Shopping cartJournal for the Study of the Historical Jesus
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Editorial Foreword
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Did the Historical Jesus Prohibit All Oaths? Part 2
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The total prohibition of oaths (Matt 5:34-37) come from the historical Jesus. The criterion of discontinuity argues that there is no parallel to Jesus' total prohibition of oaths in the Jewish Scriptures, the intertestamental literature prior to 70 C.E., or the NT. The Jewish Scriptures take oaths for granted and imposes them in a few cases. Apart from Jas 5:12, the NT knows of no prohibition; Paul uses oaths with abandon. The criterion of multiple attestation argues that Jas 5:12 represents an independent tradition of the prohibition; Jas 5:12 is parallel to Matt 5:34-37 in both content and structure; James has other examples of Jesus' sayings woven into his epistle without attribution; and Jas 5:12 is at odds with James' treatment of the Law in the rest of his epistle. Hence Jas 5:12 qualifies as an independent witness to an isolated stream of oral tradition preserving Jesus' prohibition. This is Part 2 of a two-part essay.
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A Response to John P. Meier's 'Did the Historical Jesus Prohibit All Oaths?'
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John Meier's conclusion that Jesus' teaching in Mt 5:34-37 violates the Law of Moses is incompatible with the evangelist's insistence in 5:17 that Jesus did not come to abolish the Law. Jesus remains faithful to the Law by bringing it to its intended meaning, penetrating to the essence of its teaching. If the letter of the Law is violated, its spirit is upheld: the issue is not the oaths themselves, but the importance of unqualified truthfulness. This too is the meaning of the same material in Jas 5:12. The key to understanding Jesus and the Law is to be found in christological and eschatological realities associated with the person and mission of Jesus.
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The Prohibition of Oaths and Contra-scriptural Halakhot: A Response to John P. Meier
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The following response to John Meier's article begins by raising initial questions concerning the relationship between oaths and vows, and the criterion of double dissimilarity. The focus then turns to the complicated relationship between the Pentateuch and Jewish legal sources of the Second Temple and Rabbinic periods. It will be suggested that demonstrating Jesus' legal disagreement with either the plain meaning of scripture or other first-century Jewish legal sources does not yield sufficient evidence to claim that Jesus clearly and unambiguously abrogated a matter of Jewish Law. It will also be argued that, in the case of oaths, it is particularly difficult to demonstrate either a contradiction with the Pentateuch or a complete disagreement with the preponderance of contemporary legal sources. Therefore, while Jesus may indeed have prohibited all oaths, this ought not be taken as clear evidence of an abrogation of a matter of Jewish Law.
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e Historical Jesus and Oaths: A Response to Donald A. Hagner and Jonathan Klawans
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This essay responds to the evaluations of the essay, 'Did the Historical Jesus Prohibit All Oaths?' by John P. Meier, published in two parts in JSHJ 5.2 (2007) and 6.1 (2008). Agreement is found in the conclusion that the historical Jesus did prohibit all oaths. Points of disagreement are explored.
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A Prophet Is Rejected in His Home Town (Mark 6.4 and Parallels): A Study in the Methodological (In)Consistency of the Jesus Seminar
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While some might construct their view of the historical Jesus based upon the published findings of the Jesus Seminar, others may re-examine individual pericopae and argue that a change of 'colour' would be appropriate. Here it is suggested that the arguments offered by the Seminar to justify the colouring of one saying of Jesus—that a prophet is rejected in his home town (Gos. Thom. 31.1, Mk 6.4, Matt. 13.57, Lk. 4.24, and Jn 4.44)—as a (deep) pink are flawed. Arguments based upon multiple attestation, plausibility and embarrassment are considered and rejected, leading to the conclusion that black is the most appropriate colour for the saying. Two explanations for its inclusion in the Gospels are offered: that it is a proverb inserted by the writers because it mirrored their own circumstances, and the more speculative view that the saying was viewed as appropriate because of Jesus' own hyperbolic characterization of discipleship (cf. Lk. 14.26).
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Eyewitnesses and the Oral Jesus Tradition
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Dunn responds to critiques by Birger Gerhardsson and Richard Bauckham of his thesis in Jesus Remembered (2003) regarding the early oral Jesus tradition. He agrees with Gerhardsson's emphasis on the oral Jesus tradition as taught, but questions his unwillingness to recognize the character of the 1st century oral Palestinian culture and of the Jesus tradition. He agrees with Bauckham's emphasis on eyewitnesses to explain especially the beginning of the traditioning process, but questions the extent to which the tradition was explicitly attributed to eyewitnesses, and argues that his own thesis also covers the cases where the oral Jesus tradition was being passed on by teachers at some remove from the eyewitnesses. The starting point remains the character of the Synoptic tradition, as 'same yet different', and the challenge remains to explain that character in the most historically responsible way.
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Morton Smith as M. Madiotes: Stephen Carlson's Attribution of Secret Mark to a Bald Swindler
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In 1960, Morton Smith announced that he had discovered in the Mar Saba monastery tower library a fragment of a previously unknown letter of Clement of Alexandria containing excerpts from a longer version of the Gospel of Mark that Smith called the 'Secret Gospel of Mark'. Controversial since its publication in 1973, this discovery has recently been criticized in print as both an academic hoax and a malicious forgery. This paper uses newly discovered manuscript photographs and archived documents to refute a claim found in Stephen C. Carlson's The Gospel Hoax, namely that Smith invented a pseudonymous twentieth-century individual named 'M. Madiotes' as an elaborate and deliberate clue that he himself had forged the letter of Clement.
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Book List
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Books Received
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