The Shared Witness of C. S. Lewis and Austin Farrer by Mitchell Philip Irving;

Author:Mitchell, Philip Irving;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Kent State University Press

FARRER AND THE MIND OF THE EVANGELISTS

Gerhard Ebeling once observed, “Wherever historicity is not taken seriously, there is also a failure to take really seriously either the text of the Scriptures or the man to whom this text must be interpreted” (1967, 28). Ebeling’s point contains a great truth, as well as a great point of debate. The history of twentieth-century biblical criticism, especially its criticism of the Gospels, was a debate about both history and form, and it was a debate that Austin Farrer could not avoid. The nineteenth-century quest for the historical Jesus (and its counterpart in the 1950s) had at its heart the desire to locate a Jesus independent of the biblical witnesses. However, nineteenth-century lives of Jesus, such as that of David Friedrich Strauss or Ernest Renan, tended to produce a human Jesus whose authentic teaching was suspiciously like that of ethical liberalism. As George Tyrell said of Adolf von Harnack, “The Christ that Harnack sees … is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well” (1909, 44). It took Albert Schweitzer’s The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906) to place before the world a more arresting image of Jesus as an apocalyptic eschatologist who expected the end within his lifetime. Schweitzer’s Jesus was perhaps no more miraculous than those of nineteenth-century liberalism, yet for many it put to rest an approach that decontextualized the life of Christ. After Schweitzer, the quest went into decline until the 1950s, and neoorthodox theologians, be they conservatives, such as Karl Barth and Emil Brunner, or more radical, such as Rudolf Bultmann, would downplay, even discount, any attempt to speak “objectively” of Jesus and his message.

Even given this public retreat, the quest had been about verification and originality, and these concerns did not go away. That these were necessary for sound historical judgment was hardly questioned. The rise of modern critical history continued to stress the testing of sources and independent confirmation: And the parallel search for an objective, critical methodology did not spare the study of Christian scripture. Discrepancies between parallel passages in the Gospels raised questions about their historical accuracy. Determining which gospel was written first, and in addition to oral accounts, whether the gospel writers influenced one another, was important as a means of uncovering the original events. Likewise, a distrust in the miraculous, as well as a sometimes strained standard of credulity, meant that critics would attribute some or much of the gospel materials to legend, myth, or doctrinal interpolation. And the dating of the Gospels was often an important key to determining where they fell in terms of early Christianity. Along with the quest for a Jesus were close examinations of the veracity of the texts. Four approaches in particular were important, and Farrer interacted with them to some degree. These included source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism, and tradition criticism.

Farrer’s approach to the gospel of Mark, as well as to Matthew and Luke, made him a

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