Rain and the Rhinoceros

I just read a review by Milton Moreland in the lastest edition of the Review of Biblical Literature. He reviews a book I never heard of but sounds fascinating. The book is written by William Arnal and it is called The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism and the Construction of Contemporary Identity. According to Moreland, the volume looks at the way “recent debates about the Jewish identity of Jesus actually inform the careful observer about issues related to contemporary identity.” Indeed, a common observation made by critics of historical Jesus work is that the Jesus uncovered tends to mirror the scholar.

Arnal argues that recent claims that some scholars have denied the the Jewish identity of Jesus are totally ungrounded. Instead, he finds these claims themselves to be worth looking into. As Morland puts it, “Since the Jewish identity of Jesus has not actually been questioned, then what is fueling the claim?” Arnal believes that these false claims are symbolically loaded, “consisting of issues of identity and self-definition: scholarly, political, religious, and cultural.” He suggests that the figure of Jesus has become a “symbol on which to project contemporary cultural debates.”

Arnal discusses the many varying reactions to the popular film by Mel Gibson, the Passion of the Christ. He explains that symbols are complicated and the “effects of cultural symbolism, the actual work symbols do as they are received and appropriated, is often indirect and non-linear.”

Although Arnal looks at those NT scholars who are explicitly anti-Semitic, he makes a more general observation that “Christian historical scholarship on Jesus and the gospels has, predictably, in the interests of Jesus’ unique genius, tended to emphasize the contrast between him and his environment.” He identifies this as a more covert form of denigration of the Judaism.

Interestingly, Arnal launches a critique on contemporary NT scholars N.T. Wright and E.P. Sanders. He asks why these scholars have accused other scholars of “producing a non-Jewish Jesus,” when there is no evidence that anyone has been arguing this.

In his third chapter entitled, “A Manufactured Controversy: Why the ‘Jewish Jesus’ is a Red Herring,” Arnal shows that scholars who have been the recipients of such attacks, such as Crossan, Horsley, Borg, and other Jesus Seminar cats, have never denied that Jesus was a Jew. Arnal argues that the problem has nothing to do with Jesus being Jewish, this is beyond question and so cannot be the real problem. Instead, he argues that the accusing scholars simply think “that his being a Jew is not being presented in the right way.” He suggests that the real problem lies in how we understand “Judaism.” He argues that the accusations being made are based on a “theoretically misguided” and anachronsitic” definition of Judaism, which sees it as a readily identifiable, unified, religious tradition.

According to Moreland, “Arnal is interested in the way that Jesus has been
“invoked as a cipher” for modern identity.” He goes on, “Regarding scholarly identity, Arnal argues that this recent debate about the Jewish identity of the historical Jesus is often a result of the desire of contemporary Anglophone scholars to distinguish themselves from the “theological agenda of Bultmannianism.” In order to distance themselves from the “Bulmannians” scholars basically create this caricature of those who think Jesus was not Jew (Crossan, Funk, etc.).

In Moreland’s words,

Arnal argues that for some scholars “Jesus the Jew . . .stands as the clearest possible indication that Christianity is not anti-Jewish, properly, and so is not implicated in the Holocaust” (50). The idea that Jesus was a particular type of
Jew—one who “concern[ed] himself with the Temple cultus and not only shows an
affinity to Judean Judaism but [was] actively engaged with it in Jerusalem itself (55)”—is important to modern political identity in as much as the identity of Jesus is symbolically linked to contemporary ideas about the state of Israel, Jerusalem, and the Jewish state…The traditionalist “Jewish Jesus” agenda is linked to a desire for a distinctive cultural identity and the rejection of“postmodernism.” Implicit in the desire to define ancient Judaism within very strict parameters is a wish to have “stability of culture” and “distinctiveness of cultural identity.” Arnal concludes that, “Here cultural distinctiveness and identity is being offered as a response and challenge in the face of conditions in which precisely these features of identity are becoming more and more questionable (71).”

Wow, when I read this review I got really excited! What wonderful and creative research! Evidently, the book is pretty short so perhaps I might have time to read it myself. There is so much rhetoric against historical Jesus work that it becomes overwhelming sometimes. Indeed, there are certainly theological cases to be made against the project, but as this book demonstrates the arguments used by conservatives are plagued with strawmen.