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Who is Jesus: A Case for Jesusโ Divinity
Format: Hardcover
I thoroughly enjoyed reading Brant Pitreโs โThe Case for Jesus.โ The New Testament scholarโs contribution to Catholic popular literature on the identity of Jesus stands well above much of the plethora of material available to Christian readers today. Pitre (mostly) convincingly builds his case through careful, fact-based argumentation--even if one could draw different conclusions from the same evidence.
What case is Pitre trying to make? In effect, he makes several cases leading up to his central point of who Jesus was and is.
In the first part of this slim volume, he treats the authorship of the Gospels. In this matter, as in most of the book, his principle foil seems to be Bart Ehrman, a former Fundamentalist Christian-turned-apostate scholar whose popular works attempt to undermine the validity of the Gospels as meaningful historical documents and specifically the claim that Jesus is the Son of God. Contrary to Ehrman, Pitre argues for the traditional authorship of the Gospels. As two significant pieces of evidence, Pitre points out that even the earliest Gospel manuscripts and secondary references to the Gospels include the writersโ names by which we know them. The Gospels, then, were never really โanonymous.โ This leads Pitre to challenge the scholarly consensus on the dating of the Gospels, and the more controversial hypothesis that Matthew and Luke were based in part on a hypothetical, now lost (and, as Pitre points out, never referenced) book of Jesus sayings denoted by scholars as the โQโ source.
As for the so-called lost or apocryphal gospels, Pitre shows that they were never really lost, that most of them were known by early Christian writers, who regarded them as forgeries. In the case of the apocryphal gospels, then, even though the internal evidence suggests that they were written by the apostles to whom they were ascribed, the attributions were never accepted. Ehrman has argued that the apocryphal gospels were not accepted by mainstream or orthodox Christianity, but were embraced by the communities, such as the Gnostics, for whom they were written. In a way, Pitre and Ehrman arenโt in contradiction here, but they just interpret the data differently. In other words, if you accept that the Church Fathers are espousing the correct version of Christianity, then Pitreโs point stands; if you hold on to the view that the Church Fathers represented one view of Christianity among many, all to be regarded equally, then the criticism of the (orthodox) Church Fathers matters less.
Pitre, while not dismissing the validity of literary criticism, argues for the historical value of the Gospels. He wants to treat the Gospels as biographies of Jesus. Their inconsistencies and apparent contradictions stem not, as Ehrman would have it, from a โtelephone gameโ-like process of accretions and alterations over time, or even so much from the requirements of the communities for which they were written, as from the different perspectives and life experiences of their writers. Pitre notes the similarities between the Gospels and ancient Greco-Roman biographies in countering the ideas of Ehrman and before him, Rudolf Bultmann, in thinking of the Gospels as akin to folktales, fairy stories, and myths. Pitre stands for the literal truth of the Gospels as far as they will allow in part because two of the four Gospels tell us that they are true (Lk 1:1-4; Jn 19:35, 21:24-25). Thereโs a bit of circularity in that argument.
The main case for Jesus that Pitre wants to make is for His divinity. The Gospels, as Luke Timothy Johnson and other scholars have explained, try to answer, however obliquely, the question Jesus himself poses to Peter: โBut who do you say that I am?โ (Mk 8:29). Pitre makes the case that the Gospels--even the synoptic Gospels--speak to Jesusโ being God. Pitre makes a lively, even entertaining, argument, using some passages, e.g., the reference to the sign of Jonah, in ways I certainly hadnโt thought of before. Even though as a Catholic I accept Jesusโ divinity, I am willing to allow that others may look at Pitreโs argument and reasonably come to different conclusions. One train of thinking might be this: Pitre notes that Jesus speaks in parables and riddles, and so His claims to divinity are indirect. Moreover, an outright and indeed blasphemous claim to His divinity might have put an even earlier end to Jesusโ three years of ministry. But the Gospel writers should not have been constrained by either Jesusโ particular application of rhetoric or his need to be circumspect; why did the Gospel writers not forthrightly declare that Jesus was God? I think the proper response to this is that Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wanted the person encountering the Gospels to answer for themselves who Jesus was and is. In other words, by transmitting the way Jesus conveyed who He was to His disciples perhaps they, too, would draw in and win over later followers of Christ. Itโs much more efficacious to engage the potential convert that way than simply to assert that Jesus is God.
Brad Pitre has written a wonderful and engaging book. Even if you donโt agree with all of his conclusions, you will appreciate his logical and engaging discussion. This book is meant for the general reader, although it does have a scholarly apparatus by way of careful notes. An index would have been nice but this is a short book of a couple hundred pages. If youโre on a long flight, this book would be the perfect company.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 28, 2016
