Robert M. Price - The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable Is the Gospel Tradition?

Dedicated to Grover Furr, who finally convinced me I had enough to say on the subject to write a book!

Chapter 25

Chapter 43

Chapter 73

Chapter 101

Chapter 131

Chapter 165

Chapter 183

Chapter 205

Chapter 225

Chapter 247

Chapter 269

Chapter 291

Chapter 319

Chapter 333

s Paul Tillich has said, when anything is placed on a pedestal beyond criticism, it becomes an idol. Those who thus seek to screen an idol from criticism only betray their own suspicions about the worthiness of the totem they worship. The Bible has become, in the words of the Reverend Jim Jones, "a paper idol." Once, at the time of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation, champions of the Bible celebrated the Bible's being made available to any and all who might wish to read it. They insisted that the book be freed from the gilded chains of sacred hermeneutics, to be read by the same rules scholars use to make sense of any ancient text. The Bible was to them a newly discovered treasure that they rejoiced to behold glittering in the sun. But it was not long before they began to look about suspiciously and pile the riches back into the chest and replace it in the ground. Sacred scripture must be protected from the unworthy glance of impious outsiders and heretics after all. Not everyone was satisfied with this turn of events. The appearance of historical-critical study, or the "Higher Criticism," of the Bible,' beginning in the eighteenth century with men like Johann Salomo Semler, Johann Gottfried Eichorn, Johannes Philipp Gabler, and Hermann Samuel Reimarus, represented a return to Reformation vitality where the Bible was concerned. Once again, Bible students were unafraid to read the Bible without the lenses of official dogma, insofar as they could manage it. As these critics, many of them influenced by Rationalism, and their successors applied their critical tools to the text, their orthodox opponents could see only the vandalism wrought by infidel detractors of scripture. If it turned out that the Red Sea were really only the Reed Sea, if it eventuated that Daniel, Isa. 40-66, and the Pentateuch were not written by Daniel, Isaiah, and Moses, then the edifice of faith appeared to the conventional churchman to be collapsing.' The Bible had been carried off by the enemy, as when in 1 Sam. 4:11, the Ark of the Covenant had been seized off the battlefield by the victorious Philistines.

And it cannot be denied that some of the earliest biblical critics were looking to debunk and discredit the Bible. This was not necessarily because they thought the Bible a particularly evil book, or that they deemed themselves happy champions of evil. No, many no doubt shared the ambivalence of the great agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll,3 who gladly admitted he should have nothing to say against the Bible, easily looking past the inevitable shortcomings of a Bronze Age document, if not for the powerful voices of fanaticism that demanded conscientious people accept this ancient book as the inspired Word of God and believe all within it uncritically. This Ingersoll could not brook. So he set himself the task of laying bare the absurdities of the Bible for the modern age. His task was much the same as that of the Christ in Col. 2:14-15, taking the supposedly divine law out of the hands of humanity's tormentors and publicly exposing it, so as to make it impossible for it ever to be so used again.

This task retains something of its importance today, when the Bible still functions as a warrant for the opinions of demagogues who hope, by brandishing it, to bypass rational argumentation and win assent to their opinions by cultivating superstitious fears. But mere negative apologetics, if we may call it that, can never be the real goal of the higher criticism of the Bible, for fundamentalists and demagogues are far from the only zealots for the Bible. Many more of us, whether Christians, Jews, Humanists, or just plain historians, have been bitten by the biblical bug and devote our efforts to elucidating the pages of a text we find consumingly fascinating for its own sake. We feel about the Bible as others do about the works of Homer and Shakespeare. We feel the need to explode misconceptions about the Bible (whether dangerous or merely quaint) primarily so that a better understanding of the text may come to replace them. The quest for the historical Jesus is a specific case, or subset, of this scholarly zeal. It may also be important to question a traditional picture of Jesus that has sometimes had nefarious political and spiritual effects, but the effort should be seen primarily as a positive one: given the cultural importance of the Jesus figure, how can it not be irresistibly fascinating to seek after whatever factual basis may lie at the root of it? And what data do not fall into the category of fact ought to prove equally interesting for the history of religious thought: what path does a movement follow in creating a man-god to serve as its figurehead? What dynamics are involved in creating the very authority one meanwhile imagines to be creating and sustaining one's movement?

More specifically, it is incumbent upon higher critics of scripture to demonstrate the positive value of our approach that attracted us in the first place and that should win over others who mistakenly perceive us and our enterprise as a threat. Namely, we need to display the unparalleled utility of criticism in elucidating a sometimes dark and mysterious text. Criticism can be shown to unravel the riddles that perturb every Bible reader. As we show that criticism can make an intelligible sense of the conundrums of Scripture, the "apparent contradictions" that cause so many of the pious to scratch their heads, we will show the superiority of our approach, not in destroying the Bible, but in better understanding the beloved text. Granted, the price paid is a high one, for the notion of "biblical authority" can never again seem so simple, but then it will more readily be seen how unstable and logically contradictory was the old belief. And have not biblicists always claimed to prize the right understanding of the Bible over any particular doctrine whose validity might be called into question by means of biblical scrutiny? If, for example, one is willing to part with doctrines of Purgatory or Predestination should they not square with the biblical text, then presumably any doctrine of biblical authority that did not pass muster by an honest scrutiny of the text would be as easily jettisoned. In the long run, there is nothing more edifying than understanding the text.