Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-dzt6s Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T13:45:40.917Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“Who Do Men Say That I Am?” — Modern Scholarship on Gospel Christology*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2014

Raymond E. Brown
Raymond E. Brown*
Affiliation:
Union Theological Seminary (N.Y.C.)
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

I trust that my choice of the topic of christology for an address to a national convention of the College Theology Society needs no explanation. Christology was, is, and, I suspect, always will be the single most important question in Christian theology. Of the three religions of the book, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, we Christians are the only ones who have accepted identification in terms of our stance about a person of history, Jesus of Nazareth. Although Judaism revers Moses as the lawgiver, the designation “Judaism” suggests that primary identity is not in terms of an attitude toward Moses but in terms of relationship to the tribe of Judah and the people of Israel. Westerners persist in calling Muslims “Mohammedans,” but that is by false analogy with the title “Christians.” While Mohammed is the prophet, a Muslim is one who has accepted Islam, that is, submission to the will of Allah, as preached by Mohammed. Christians, however, are those who profess that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah, the Christ. The question “Who do men say that I am?” stands in a central place in the tradition of the Synoptic Gospels, symptomatic of where it stands in our faith; and we Christians are those who think that, whether he understood it fully or not, Peter gave the correct answer to that question.

Type
Articles
Information
Horizons , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , Fall 1974 , pp. 35 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © The College Theology Society 1974

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

*

An address given on June 1, 1974 to the national convention of the College Theology Society held at the University of Dayton.

References

1 As will be pointed out, the answer given in Mark's account is different from the answer given in Matthew's account, but both agree that Peter acknowledged Jesus as Messiah. I do not accept the view that the Marcan Peter is made the spokesman of an erroneous christology which Mark is trying to correct; rather, in Mark Peter is the spokesman of an inadequate christology.

2 The first NT work was 1 Thessalonians, written about A.D. 50. The last NT work was probably 2 Peter written in the first half of the second century. Give or take ten years, the Gospels may be plausibly dated as follows: Mark in the late sixties; Matthew and Luke in the eighties; John in the nineties.

3 In my outlook reputable scholars are those who have produced a body of articles that meet the publishing standards of the professional biblical journals or whose books have been favorably reviewed in such journals. Thus, I am not speaking simply about those who have biblical degrees or who teach Bible. I find it necessary to be precise here because, on the American Catholic scene in the last two years, fundamentalist newspapers and journals have had a habit of trotting out a polemicist, dubbing him a scholar, and then playing a game of “scholars are divided” in order to propose views that have no serious following in the world of biblical scholarship.

4 For this reason there will be no attempt to equip this paper with detailed footnotes giving bibliographical background. The history recounted and the biblical views presented can be documented in the standard NT introductions.

5 I am presuming that many in the College Theology Society will share a pastoral concern for the Church and regard religion as more than simply a scientific discipline.

6 The text and a commentary by Fitzmyer, J. A. appear in Theological Studies 25 (1964, pp. 386–408)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This Instruction has special force since the substance of it was taken by the Second Vatican Council into the final (1965) form of the Constitution on Revelation (Dei Verbum, Chapter V).

7 The pertinent passages are sections VI through IX. Note the following statements: “After Jesus rose from the dead and His divinity was clearly perceived …” (VIII); “The evangelists relate the words and deeds of the Lord in a different order, and express His sayings not literally but differently …” (IX).

8 In an address given at New Orleans in April 1973 to the convention of the National Catholic Educational Association, I spoke about a dangerous pseudo-magisterium consisting of extremist right-wing newspapers and magazines that arrogate to themselves the right to designate as heretical or modernist views and books approved by the true Magisterium of pope and bishops. The address was published in full in Origins of NC News Service (Vol. 2, No. 43; April 19, 1973)Google Scholar; in Catholic Mind (Vol. 71, No. 1275; September 1973, pp. 25–37)Google Scholar; and in The Month (Vol. 235, No. 1280; April 1974, pp. 531–536)Google Scholar. Although I mentioned by name no writer, newspaper, or journal, extremist organs and spokesmen hastened to identify themselves as the object of my remarks—a classic case of the shoe's fitting.

9 It is common sense that sometimes subjects are too complicated to be broached in short talks to an unprepared public and that exploratory views should be examined before wide dissemination. But it is quite different to pretend that what is taught in seminary and college classrooms is too dangerous or disturbing to be made known to the faithful. Modern biblical and theological views are time-conditioned and have an element of uncertainty, but that is no excuse for pretending that they can be ignored until some mythical future day when absolute certainty is possible. No greater certitude should be demanded of biblical criticism or of theology today than was demanded in the past when there were formulated the very views that ultra-conservatives would like to retain. The contrast is not, as some would have it, between past Catholic doctrine and modern scholarly opinion; the contrast is between past scholarly opinion accepted within Catholicism and modern scholarly opinion now finding acceptance within Catholicism. Unfortunately a naive understanding of the scope and effect of infallibility blinds many to the fact that Catholicism has frequently adopted scholarly opinions that it later rejected.

10 Ironically, this may be more of a danger among Catholics than among Protestants today. Protestantism went through a major struggle with liberalism at the beginning of this century and suffered its losses then. But in the wake of Vatican II, as a reaction to exaggerated dogmatism, contemporary “liberated” Catholics have sometimes thrown aside all doctrinal content for an experiential grasp of religion. The reaction to a catechetics that overly stressed content and memory has sometimes been a total neglect of content and memory. If in the long run one must evaluate the danger presented by the two extremes, namely an ultra-conservatism and a doctrine-free liberalism, one must remember that the ultra-conservatives have money, organization, and fanatical persistence on their side. Liberalism by its very nature tends to be disorganized and ephemeral. The ultra-liberal press has either gone under or been tamed; ultra-conservatives have been buying up journals of opinion. Ultra-liberalism may well be a greater distortion of truth than ultra-conservatism, but it is much less likely to survive.

11 See footnote 3 above.

12 The chief qualification comes from an increasing uncertainty about the ability to regard Hellenistic (Greek) features in the christology as coming from the later levels of the NT. The Palestine of Jesus' time was thoroughly Hellenized, and some Hellenization of the Christian message may have been a feature from the very beginning. Moreover, we have become aware that various stages of the development may have co-existed, so that the process was much less linear than was formerly imagined.

13 Perhaps the best example of scholarly liberalism both as to method and to conclusions was Wilhelm Bousset, Kyrios Christos. The German original appeared in 1913; the English translation (Nashville: Abingdon), in 1970. The feasibility of bringing out an English edition of such an old book in a rather tight book-market may reflect a revival of interest in liberalism (see footnote 10 above).

14 Since Bultmann's writings are prolific and stretch over a span of nearly fifty years, it is not always easy to find an absolutely consistent stance. It is worth comparing Jesus and the Word (German original, 1926; paperback ed., New York: Scribners, 1958)Google Scholar and his paper “The Primitive Christian Kerygma and the Historical Jesus” (German original, 1962; in The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ, ed. Braaten, C. E. and Harrisville, R. A. (New York: Abingdon, 1964)Google Scholar.

15 Since Bultmann's main works were translated into English decades after the German originals, his impact on English-speaking circles was somewhat delayed. Robinson's, John A. T. discovery of the import of Bultmann in Honest to God (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1963)Google Scholar is a good example.

16 For a Catholic view see X. Léon-Dufour, , The Gospels and the Jesus of History (Garden City: Doubleday, 1970 abridgment of a French original of 1963)Google Scholar.

17 See Vawter, B., This Man Jesus (Garden City: Doubleday, 1973)Google Scholar. Also Brown, R. E. and Cahill, P. J., Biblical Tendencies Today: An Introduction to the Post-Bultmannians (Washington: Corpus, 1969)Google Scholar. A great deal of implicit christology is uncovered in modern studies of the parables and healings of Jesus.

18 The “Son of Man” problem is much discussed today and I am giving above only two approaches. Other scholars deny that there was a definite Son of Man expectation in Judaism.

19 All modern christology is based on the theory that the human knowledge of Jesus was limited. In Catholicism this theory often runs against a popular misunderstanding which would claim that since Jesus was the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, he knew, even as man, all that God would know—a misunderstanding usually accompanied with the argument that the person is the subject of knowledge and there was only one person in Jesus. Such an approach was unacceptable to the great scholastic theologians. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica III, q. 9, a. 1, ad 1, says: “If there had not been in the soul of Christ some other knowledge besides his divine knowledge, he would not have known anything. Divine knowledge cannot be an act of the human soul of Christ; it belongs to another nature.” Knowledge comes through the nature, and God and man know in different ways: God's knowledge is immediate and non-conceptual; man's knowledge is through abstraction and is conceptual. Therefore divine knowledge is not simply transferable to a human mind. Precisely because of their acknowledgment of this limitation, the scholastics posited special aids to the human nature of Jesus so that he would know more than other men, e.g., Beatific Vision, infused knowledge. This is obviously a problem within the domain of systematic theology, and scholars like Rahner and Lonergan deny the presence of such aids. Critical biblical scholars have been unable to detect their presence; and most of us are willing to settle for the teaching of Chalcedon (DBS 301, based on Heb. 4:15) which made Jesus consubstantial with human beings in all things except sin—and therefore consubstantial with us in limited knowledge. (Hostile right-wing columnists [see footnote 8 above] have seized on this to alarm Catholics with the news that scholars are now saying that Jesus was ignorant.) Of course, a limitation of human knowledge does not mean that Jesus was not God; it means he was man.

20 Popular understanding of this problem is not helped by those (often polemicists) who tell people that scholars are now doubting whether Jesus knew he was the Messiah. The question is not whether Jesus knew he was the Messiah; Jesus intuitively knew who he was, and the question is whether “Messiah,” as that title was understood in his lifetime, satisfactorily described who he was.

21 It is another false simplification that many Catholic schplars are now doubting whether Jesus knew he was God. Once more Jesus intuitively knew who he was; the question is whether “God” as understood by a first-century Jew (namely, as the Father in heaven) could have described who Jesus was. Christians found “God” a satisfactory designation, but only after they had enlarged their understanding of the term to include the Son on earth. See Brown, R. E., Jesus God and Man (New York: Macmillan, 1967), pp. 28-38, 95ff.Google Scholar

22 Even the “true God of true God” of Nicaea does not end the search. The Roman Doctrinal Congregation (Holy Office) Declaration Mysterium Ecclesiae (1973) is most helpful in the struggle against a Catholic fundamentalism that does not realize the limited nature of dogmatic formulations. This Declaration acknowledges limitations imposed by the expressive power of language used at a particular time, by incomplete expressions of truth, by the fact that specific questions were being answered, and by traces left by the changeable conceptions of a given epoch.