Ich füge den Artikel von Ross Douthat unten an, damit
ihn auch die lesen können, für die er in der New York Times hinter der Paywall
versteckt ist.
ROSS DOUTHAT
A Naïve Reading of the Gospels May Be
Just What Christianity Needs
In the not-so-distant past
when 90 or 95 percent of Americans identified as Christian, it was hard for
almost anyone in that vast majority to read the Christian Gospels naïvely — to
come to them without preconceptions, in the way of their original intended
audience, a person hearing the “good news” about Jesus of Nazareth for the
first time.
Instead, almost everyone
encountered them first through either the structures of organized Christianity
— as a text for Sunday school and Bible study, the experience of the scripture
inseparable from the experience of church — or with the expectations set up by
Christianity’s overwhelming cultural influence.
In that world, even the work
of skeptical critique and academic deconstruction was mostly carried out by
people who had experienced the pious reading first and organized their own
interpretations against religious doctrines or cultural norms that they had
rejected or abandoned.
These dynamics persist for the
millions of people still raised within some form of Christian faith. But with
the rapid decline of institutional Christianity, the younger generations in
America now include large numbers of people who have only vague and secondhand
ideas about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So a more naïve encounter with the
New Testament may become more normal, on a much larger scale than in the past.
At both the popular and the academic level, more people will experience the
Gospels first as a form of testimony and storytelling that precedes any fully
realized set of doctrines or vision of the church.
As someone raised within
Christianity, I can’t tell you directly what that experience is like. But Lent
and especially Holy Week in my own Catholic Christianity provide a strong
encounter with the Gospel narrative, the raw text overshadowing the liturgical
and doctrinal elements more than usual. So it’s an appropriate time to
speculate about how the return of a more naïve reading might influence the
wider culture, its possible effects on the long debate between Christian
believers and would-be academic debunkers of the faith.
From its 18th- and
19th-century origins, the project of skeptically deconstructing the New
Testament, in search of a “Historical Jesus” distinct from the Christ of faith,
has often combined two distinct arguments. First, it has attacked the pious
assumption that the Gospels must be factually inerrant, perfectly historical,
accurate in every detail and pellucid in the doctrines they imply. Second, it
has moved from identifying specific problems in the texts, tensions and apparent
contradictions and arguable mistakes, to arguing that all the problems are
evidence that the Gospels must have been mostly composed long after the fact,
as theological texts rather than historical records, with relatively thin
connections to the events that they describe.
My speculation is that a naïve
reading of the Gospels tends to break these two arguments apart. The naïve
reader, going through the evangelists in order, will notice immediately much of
what the skeptics emphasize about the seeming imperfections of the texts. That
Jesus is given different genealogies in Luke and Matthew. That timelines and
details differ among the authors. That Jesus drives the money changers out of
the temple early in his ministry in the Gospel of John and just before his
crucifixion in the others. That Jesus in John’s Gospel talks differently, with
his long theological discourses, from Jesus in the other narratives.
Whether or not it’s possible
to resolve some of these issues, they present themselves directly to the
reader, and they don’t require any special training to pick up. And the naïve
reader will also intuitively understand, without needing to be historically
aware of the details, the debates about Jesus’ identity that consumed the early
church. The Gospels all present him as a messiah, clearly — but the question of
what that actually means is not completely or consistently answered in an
initial reading of the texts.
But the larger
deconstructionist argument — that the immediate issues with the Gospels indicate
that they’re long-after-the-fact creations, driven by agendas more than
memories — is very different: It’s a reading against the naïve reader experience.
By this I mean that you have
to go into the Gospels with a skeptical framework already to come away from
them feeling that the core narrative isn’t deeply rooted in eyewitness
testimony, in things that either the authors or their immediate sources really
experienced and saw. What C.S. Lewis once observed about the Gospel of John is
true of all four Gospels: You can say that the narratives represent a form of
memoir, or you can say that they’re an ingenious impersonation of personal
testimony that would tax the skills of a brilliant 20th-century novelist. But
the reader who thinks the narratives read like after-the-fact legend making,
Lewis rightly insists, “has simply not learned to read.”
And many of the details that
get cited as evidence against inerrancy, the difficulties and discrepancies,
are actually part of this memoiristic reading experience. Yes, the theological
discourses in John or the infancy narratives in Luke and Matthew might be read
as the products of later piety. But the more minute distinctions among the
Gospels, the differences in which day an event took place, on what timeline a
series of miracles transpired, with which witnesses and so on, are exactly what
you’d expect from testimonies that weren’t deliberately conformed to one
another by later authorities, that came direct from the people who remembered
the action, with all the variation that normal memory entails.
Likewise with all the deeds
and words from Jesus that led to endless theological wrangling later on because
of their ambiguities and uncertain implications. That wrangling happened (and
still happens) precisely because there’s so little theological smoothing
out within the Gospels, so few signs that the writers carefully imposed an
ideologically driven clarity on the experiences they set out to relate.
Indeed the texts themselves
self-advertise as having this imperfect, memoiristic quality. The Gospel of
Luke, for instance, is quite explicit that it’s a collation of different
testimonies “handed on” from eyewitnesses. The Gospel of Mark, by contrast,
reads much more like what the earliest Christian traditions claim it was: the
memories of the Apostle Peter dictated or transmitted to a younger scribe.
Read Mark together with the
other Gospels, and note how often the same story includes a telling detail,
like the literal Aramaic words Jesus uses while performing a healing — “talitha
cum” (“little girl, get up”); “ephphatha” (“be opened”) — that you would expect
Peter to remember but other recollections to neglect. Or read Mark’s Passion
side by side with John’s Passion — Peter’s denials more detailed in Mark, more
inside information and details about the scene around the cross in John — and
note how naturally the two accounts read like the same events narrated from two
distinct eyewitness perspectives.
Or, to take a different kind
of example, read John’s account of the water-into-wine miracle at Cana or the
raising of Lazarus. The miracles themselves fit with the Johannine author’s
theological perspective, his elevated view of Jesus’s divinity. But the way
Jesus performs the miracles is so human and un-godlike and complex — at once
irritated by and responsive to his mother’s cajolement at Cana, deliberately
delaying coming to Lazarus and then weeping at the tomb — that in each case the
natural reading is that this is a real remembrance of strange events, the
author’s or even
Mary’s, the memory more potent than any theological program.
That a particular reading of
the New Testament comes naturally doesn’t make that reading correct, of course
— especially where miracles and other wild supernatural business are involved.
But the natural reading in this case also has plenty of persuasive scholarship
on its side. (The best recent place to start is the 2006 book “Jesus and the
Eyewitnesses,” by the English biblical scholar Richard Bauckham.) Whereas the
more unnatural reading, the one that insists that the Gospels were largely
constructed later on, tends to lead to the constant problem of so much
historical-Jesus scholarship, where the supposed “real Jesus” is merely
reconstructed in the scholar’s own image, the memoirs of first-century Jews
replaced by the spiritual autobiographies of 19th- and 20th-century academics.
Thus my speculative
prediction: The decline of institutional Christianity and the return of more naïve
readings of Christian Scripture will lead to the decline of the
deconstructionist project, which has been propped up all these years by the
felt need to strike the strongest possible blow against ecclesiastical power
and tradition.
Take away that power, throw
people into the texts without an anticlerical preoccupation, and you won’t
immediately get a revival of Christian orthodoxy. But you may get much more
acknowledgment of what’s obvious each and every Easter: That in their immediacy
and mystery, their lapel-shaking urgency, their mixture of the mundane and the
impossible, the Gospels are at least — at the very least — the strangest story
ever told.
