The Philosophy of Jesus

Amazingly, no one ever seems to have looked at Jesus as a philosopher, or his teaching as philosophy. Yet no one in history has ever had a more radically new philosophy, or made more of a difference to philosophy, than Jesus. He divided all human history into two, into "B.C." and "A.D."; and the history of philosophy is crucial to human history, since philosophy is crucial to man; so how could He not also divide philosophy?

This book (1) looks at Jesus as a complete human being (as well as divine), therefore
also as a philosopher; (2) looks at philosophy as Jesus' pre-modern contemporaries did, as a wisdom, a world-view, and a way of life rather than as a super-science (Descartes, Hegel) or as a servant-science (Hobbes, Hume); and (3) looks at philosophy in light of Jesus rather than at Jesus in light of philosophy. It explores the consequences of Etienne Gilson's point that when St. John brought Christianity and Greek philosophy into contact and identified the Messiah the Jews had most deeply sought with the logos that the Greeks had most deeply sought, nothing happened to Christ but something happened to the logos.

This book explores the most radical revolution in the history of philosophy, the
differences Jesus made to metaphysics (the philosophy of being), to epistemology (the philosophy of knowing), to anthropology (the philosophy of man), and to philosophical ethics and politics.

And, besides, it has the greatest ending of any philosophy book in a century.

St. Augustine's Press

Contents

Introduction 1: Who Is It For?

Introduction 2: How Is Jesus a Philosopher?

Introduction 3: What Are the Four Great Questions of Philosophy?

I. Jesus’ Metaphysics (What is real?)
* Jesus’ Jewish Metaphysics
* Jesus’ New Name for God
* The Metaphysics of Love
* The Moral Consequences of Metaphysics
* Sanctity as the Key to Ontology
* The Metaphysics of “I AM”

II. Jesus’ Epistemology (How do we know what is real?)

III. Jesus’ Anthropology (Who are we who know what is real?)

IV. Jesus’ Ethics (What should we be to be more real?)
* Christian Personalism: Seeing “Jesus only”
* Jesus and Legalism
* Jesus and Relativism
* Jesus and the Secret of Moral Success
* Jesus and Sex
* Jesus and Social Ethics: Solidarity
* Jesus and Politics: Is He Left or Right?

Conclusion

Index

And, taken from: http://www.philosophos.com/philosophy_article_152.html

Jesus as a Jewish Philosopher by Matthew Del Nevo An appraisal of Peter Kreeft, The Philosophy of Jesus (St. Augustine's Press, 2007) This is a popularly written book about the philosophy of Jesus rather than the Jesus of philosophy — at least that is the intention. The book scopes the philosophy of Jesus in terms of the primary questions of ontology, epistemology, anthropology and ethics, respectively: What is being? What can I know? Who is man? What ought I to do? The style is very direct, and what is lost in subtlety is gained in clarity. The book gets off to a good start but increasingly confuses the philosophy of Jesus with the theology of the Catholic Church as represented by recent official documentation. The book is divided into four sections aligned with the four prime questions. There is a subject index and a scriptural index. So what does Kreeft make of Jesus' philosophy? First of all Kreeft makes it clear that he does not occupy that ostensibly neutral or supposedly objective position struck up by many in philosophy of religions discourse. Kreeft's presumption in writing about Jesus' philosophy from a Christian point of view is not apologetic or polemical, rather he understands, rightly in this reader's view, that Jesus' teaching and person (like Socrates') present matters of intellectual substance that have to be engaged philosophically if they are to be engaged properly. He believes that Jesus' philosophy is not only of historical philosophical importance in the history of ideas, but still has a critical relevancy today. As a Christian he is in a good position to expound this, just as someone who knows the Greek is in a better position to expound Plato. On Jesus' metaphysics or ontology in Chapter 1 Kreeft rightly accentuates its Jewishness and in this regard the uniqueness of the Jewish take on reality in which God, world and humankind are seen as ontologically other and not merged, submerged or seen as intrinsic to one another. It is a philosophy of otherness and difference. Kreeft could have been more definite about this point. The threefold difference of God, world and humankind demarcates Jewish reality from pagan reality which does not mark the ontological otherness of these three so absolutely, if at all. The Jewish take on reality is different from that of other religions and non-religions (pantheism, panentheism, henotheism, ontologism, atheism, prophetism etc.), and Kreeft touches on this. Kreeft tends to describe Jesus' metaphysics theologically rather than out of the Jewish world of Jesus. Kreeft speaks of a metaphysics of love, but this does not capture the links back, in rabbinic thought, between God, world and humankind which can be encapsulated by naming Creation, Revelation and Redemption, as Rosenzweig has famously put it: Jesus has both a teaching on these links back and a personal stance that is re-creative, redemptive and revelatory. It is in this kind of metaphysical context that Jesus speaks of love. Kreeft argues his case for Jesus' metaphysics of love from the Name of God, but he is incorrect in saying that Jesus calling God 'abba' (father, papa) was revolutionary. It is not in the Hebrew Scriptures as such, although the Fatherhood of God is, but speaking to God familiarly as abba was common in rabbinic tradition. What is revolutionary about Jesus' philosophy is that he said you did not have to be Jewish to speak to God like this, or even religious! Kreeft rightly asserts that everything else follows from Jesus' metaphysics. In epistemology, what we must know is ourselves, the world and God. There are degrees of knowledge and the key is wisdom. Again Jesus not only taught in the Jewish wisdom tradition but personified it. As Kierkegaard wrote in Practice in Christianity, 'the only explanation of truth is to be it.' Jesus' philosophy is in that sense 'existential'. Our knowledge will increase with our sanctification of the Name of God, and of the world and of ourselves. Kreeft rightly refers to prayer as an important key to knowledge, allowing us to draw close and relate to that which we need to know, rather than just to 'know about'. Jesus' anthropology revolves around the imago Dei, the instruction that we are made in the image and likeness of God. Each person is infinitely other than God, but bears God's image and likeness in one major respect: each human person is absolutely one and only. Upon this is founded human dignity. Jesus' anthropology is one which seeks to serve human dignity and increase it upon the face of the earth, for God's glory. Jesus' ethics revolves around the imitatio Dei, the imitation of God, which in Christianity becomes the imitation of Christ. Kreeft argues that we have to be 'little Christs', which I take it has to do with becoming all that God has called us to be, individually and as a people of God. The idea is that we each need to be personally responsible for our share in collective destiny, which is with God, to 'mend the world' (tikkun olam). Jesus' own philosophy was to do the Father's will, which he did, and which he enjoined us to do, and in which prayer and personal wholeness is the key to knowledge and true freedom. In the second half of the book, in these chapters on anthropology and ethics, Kreeft's tendency to move from the philosophy of Jesus to the theology of the Church, becomes more pronounced. This shift will lose many readers not predisposed in like manner to Kreeft. The problem goes back to Chapter 1 on metaphysics which gets a little lost in a Thomistic interpretation of the Creed, which is an anachronistic discussion. But this kind of anachronism is stepped up in Chapter 3 on Jesus' anthropology. This chapter starts with the idea of Jesus as perfect Man and perfect God, which is Greek philosophy, not Jesus' philosophy. Kreeft then takes up the anthropological question in terms of the Socratic dictum, 'know thyself'. This chapter shifts into apologetics with a justification of Mary as the Mother of God, Catholic dogma rather than Jesus' philosophy. Chapter 4 on Jesus' ethics also shifts over into apologetics with an argument that ends with the assertion that, 'we are to worship the Eucharist'; again, Catholic dogma, rather than Jesus' philosophy. Traditionally Catholic Christians have taught that philosophy is a 'handmaid' to philosophy. This is preferable to the Protestant response which was to try and expunge philosophy from theology, which gave them ideology. My view, the view of most philosophers, would be that any theology is no better than its philosophy. Traditionally Christian thought, that is, Christian interpretation, has depended on Greek philosophy, more precisely on combinations of Platonic and Aristotelian philosophy. Jesus' philosophy — whatever it was — was Jewish, rabbinic, in the sense we read about in the Talmud, which reflects the oral tradition of Jesus' Jewish world. Jesus' philosophy was not Platonic or Aristotelian. The problem for Kreeft, which his book bears out, is that philosophy for him is by definition non-Jewish. There is a long quotation from C. S. Lewis in the Preface to show that Jesus' style followed broadly along Aristotelian lines as found in the Poetics and the Analytics. But Jesus' style was halakhic and aggadic. Kreeft asserts in the Preface that it is not the style but the substance of Jesus' philosophy that interests him, his answers. Jewish religious philosophy has always revolved around the question, though, not the answer; on answers it is pluralistic. Catholicism by contrast is about answers and is autocratically assertive about its own answers, both to its own global constituency and with regard to other denominational points of view. Kreeft needs to cross over from a culture of answers in which he is steeped to a culture of the question, in which Jesus was steeped. Moreover, in achieving the relevancy of Jesus' philosophy another bridge has to be crossed from an autocratic 'one answer fits all' culture to a plural culture. For we live in an age of philosophies, a pluralist age in which by definition there cannot be one overarching theological metaphysic because that would mean one underlying dominant philosophy, which is simply not the case in our time. Therefore we need to situate Jesus' philosophy in terms of an age of interpretation if we are going as Kreeft intends, to gauge its enormous transformative power. Ultimately the lack of distinction between the philosophy of Jesus and Catholic dogma lets the book down. Kreeft has taken the ecclesiastical future of Jesus as the cue, rather than the Jewish background, Jesus' own world and the greatness of rabbinic thinking in particular. In an age of interpretation when a lot of metaphysical theology is suspect, archaic and unengaging, the project of re-discovering Jesus' philosophy is important as a basis for Christian self-understanding, and then for pre-understanding in philosophical argument. Jesus' philosophy was certainly questioning and critically formulated in a rabbinic manner and it aimed to be foundational for the philosophical task of bringing heaven down to earth, a prophetic task in which humanity becomes all that God meant it to be.

© Matthew Del Nevo 2007 E-mail: mdelnevo@bbi.catholic.edu.au Dr Matthew Del Nevo Senior Lecturer in Theology and Christian Spirituality Broken Bay Institute Pennant Hills New South Wales Australia

The Radical “Newness” of Jesus Christ As Explained by Pope Benedict XVI

“Jesus represents the whole of his saving ministry in one symbolic act. He divests himself of his divine splendor; he, as it were, kneels down before us; he washes and dries our soiled feet, in order to make us fit to sit at table for God’s wedding feast”. (Chapter 3: “The Washing of the Feet”)

This Part Two is full of surprises, which some have even taken to be unsound ones. Right from the beginning Pope Benedict, in the Foreword to his book, has specified his intention to have taken “a significant step” in the “direction” of a “hermeneutics” (interpretation) fully in accordance with “the methodological principles formulated by the Second Vatican Council”, as opposed to a common “historical-critical exegesis” that is “positivistic” and that has neglected the “theological” aspect (pp. xiv-xv):

One thing is clear to me: in two hundred years of exegetical work, historical-critical exegesis has already yielded its essential fruit. If scholarly exegesis is not to exhaust itself in constantly new hypotheses, becoming theologically irrelevant, it must take a methodological step forward and see itself once again as a theological discipline, without abandoning its historical character. It must learn that the positivistic hermeneutic on which it has been based does not constitute the only valid and definitively evolved rational approach; rather, it constitutes a specific and historically conditioned form of rationality that is both open to correction and completion and in need of it. It must recognize that a properly developed faith-hermeneutic is appropriate to the text and can be combined with a historical hermeneutic, aware of its limits, so as to form a methodological whole.

Naturally, this combination of two quite different types of hermeneutic is an art that needs to be constantly remastered. But it can be achieved, and as a result the great insights of patristic [the Church Fathers] exegesis will be able to yield their fruit once more in a new context, as [Marius] Reiser’s bookBibelkritik und Auslegung der Heiligen Schrift, 2007 demonstrates. I would not presume to claim that this combination of the two hermeneutics is already fully accomplished in my book.

But I hope to have taken a significant step in that direction. Fundamentally this is a matter of finally putting into practice the methodological principles formulated for exegesis by the Second Vatican council (in Dei Verbum 12), a task that unfortunately has scarcely been attempted thus far.

In this way the Pope is showing himself to be an original thinker, one who will really stretch the minds of his readers. A reading of this book, therefore, requires real effort and attentiveness. A superficial and careless reading of the text might lead one to the conclusion, in places, that the author has departed from a traditional base. But that is never the case. Like Jesus Christ, whom the Pope had called ‘a living Torah’ in Part One, whose transformation of the old, without annihilating it, was a constant source of puzzlement to his disciples, the Pope, while pre-supposing Church doctrine, will significantly develop it. P. 81: “The “newness” of the figure of Jesus Christ – made visible in the outward discontinuity with theTempleand its sacrifices – nevertheless maintains a deep inner unity with the salvation history of the Old Covenant”.

For his hermeneutical boldness, the Pope has received strong criticism in conservative quarters. A reader has e-mailed us an article, “Modernism Resurrected: Benedict XVI on the Resurrection” by the Most Rev. Donald J. Sanborn, in the April 2011 edition of the Most Holy Trinity Seminary Newsletter (Brooksville, Florida), in which the author castigates the Pope for his ‘so many errors’, his being ‘so difficult to understand’, and ‘just like all the Modernists, he is seldom clear about what he is saying’, his book being ‘loaded with ... [heresy] luring statements’. This is especially in regard to his, admittedly challenging, Chapter 9 on the Resurrection. In Sanborn’s opinion, the Pope does not build upon the traditional Catholic foundations regarding this doctrine, and he ignores the clear teachings of former Popes. He is not a Thomist at all. This evolutionary-minded pontiff, he points out, has even couched the great event of the Resurrection in evolutionary terms, “an ‘evolutionary leap’.”

Actually, the Resurrection of Jesus Christ is the one true case of an evolutionary leap - unlike the fictional leap of primate to man - to a higher form of existence, a very “metamor­phosis of being”, as the Pope will say, “of remolding the whole of being”.

Our original purpose with this review had in fact been to focus upon the Pope’s discussion of Christ’s Resurrection. However, one finds that there is so much choice fruit to be picked from his earlier chapters - and here we must limit ourselves only to a few selections based around the concept of Jesus’ self-giving servanthood concept of Messianism, perhaps as contrasted with his contemporaries’ prevailing expectation of the Messiah as a political liberator - that we shall have to reserve our discussion of the Resurrection to the next MATRIX. So this article will be merely Part One.

Regarding those choice fruits, consider, for instance, Pope Benedict’s wonderful discussion on Jesus as (as mentioned above) the ‘new Temple’, a common theme throughout his book, and of the ‘deepened spiritual understanding of the priesthood’, ‘the new worship’, and the key importance of Isaiah 53 about the “Suffering Servant”, which however becomes only truly fulfilled in Jesus himself (pp. 80-81):

With the institution of the Eucharist, Jesus transforms his cruel death into “word”, into the radical expression of his love, his self-giving to the point of death. So he himself becomes the “Temple”. Insofar as the high-priestly prayer forms the consummation of Jesus’ self-gift, it represents the new worship and has a deeper inner connection with the Eucharist ....

Before we consider the individual themes contained in Jesus’ high-priestly prayer, one further Old Testament allusion should be mentioned, one that has again been studied by André Feuillet. He shows that the renewed and deepened spiritual understanding of the priesthood found in John 17 is already prefigured in Isaiah’s Suffering Servant Songs, especially in Isaiah 53. The Suffering Servant, who has the guilt of all laid upon him (53:6), giving up his life as a sin-offering (53:10) and bearing the sins of many (53:12), thereby carries out the ministry of the high priest, fulfilling the figure of the priesthood from deep within. He is both priest and victim, and in this way he achieves reconciliation. Thus the Suffering Servant Songs continue along the whole path of exploring the deeper meaning of the priesthood and worship, in harmony with the prophetic tradition ....

Pope Benedict, contrasting Jesus’ attitude of “otherness” against the pride of Adam, with reference to “The Washing of the Feet” (Chapter 3, a key chapter in the book), writes (p. 56):

What the Letter to the Philippians says in its great Christological hymn – namely, that unlike Adam, who had tried to grasp divinity for himself, Christ moves in the opposite direction, coming down from his divinity into humanity, taking the form of a servant and becoming obedient even to death on a cross (cf. 2:7-8) – all this is rendered visible in a single gesture. Jesus represents the whole of his saving ministry in one symbolic act. He divests himself of his divine splendor; he, as it were, kneels down before us; he washes and dries our soiled feet, in order to make us fit to sit at table for God’s wedding feast.

Marvellous too, and still in the context of the self-effacing act of washing his disciples’ feet, is this inspiring account of Jesus’ salvific action, his “totality of self-giving”, his “love to the end” (pp. 54-55):

The hour of Jesus

With the Last Supper, Jesus' "hour" has arrived, the goal to which his ministry has been directed from the beginning ([John] 2:4). The essence of this hour is described by John with two key words: it is the hour of his "departing" (metabaínein / metábasis); it is the hour of the love that reaches to the end (agápê).

The two concepts shed light on one another and are inseparable. Love is the very process of passing over, of transformation, of stepping outside the limitations of fallen humanity - in which we are all separated from one another and ultimately impenetrable to one another - into an infinite otherness. "Love to the end" is what brings about the seemingly impossible metábasis: stepping outside the limits of one's closed individuality, which is what agápê is - breaking through into the divine.

The "hour" of Jesus is the hour of the great stepping-beyond, the hour of transformation, and this metamor­phosis of being is brought about through agápê. It is agápê “to the end" - and here John anticipates the final word of the dying Jesus: tetélestai – “it is finished" (19:30). This end (télos), this totality of self-giving, of remolding the whole of being - this is what it means to give oneself even unto death.

Consider also the Pope’s explanation of St. John’s superior notion of creation, revealing “what God is really like”, by comparison with the view of the Plotinian philosophy (pp. 55-56):

When Jesus speaks ... in John's Gospel ... of having come from the Father and of returning to him, one is perhaps reminded of the ancient model of exitus and reditus, of exit and return, such as we find in the philosophy of Plotinus in particular. Nevertheless, the going out and returning that John describes is something quite different from what is meant in the philosophical model. For Plotinus and his successors, the “going out” which was their equivalent of the divine act of creation, is a descent that ultimately leads to a fall: from the height of the "one" down into ever lower regions of being. The return then consists in purification from the material sphere, in a gradual ascent, and in purifications that strip away again what is base and ultimately lead back to the unity of the divine.

Jesus' going out, on the other hand, presupposes that creation is not a fall, but a positive act of God's will. It is thus a movement of love, which in the process of descending demonstrates its true nature - motivated by love for the creature, love for the lost sheep - and so in descending it reveals what God is really like. On returning, Jesus does not strip away his humanity again as if it were a source of impurity. The goal of his descent was the addition and assumption of all mankind, and his homecoming with all men is the homecoming of "all flesh".

Something new happens in this return: Jesus does not return alone. He does not strip away the flesh, but draws all to himself (cf. Jn 12:32).The metábasis applies to all. If in the Prologue of John's Gospel we read that "his own” (ídioi) did not accept him (cf. 1:11), we now hear that he loves "his own" to the end (cf. 13:1). In descending he reassembled "his own"- the great family of God - from strangers he has made them "his own".

Let us listen to the evangelist as he continues: Jesus “rose from supper, laid aside his garments, and tied a towel around himself Then he poured water into a basin, and began to wash the disciples' feet, and to wipe them with the towel that was tied around him" (Jn 13:4-5). Jesus performs for his disciples the service of a slave, he "emptied himself" (Phil 2:7).

This is all in total contrast to the notion of Messiah that the Jews were expecting, hence Peter’s initial unwillingness to be thus served (p. 70). It is also quite the antithesis, too, of the Islamic view of a prophet (re recent ad., ‘Jesus as Islam Prophet’). The Pope - who will shortly discuss ‘The mystery of the betrayer [Judas]’ (pp. 65-69) - but presently leading to his important explanation of the meaning of the “new commandment” of Jesus - bids us now “to be very attentive” (p. 63):

After an interlude devoted to Judas' betrayal, Jesus returns to his instruction to the dis­ciples to wash one another's feet, and he applies it more widely (13:34-35). What is new about the new command­ment? Since this question ultimately concerns the "new­ness" of the New Testament, that is to say, the "essence of Christianity", it is important to be very attentive. ….

Saint Peter is just the sort of impulsive human character who elicits comment. And the Pope has sketched him well; and, too, more tragically, Judas the betrayer, who “shows us the wrong type of remorse: the type that is unable to hope, that sees only its own darkness, the type that is destructive and in no way authentic” (p. 69). By contrast (pp. 69-72):

In Peter we encounter another danger, that of a fall which is not definitive which can therefore be healed through conversion.

John 13 recounts two exchanges between Jesus and Peter, in which two aspects of this danger become visible. Initially, Peter does not want to have his feet washed by Jesus. This goes against his understanding of the relationship between master and disciple and against his image of the Messiah, whom he recognizes in Jesus. His resistance to the foot-washing has ultimately the same meaning as his protest against Jesus' prophecy of the Passion after the great confession at Caesarea Philippi: "God forbid, Lord! This shall never happen to you" was how he put it on that occasion (Mt 16:22).

Now, from a similar standpoint, he says: "You shall never wash my feet" (Jn 13:8). It is the response to Jesus that we find throughout history: You are the victor. You are the strong one - you must not lower yourself or practice humility! Again and again Jesus has to help us recognize anew that God's power is different, that the Messiah must pass through suffering into glory and must lead others along the same path.

In the second exchange, which comes after Judas' departure and the teaching on the new commandment, the theme is martyrdom. It is expressed in terms of "going away", "going across" (hypágô). Jesus had spoken on two occasions in John's Gospel about "going away" to a place where the Jews could not come (7:34-36; 8:21-22). ….

During the washing of the feet, in the atmosphere of farewell that pervades the scene, Peter asks his master quite openly: "Lord, where are you going?" And again he receives a cryptic answer: "Where I am going you cannot follow me now; but you shall follow afterward" (13:36). Peter understands that Jesus is speaking of his imminent death, and he now wants to emphasize his radical fidel­ity even unto death: “Why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you” (13:37). Indeed, shortly afterward on the Mount of Olives, he rushes in with his sword, ready to put his intention into effect. But he must learn that even martyrdom is no heroic achievement: rather, it is a grace to be able to suffer for Jesus. He must bid farewell to the heroism of personal deeds and learn the humility of the disciple. His desire to rush in -his heroism - leads to his denial. In order to secure his place by the fire in the forecourt of the high priest's palace, and in order to keep abreast of every development in Jesus' destiny as it happens, he claims not to know him. His heroism falls to pieces in a small-minded tactic. He must learn how to wait, how to persevere. He must learn the way of the disciple in order to be led, when his hour comes, to the place where he does not want to go (cf. Jn 21:18) and to receive the grace of martyrdom.

One might wonder just how much influence his association with Pope John Paul II - especially in his later years of suffering - may have had upon the formation of our present Pope’s thinking as regards suffering servanthood. Leaving aside his book for a moment, it was interesting (and most relevant to our discussion) to read in an article what the following author considered to constitute the greatness of Pope John Paul II. That he showed us how to carry the Cross.

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/column.php?n=1556

April 25, 2011

By Russell Shaw

Strange as it may seem at first, I find the key to the sanctity of Pope John Paul II in the closing words of an American novel published in 1988 — a book the Pope most likely never read.

In brief, the heart of John Paul’s practice of “heroic charity” resides in the fact that he showed the world how to carry the cross.

…. John Paul was human, and he made mistakes. He was slow to come to grips with the sex abuse problem, and not all his choices for bishop turned out well.

But among the conspicuous elements of his greatness were his key role in the fall of communism, which he helped bring about by his powerful support for the Polish people’s deeply spiritual rebellion against their communist overlords; his remarkable body of encyclicals and other teaching documents positioning Catholics to engage contemporary secular culture; and his dramatic, globe-circling travels that captured the imaginations and moved the hearts of people throughout the world.

Important as all this was, however, to me the heart of his sanctity resides somewhere else. I find the idea expressed at the end of J.F. Powers’s second novel and last book, Wheat That Springeth Green.

Powers, a serious Catholic, was not a prolific writer — he published just three books of short stories and two novels — but he was a subtle and insightful one as well as a careful craftsman.

Wheat That Springeth Green tells the story of an American priest named Joe, a would-be wearer of a hairshirt during his seminary years, who as a pastor in the post-Vatican II Church learns what everyday penitential suffering really means.

In an incident that recalls an episode in the life of St. John Vianney, patron saint of parish priests, Joe deserts his post and runs away. But, also like the Cure d’Ars, he soon relents and turns back. Not long after that, friends give Father Joe a birthday party. After it’s over, he’s heading to his car when another priest, Lefty by name, calls after him about a chair he’s offered to give Joe and Joe has declined: “Sure you don’t want that chair?” “Joe shook his head and kept going, calling back, ‘Yes,’ and when Dave called after him, ‘Where is it you’re stationed now — Holy…Faith?’ Joe shook his head and kept going, calling back, ‘Cross.’”

What does that have to do with John Paul II? Just this. In his declining years — old, sick, increasingly incapacitated by Parkinsonism — he soldiered on, demonstrating how a son of God accepts the Father’s will, takes up his cross, and goes to meet his death.

Other public men have hidden their weakness and disability — among American presidents, think of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John Kennedy.
Popes have sometimes done the same.

John Paul handled it differently, carrying on his ministry as pastor of the universal Church as well as his failing strength allowed and allowing the world to witness his weakness in a display of uncommon heroism.

No doubt there are many reasons why he deserves to be called “Blessed” and some day “Saint.” This one seems central to me. ….

{End of quote}

“We must let ourselves be immersed ­in the Lord's mercy,

then our "hearts", too, will discover the right path”.

Pope Benedict had bade us “to be very attentive” regarding the “new commandment”. Here is his ontological and Thomistically-grounded explanation of it (pp. 63-64):

It has been argued that the new element - moving beyond the earlier commandment to love one's neigh­bor - is revealed in the saying "love as I have loved you", in other words, loving to the point of readiness to lay down one's life for the other. If this were the specific and exclusive content of the "new commandment", then Christianity could after all be defined as a form of extreme moral effort. This is how many commentators explain the Sermon on the Mount: in contrast to the old way of the Ten Commandments - the way of the average man, one might say - Christianity, through the Sermon on the Mount, opens up the high way that is radical in its demands, revealing a new level of humanity to which men can aspire.

And yet who could possibly claim to have risen above the "average" way of the Ten Commandments, to have left them behind as self-evident, so to speak, and now to walk along the exalted paths of the "new law"? No, the newness of the new commandment cannot consist in the highest moral attainment. Here, too, the essential point is not the call to supreme achievement, but the new founda­tion of being that is given to us. The newness can come only from the gift of being-with and being-in Christ.

Saint Augustine actually began his exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount - his first cycle of homilies after priestly ordination - with the idea of a higher ethos, loft­ier and purer norms. But in the course of the homilies, the center of gravity shifts more and more. In a number of places he has to acknowledge that the older morality was already marked by a genuine completeness. With increas­ing clarity, preparation of the heart comes to replace the idea of the higher demand (cf. De Serm. Dom. in Monte I. 19, 59); the "pure heart" (cf. Mt 5:8) becomes more and more the focus of the exegesis. …. the connection with the wash­ing of the feet becomes visible in a surprising way: only by letting ourselves be repeatedly cleansed, "made pure'', by the Lord himself can we learn to act as he did, in union with him.

It all depends on our "I" being absorbed into his ("it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me" - Gal 2:20). This is why the second constantly recurring key-­word in Augustine's exegesis of the Sermon on the Mount ^­ismisericordia - mercy. We must let ourselves be immersed ­in the Lord's mercy, then our "hearts", too, will discover the right path. The "new commandment" is not simply a new and higher demand: it is linked to the newness of Christ - to growing immersion in him.

Taking this line of argument farther, Thomas Aquinas observed: "The new law is the grace of the Holy Spirit" (Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 106, a. 1) - not a new norm, but the new interiority granted by the Spirit of God himself­. This spiritual experience of the truly new element in Christianity was what Augustine succinctly expressed in the famous formula: "Da quod iubes et iube quod vis" (give what you command and command what you will; Conf. X, 29, 40). The gift - the sacramentum - becomes an exemplum, an example, while always remaining a gift. To be a Christian is primarily a gift, which then unfolds in the dynamic of living and acting in and around the gift.

Pope Reminds Jesuits of Devotion to Sacred Heart of Jesus

ZE06061522 - 2006-06-15
Permalink: http://www.zenit.org/article-16328?l=english

Papal Letter on 50th Anniversary of "Haurietis Aquas"

Remembrance of Encyclical on Devotion to Sacred Heart

VATICAN CITY, JUNE 15, 2006 (Zenit.org).- Here is a Vatican translation of Benedict XVI's letter to the superior general of the Jesuits to mark the 50th anniversary of Pope Pius XII's encyclical "Haurietis Aquas," on devotion to the Sacred Heart.

* * *

To the Most Reverend Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, S.J.
Superior General of the Society of Jesus

Today, 50 years later, the Prophet Isaiah's words, which Pius XII placed at the beginning of the Encyclical with which he commemorated the first centenary of the extension of the Feast of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus to the entire Church, have lost none of their meaning: "With joy you will draw water from the wells of salvation" (Isaiah 12:3).

By encouraging devotion to the Heart of Jesus, the Encyclical "Haurietis Aquas" exhorted believers to open themselves to the mystery of God and of his love and to allow themselves to be transformed by it. After 50 years, it is still a fitting task for Christians to continue to deepen their relationship with the Heart of Jesus, in such a way as to revive their faith in the saving love of God and to welcome him ever better into their lives.

The Redeemer's pierced side is the source to which the Encyclical "Haurietis Aquas" refers us: We must draw from this source to attain true knowledge of Jesus Christ and a deeper experience of his love. Thus, we will be able to understand better what it means to know God's love in Jesus Christ, to experience him, keeping our gaze fixed on him to the point that we live entirely on the experience of his love, so that we can subsequently witness to it to others.

Indeed, to take up a saying of my venerable Predecessor John Paul II, "In the Heart of Christ, man's heart learns to know the genuine and unique meaning of his life and of his destiny, to understand the value of an authentically Christian life, to keep himself from certain perversions of the human heart, and to unite the filial love for God and the love of neighbor."

Thus: "The true reparation asked by the Heart of the Savior will come when the civilization of the Heart of Christ can be built upon the ruins heaped up by hatred and violence" (Letter to Father Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, superior general of the Society of Jesus for the beatification of Blessed Claude de la Colombière, Oct. 5, 1986; L'Osservatore Romano, English edition, Oct. 27, 1986, p. 7).

In the Encyclical "Deus Caritas Est," I cited the affirmation in the First Letter of St John: "We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us," in order to emphasize that being Christian begins with the encounter with a Person (cf. No. 1).

Since God revealed himself most profoundly in the Incarnation of his Son in whom he made himself "visible," it is in our relationship with Christ that we can recognize who God really is (cf. "Haurietis Aquas," Nos. 29-41; "Deus Caritas Est," Nos. 12-15).

And again: since the deepest expression of God's love is found in the gift Christ made of his life for us on the Cross, the deepest expression of God's love, it is above all by looking at his suffering and his death that we can see God's infinite love for us more and more clearly: "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life" (John 3:16).

Moreover, not only does this mystery of God's love for us constitute the content of the worship of and devotion to the Heart of Jesus, but in the same way it is likewise the content of all true spirituality and Christian devotion. It is consequently important to stress that the basis of the devotion is as old as Christianity itself.

Indeed, it is only possible to be Christian by fixing our gaze on the Cross of our Redeemer, "on him whom they have pierced" (John 19:37; cf. Zechariah 12:10).

The Encyclical "Haurietis Aquas" rightly recalls that for countless souls the wound in Christ's side and the marks left by the nails have been "the chief sign and symbol of that love" that ever more incisively shaped their life from within (cf. No. 52).

Recognizing God's love in the Crucified One became an inner experience that prompted them to confess, together with Thomas: "My Lord and my God!" (John 20:28), and enabled them to acquire a deeper faith by welcoming God's love unreservedly (cf. "Haurietis Aquas," No. 49).

The deepest meaning of this devotion to God's love is revealed solely through a more attentive consideration of its contribution not only to the knowledge, but also and especially to the personal experience of this love in trusting dedication to its service (cf. ibid., No. 62).

It is obvious that experience and knowledge cannot be separated: The one refers to the other. Moreover, it is essential to emphasize that true knowledge of God's love is only possible in the context of an attitude of humble prayer and generous availability.

Starting with this interior attitude, one sees that the gaze fixed upon his side, pierced by the spear, is transformed into silent adoration. Gazing at the Lord's pierced side, from which "blood and water" flowed (cf. John 19:34), helps us to recognize the manifold gifts of grace that derive from it (cf. "Haurietis Aquas," Nos. 34-41) and opens us to all other forms of Christian worship embraced by the devotion to the Heart of Jesus.

Faith, understood as a fruit of the experience of God's love, is a grace, a gift of God. Yet human beings will only be able to experience faith as a grace to the extent that they accept it within themselves as a gift on which they seek to live. Devotion to the love of God, to which the Encyclical "Haurietis Aquas" invited the faithful (cf. No. 72), must help us never to forget that he willingly took this suffering upon himself "for us," "for me."

When we practice this devotion, not only do we recognize God's love with gratitude but we continue to open ourselves to this love so that our lives are ever more closely patterned upon it. God, who poured out his love "into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us" (cf. Romans 5:5), invites us tirelessly to accept his love. The main aim of the invitation to give ourselves entirely to the saving love of Christ and to consecrate ourselves to it (cf. "Haurietis Aquas," No. 4) is, consequently, to bring about our relationship with God.

This explains why the devotion, which is totally oriented to the love of God who sacrificed himself for us, has an irreplaceable importance for our faith and for our life in love.

Whoever inwardly accepts God is molded by him. The experience of God's love should be lived by men and women as a "calling" to which they must respond. Fixing our gaze on the Lord, who "took our infirmities and bore our diseases" (Matthew 8:17), helps us to become more attentive to the suffering and need of others.

Adoring contemplation of the side pierced by the spear makes us sensitive to God's salvific will. It enables us to entrust ourselves to his saving and merciful love, and at the same time strengthens us in the desire to take part in his work of salvation, becoming his instruments.

The gifts received from the open side, from which "blood and water" flowed (cf. John 19:34), ensure that our lives will also become for others a source from which "rivers of living water" flow (John 7:38; cf. "Deus Caritas Est," No. 7).

The experience of love, brought by the devotion to the pierced side of the Redeemer, protects us from the risk of withdrawing into ourselves and makes us readier to live for others. "By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren" (1 John 3:16; cf. "Haurietis Aquas," No. 38).

It was only the experience that God first gave us his love that has enabled us to respond to his commandment of love (cf. "Deus Caritas Est," No. 17).

So it is that the cult of love, which becomes visible in the mystery of the Cross presented anew in every celebration of the Eucharist, lays the foundations of our capacity to love and to make a gift of ourselves (cf. "Haurietis Aquas," No. 69), becoming instruments in Christ's hands: Only in this way can we be credible proclaimers of his love.

However, this opening of ourselves to God's will must be renewed in every moment: "Love is never 'finished' and complete" (cf. "Deus Caritas Est," No. 17).

Thus, looking at the "side pierced by the spear" from which shines forth God's boundless desire for our salvation cannot be considered a transitory form of worship or devotion: The adoration of God's love, whose historical and devotional expression is found in the symbol of the "pierced heart," remains indispensable for a living relationship with God (cf. "Haurietis Aquas," No. 62).

As I express the wish that the 50th anniversary will give rise to an ever more fervent response to love of the Heart of Christ in numerous hearts, I impart a special Apostolic Blessing to you, Most Reverend Father, and to all the Religious of the Society of Jesus, who are still very active in promoting this fundamental devotion.

From the Vatican, May 15, 2006

BENEDICTUS PP. XVI

[Original in Italian; translation by Vatican, adapted]

© Copyright 2006 -- Libreria Editrice Vaticana

Resurrection: A New Dimension of Reality

The Pope on the Resurrection

... I have just finished Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week, his new book which was published March 10, and I was quite favorably impressed with it.

On this Wednesday before Easter, let me share some of the Pope’s statements about the Resurrection, which I found very close to my own theological position (and also close to the position of the noted New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, whom he does not cite).

Near the beginning of “Jesus’ Resurrection from the Dead,” the ninth chapter, the Pope asserts, “The Christian faith stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead” (p. 241). And on the following page: “Only if Jesus is risen has anything really new occurred that changes the world and the situation of mankind.”

The Pope cites New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann on page 246. I write more (and more critically) about him in my book The Limits of Liberalism (see especially pp. 194-5). In his book The Resurrection of Christ (2004) Lüdemann dismisses the “vain resort of accepting the resurrection of Jesus as a historical fact” and then goes on to assert that “we can no longer be Christians even if we wanted to be, for Jesus did not rise from the dead” (p. 202).

In response to what he quoted Lüdemann as saying, Benedict writes, “Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data.” But, “The Resurrection accounts certainly speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented—a new dimension of reality that is revealed. . . . Does that contradict science?”

The Pope continues, “Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new? If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of reality altogether?” (pp. 246-7).

In the last section of the ninth chapter, Benedict says that the resurrection is “a historical event that nevertheless bursts open the dimensions of history and transcends it” (p. 273). He also says that the Resurrection can be regarded “as something akin to a radical ‘evolutionary leap,’ in which a new dimension of life emerges, a new dimension of human existence.

“Indeed, matter itself is remolded into a new type of reality. The man Jesus, complete with his body, now belongs totally to the sphere of the divine and eternal” (p. 274). So, the Resurrection “is not the same kind of historical event as the birth or crucifixion of Jesus. It is something new, a new type of event.

“Yet at the same time it must be understood that the Resurrection does not simply stand outside or above history” (p. 275).
....

Taken from:
http://theviewfromthisseat.blogspot.com/2011/04/pope-on-resurrection.html

Eyewitnesses to Jesus?

IS IT, AS SOME CLAIM, THE most important breakthrough in biblical research since the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls? Or is it merely a scholar's overhyped thesis, unsupported by solid evidence? These questions swirl about three tiny fragments of papyrus at Oxford University known collectively as the Magdalen Papyrus. Ragged-edged and dun-colored, they contain snippets of three passages from Chapter 26 of St. Matthew's Gospel in Greek script. For more than 90 years, the papyrus scraps had been housed at the library of Magdalen College, the gift of an obscure British chaplain who bought them at an antiquities market in Luxor, Egypt.

Specialists had long assumed that the Magdalen Papyrus was written sometime in the mid-to-late 2nd century A.D. Now, however, German papyrologist Carsten Peter Thiede has startled the rarefied world of biblical scholarship by arguing that the papyruses are actually the oldest extant fragments of the New Testament, dating from about A.D. 70. Thiede's thesis, if correct, means St. Matthew's Gospel, as well as Mark's (on which it is based, in part), is not the secondhand account of Evangelists who were separated by decades from the Jesus of history. Instead, it reflects eyewitness testimony by near contemporaries of the carpenter from Nazareth.

Inevitably, Thiede's thesis has been sharply criticized by other experts who question both his credentials as a papyrologist and his methodology. Says Klaus Wachtel of the Institute for New Testament Exegesis at the University of Munster: "Thiede's paleographic arguments for an early dating are demonstrably untenable." The British scholar Graham Stanton insists that "the case for a first-century date does not stand up to scrutiny."

Amplifying a learned article that he published in 1995, Thiede has marshaled his arguments in a new book called Eyewitness to Jesus (Doubleday; 206 pages; $23.95), written with Matthew d'Ancona, a deputy editor and political columnist at London's Sunday Telegraph. As evidence of the fragments' early origins, Thiede notes that the handwriting on the Magdalen Papyrus is in a style known as uncial, which began to die out in the middle of the 1st century. A second clue to the manuscript's origins is its format. The three fragments are from a codex, a primitive kind of book in which writing is found on both sides of the papyrus. (On a scroll, by contrast, only one side is used.) Contrary to the views of most biblical scholars, Thiede argues that codices were widely used by 1st century Christians, since they were easier to handle than scrolls.

One of Thiede's findings has intriguing implications. In three places on the Magdalen Papyrus, the name of Jesus is written as KS, an abbreviation of the Greek word Kyrios, or Lord. Thiede contends that this shorthand is proof that early Christians considered Jesus a nomen sacrum (sacred name), much the way devout Jews emphasized the holiness of God's name by shortening it to the tetragrammaton YHWH. Thus the perception of Jesus as divine was not a later development of Christian faith but a firm belief of the early church.

New papyrus discoveries, Thiede believes, will eventually prove that all four Gospels, even the problematic one ascribed to John, were written before A.D. 80 rather than during the mid-2nd century. He argues that a scroll fragment unearthed at the Essene community of Qumran in 1972 almost certainly contains a passage from Mark's Gospel and can be accurately dated to A.D. 68. In Thiede's opinion, recent research has established that a papyrus fragment of Luke in a Paris library was written between A.D. 63 and A.D. 67.

Thiede believes his early dating thesis will force New Testament scholars to re-examine their assumptions about the Gospels. Instead of being theological constructs about the Christ of Faith, written long after the events they record, the Evangels need to be seen as authentic biographies, based on eyewitness accounts. "For nonbelievers, [the early dating theory] may mean nothing," says Thiede, who is an observant Anglican. "Certainly these findings are not going to force anybody to become a Christian. But the testimony of eyewitnesses of Jesus' generation does make [the Gospel] more credible, at least as a historical account."

Critics respond that Thiede has vastly exaggerated the significance of his early dating theory. Since some, although not all, scholars believe Matthew may have been written around A.D. 80, what real difference does a marginally earlier date make? As for the accuracy of eyewitnesses,

J. Keith Lincoln of Leeds University points out, "Just because the [writers] are bystanders and observers doesn't mean they are getting the correct view. In some cases, a period of reflection and discussion might end up with a better and more historical document."

To Thiede, any evidence that the Gospels reflect eyewitness testimony matters a great deal. As he writes, "If the Gospels are more authentic than we thought, then perhaps the gap between the Jesus of history and the Christ of Faith is not as great as academics have claimed and Christians feared." Apparently the age-old battle over the truth of Scripture, far from being over, has just begun.

 

--Reported by Barry Hillenbrand/London and Bruce van Voorst/Bonn

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984370,00.html#ixzz1NPk1wSbU

Read more: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,984370,00.html#ixzz1NPjsEfGo

The dates of the Gospels

Taken from: http://jmm.aaa.net.au/articles/14452.htm

....

By George H. Duggan

When were the Gospels written? Or, to frame the question more precisely, when had the Gospels arrived at the state in which we now have them? The present text, we have reason to believe, was preceded by earlier drafts. If that is so, we could not say that the Gospel of St. Mark was written in 45, as we can say, for example, that Second Corinthians was written in 55 or 56.

If we accept the Gospels as the inspired word of God, does it really matter, one might ask, when they were written? In the days when everyone accepted the traditional dating,1 one could perhaps have dismissed the question as unimportant. But those days are long gone. Ever since Reimarus (1694-1768) sought to convict the evangelists of conscious fraud and innumerable contradictions, his rationalist followers have put the writing of the Gospels late, in order to lessen their value as sources of reliable information about the life of Christ and his teaching.

D. F. Strauss (1808-1874), in his Life of Jesus, (published in 1835-6), anticipated Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976) in holding that the Gospels, although they contain some historical facts, were mainly mythology and were written late in the 2nd century. Similarly F. C. Baur (1792-1860), an Hegelian rationalist, held that the Gospels were written between 130 and 170. But Strauss, in the words of Giuseppe Ricciotti, “honestly confessed that his theory would collapse if the Gospels were composed during the first century.”2 If they were so early, there would not be enough time for the myths to develop. Moreover, it is plain that, the nearer a document is to the facts it narrates, the more likely it is that it will be factually accurate, just as an entry in a diary is more likely to be accurate than memoirs written forty or fifty years afterwards. John A. T. Robinson was therefore justified when he ended his book Redating the New Testament with the words: “Dates remain disturbingly fundamental data.”3

The current dating of the four Gospels, accepted by the biblical establishment, which includes scholars of every persuasion, is: Mark 65-70; Matthew and Luke in the 80s; John in the 90s. These dates are repeated by the columnists who write in our Catholic newspapers and the experts who draw up the curricula for religious education in our Catholic schools.

For much of this late dating there is little real evidence. This point was made by C. H. Dodd, arguably the greatest English-speaking biblical scholar of the century. In a letter that serves as an appendix to Robinson’s book Redating the New Testament, Dodd wrote: “I should agree with you that much of the late dating is quite arbitrary, even wanton, the offspring not of any argument that can be presented, but rather of the critic’s prejudice that, if he appears to assent to the traditional position of the early church, he will be thought no better than a stick-in-the-mud.”5

Many years earlier the same point was made by C. C. Torrey, professor of Semitic Languages at Yale from 1900 to 1932. He wrote: “I challenged my NT colleagues to designate one passage from any one of the four Gospels giving clear evidence of a date later than 50 A.D. . . . The challenge was not met, nor will it be, for there is no such passage.”6

In 1976, the eminent New Testament scholar, John A. T. Robinson, “put a cat among the pigeons” with his book Redating the New Testament, published by SCM Press. He maintained that there are no real grounds for putting any of the NT books later than 70 A.D. His main argument is that there is no clear reference in any of them to the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple which occurred on September 26th of that year. This cataclysmic event brought to an end the sacrificial worship that was the center of the Jewish religion and it should have merited a mention in the NT books if they were written afterwards. In particular, one would have expected to find a reference to the event in the Epistle to the Hebrews, for it would have greatly strengthened the author’s argument that the Temple worship was now obsolete.

Robinson dated the composition of Matthew from 40 to 60, using dots to indicate the traditions behind the text, dashes to indicate a first draft, and a continuous line to indicate writing and rewriting. Similarly, he dated Mark from 45 to 60, Luke from 55 to 62, and John from 40 to 65.

Robinson’s book was the first comprehensive treatment of the dating of the NT books since Harnack’s Chronologie des altchristlichen Litteratur, published in 1897. It is a genuine work of scholarship by a man thoroughly versed in the NT text and the literature bearing on it. But it was not welcomed by the biblical establishment, and it was not refuted, but ignored. “German New Testament scholars,” Carsten Thiede has written, “all but ignored Redating the New Testament, and not until 1986, ten years later, did Robinson’s work appear in Germany, when a Catholic and an Evangelical publishing house joined forces to have it translated and put into print.”7

In 1987, the Franciscan Herald Press published The Birth of the Synoptics by Jean Carmignac, a scholar who for some years was a member of the team working on the Dead Sea Scrolls. He tells us he would have preferred “Twenty Years of Work on the Formation of the Synoptic Gospels” as a title for the book, but the publishers ruled this out as too long.

Carmignac is sure that Matthew and Mark were originally written in Hebrew. This would not have been the classical Hebrew of the Old Testament, nor that of the Mishnah (c. 200 A.D.) but an intermediate form of the language, such as the Qumran sectaries were using in the 1st century A.D.

Papias, the Bishop of Hierapolis in Asia Minor, who died about 130 A.D., tells us that Matthew wrote his Gospel in Hebrew, and Carmignac has made a good case for holding that the same is true of Mark. He found that this compelled him to put the composition of these Gospels much earlier than the dates proposed by the biblical establishment. He writes: “I increasingly came to realize the consequences of my work . . . . The latest dates that can be admitted for Mark (and the Collection of Discourses) is 50, and around 55 for the Completed Mark; around 55-60 for Matthew; between 58 and 60 for Luke. But the earliest dates are clearly more probable: Mark around 42; Completed Mark around 45; (Hebrew) Matthew around 50; (Greek) Luke a little after 50.”8

On page 87 he sets out the provisional results (some certain, some probable, others possible) of his twenty years’ research and remarks that his conclusions almost square with those of J. W. Wenham.9

In 1992, Hodder and Stoughton published Redating Matthew, Mark and Luke by John Wenham, the author of a well-known grammar of New Testament Greek. Born in 1913, he is an Anglican scholar who has spent his life in academic and pastoral work. He tells us that his attention was drawn to the Synoptic Problem in 1937, when he read Dom John Chapman’s book Matthew, Mark and Luke. He has been grappling with the problem ever since and in this book he offers his solution of the problem; but his main concern is the dates of the Synoptics.

Wenham’s book received high praise from Michael Green, the editor of the series I Believe, which includes works by such well-known scholars as I. Howard Marsall and the late George Eldon Ladd. The book, Green writes, “is full of careful research, respect for evidence, brilliant inspiration and fearless judgement. It is a book no New Testament scholar will be able to neglect.”

Green may be too optimistic. Wenham will probably get the same treatment as Robinson: not a detailed refutation, but dismissed as not worthy of serious consideration.

Wenham puts the first draft of Matthew before 42. For twelve years (30-42) the Apostles had remained in Jerusalem, constituting, in words of the Swedish scholar B. Gerhardsson, a kind of Christian Sanhedrin, hoping to win over the Jewish people to faith in Christ. Matthew’s Gospel, written in Hebrew, would have had an apologetic purpose, endeavoring to convince the Jews, by citing various Old Testament texts, that Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of David and the long-awaited Messiah.

The persecution of the Church in 42 by Herod Agrippa I, in which the Apostle James suffered martyrdom, put an end to those hopes. Peter, miraculously freed from prison, went, we are told “to another place” (Acts 12:17). There are grounds for thinking that this “other place” was Rome, where there was a big Jewish community and where he would be out of the reach of Herod Agrippa. There, using Matthew’s text, and amplifying it with personal reminiscences, he preached the gospel. When Agrippa died in 44, Peter was able to return to Palestine. After his departure from Rome, Mark produced the first draft of his Gospel, based on Peter’s preaching.

Luke was in Philippi from 49 to 55, and it was during this time that he produced the first draft of his Gospel, beginning with our present chapter 3, which records the preaching of John the Baptist.10 It was to this Gospel, Origen explained, that St. Paul was referring when, writing to the Corinthians in 56, he described Luke as “the brother whose fame in the gospel has gone through all the churches” (2 Cor. 8:18).

We know that Luke was in Palestine when Paul was in custody in Caesarea (58-59). He would have been able to move round Galilee, interviewing people who had known the Holy Family, and probably making the acquaintance of a draft in the Hebrew of the Infancy Narrative, and so gathering material for the first two chapters of the present Gospel. In the finished text he introduced this and the rest of the Gospel with the prologue in which he assures Theophilus that he intends to write history.

There are no grounds for putting Luke’s Gospel in the early 80s as R. F. Karris does,11 or, with Joseph Fitzmyer, placing it as “not earlier than 80-85.”12

The date of Luke’s Gospel is closely connected with that of Acts, its companion volume, for if Acts is early, then Luke will be earlier still. In 1896, Harnack put Acts between 79 and 93, but by 1911 he had come to the conclusion that “it is the highest degree probable” that Acts is to be dated before 62. If Luke does not mention the outcome of the trial of Paul, it is, Harnack argued, because he did not know, for when Luke wrote, the trial had not yet taken place.

C. J. Hemer, in his magisterial work, The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History, which was published posthumously in 1989, gives fifteen general indications, of varying weight but cumulative in their force, which point to a date before 70. Indeed, many of these point to a date before 65, the year in which the Neroian persecution of the Church began.13

In 1996, Weidenfeld and Nicholson published The Jesus Papyrus by Carsten Peter Thiede and Matthew d’Ancona. Thiede is Director of the Institute for Basic Epistemological Research in Paderborn, Germany, and a member of the International Papyrological Association. Matthew d’Ancona is a journalist and Deputy Editor of the Daily Telegraph, a London newspaper.

The book is about several papyrus fragments, and in particular three found in Luxor, Egypt, which contain passages from the Gospel of St. Matthew, and one found in Qumran, which contains twenty letters from the Gospel of St. Mark.

The three Luxor fragments-the Jesus papyrus-came into the possession of the Reverend Charles Huleatt, the Anglican chaplain in that city, who sent them in 1901 to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he had graduated in 1888. They did not attract scholarly attention until 1953, when Colin H. Roberts examined them. He dated them as belonging to the late 2nd century. Then in 1994, they came to the notice of C. P. Thiede, who suspected that they might be much older than Roberts thought. Examining them with a confocal laser scanning microscope, and comparing them with the script in a document dated July 24, 66, he came to the conclusion that the fragments should be dated as belonging to the middle of the first century.

The Qumran fragment is small-3.3 cm x 2.3 cm-an area that is slightly larger than a postage stamp. It contains twenty letters, on five lines, ten of the letters being damaged. It is fragment no. 5 from Cave 7 and it is designated 7Q5. A similar fragment from the same Cave-7Q2-has one more letter-twenty-one as against twenty, on five lines. The identification of this fragment as Baruch (or the Letter of Jeremiah) 6:43-44 has never been disputed.

In 1972 Fr. Jos� O’Callaghan, S.J., a Spanish papyrologist, declared that the words on 7Q5 were from the Gospel of St. Mark: 6:52-53. This identification was widely questioned, but many papyrologists rallied to his support, and there are good reasons for thinking that O’Callaghan was right. Thiede writes: “In 1994, the last word on this particular identification seemed to have been uttered by one of the great papyrologists of our time, Orsolina Montevecchi, Honorary President of the International Papyrological Association. She summarized the results in a single unequivocal sentence: ‘I do not think there can be any doubt about the identification of 7Q5.’”14 This implies that St. Marks’ Gospel was in being some time before the monastery at Qumran was destroyed by the Romans in 68.

Those who object that texts of the Gospels could not have reached such out of the way places as Luxor or Qumran as early as the 60s of the first century do not realize how efficient the means of communication were in the Empire at that time. Luxor was even then a famous tourist attraction, and, with favorable winds a letter from Rome could reach Alexandria in three days-at least as quickly as an airmail letter in 1996. Nor was Qumran far from Jerusalem, and we know that the monks took a lively interest in the religious and intellectual movements of the time.

New Testament scholars dealing with the Synoptic Gospels will obviously have to take more notice of the findings of the papyrologists than they have so far been prepared to do, however painful it may be to discard received opinions.

When was St. John’s Gospel written?

That John, the son of Zebedee, and one of the Apostles, wrote the Gospel that bears his name, was established long ago, on the basis of external and internal evidence, by B. F. Westcott and M. J. Lagrange, O.P., and their view, though not universally accepted, has not really been shaken.

St. Irenaeus, writing in 180, tells us that John lived until the reign of the Emperor Trajan, which began in 98. From this some have inferred that John wrote his Gospel in the 90s. But this inference is obviously fallacious. The majority of modern scholars do indeed date the Gospel in the 90s, but a growing number put it earlier, and Robinson mentions seventeen, including P. Gardner-Smith, R. M. Grant and Leon Morris, who favor a date before 70. To them we could add Klaus Berger, of Heidelberg, who puts it in 66. Robinson decisively refutes the arguments brought forward by Raymond Brown and others to establish a later date, viz. the manner of referring to “the Jews,” and the reference to excommunication in chapter 9.15 He adds: “There is nothing in the Gospel that suggests or presupposes that the Temple is already destroyed or that Jerusalem is in ruins-signs of which calamity are inescapably present in any Jewish or Christian literature that can with any certainty be dated to the period 70-100.”16

Robinson also points out that John, when describing the cure of the paralytic at the pool of Bethesda, tells us that this pool “is surrounded by five porticos, or covered colonnades” (5:2). Since these porticos were destroyed in 70, John’s use of the present tense-”is”-seems to imply that the porticos were still in being when he wrote. “Too much weight,” he admits, “must not be put on this-though it is the only present tense in the context; and elsewhere (4:6; 11:18; 18:1; 19:41), John assimilates his topographical descriptions to the tense of the narrative.”17

This article will have served its purpose if it has encouraged the reader to consider seriously the evidence for an early date for the Gospels, refusing to be overawed by such statements as that “the majority of modern biblical scholars hold” or that “there is now a consensus among modern biblical scholars” that the Gospels are to be dated from 65 to 90 A.D.

The account I have given of the writing of the Synoptic Gospels is categorical in style, but it is presented only as a likely scenario. However, it would seem to be more likely than one based on the assumption that among the Jews, a literate people, it was thirty years or more before anyone wrote a connected account of the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.

“I do not wish,” C. S. Lewis once said to a group of divinity students, “to reduce the skeptical element in your minds. I am only suggesting that it need not be reserved exclusively for the New Testament and the Creeds. Try doubting something else.”18 This something else, I suggest could include the widely accepted view that the Gospels were written late.

It will be easier to do this if the reader is acquainted with the judgment of the eminent jurist, Sir Norman Anderson, who describes himself as “an academic from another discipline who has browsed widely in the writings of contemporary theologians and biblical scholars.” At times, he is, he tells us, “astonished by the way in which they handle their evidence, by the presuppositions and a priori convictions with which some of them clearly (and even, on occasion, on their own admission) approach the documents concerned, and by the positively staggering assurance with which they make categorical pronouncements on points which are, on any showing, open to question, and on which equally competent colleagues take a diametrically opposite view.”19

1 The traditional dating is given in the Douay-Rheims-Challoner version in its introductions to the Gospels: Matthew about 36; Mark about 40; Luke about 54; John about 93. 2 Ricciotti, The Life of Christ (E.T. Alba I. Zizzamia), Bruce, Milwaukee, 1944, p. 186. 3 Redating the New Testament, SCM Press, London, 1976, p. 358. 4 Thus in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, Geoffrey Chapman, London, 1989, D. J. Harrington puts Mark before 70; B. T. Viviani, O.P., puts Matthew between 80 and 90; R. J. Karris, O.F.M., puts Luke 80-85; Pheme Perkins puts John in the 90s. 5 Redating the New Testament, p. 360. 6 Quoted in J. Wenham, Redating Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Hodder and Stoughton, London, p. 299 note 2. 7 C. P. Thiede and M. d’Ancona, The Jesus Papyrus, Weidenfeld and Nicholson, London, 1996, p. 45. 8 J. Carmignac, The Birth of the Synoptics, (E. T. Michael J. Wrenn)

Franciscan Herald Press, Chicago, 1987, pp. 6, 61. 9 Ibid., p. 99 note 29. 10 Robinson suggests that this may be the case, op. cit. p. 282 note 142. 11 R. J. Karris, in The New Jerome Biblical Commentary, p. 670. 12 Richard Dillon and Joseph A. Fitzmyer, S.J., in The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Prentice-Hall International, London, 1968, Vol. 2, p. 165. 13 J. Wenham, op. cit., pp. 225-226. 14 C. P. Thiede and M. d’Ancona, op. cit., p. 56. 15 Robinson, op. cit., pp. 272-285. 16 Ibid., p. 275. 17 Ibid., p. 278. 18 “Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism” in Christian Reflections, Geoffrey Bles, London, 1967, p. 164. 19A Lawyer Among Theologians, Hodder and Stoughton, London, 1973, p. 15.

Reverend George H. Duggan, S.M., is a New Zealander. After earning his S.T.D. at the Angelicum in Rome, he taught philosophy for fifteen years at the Marist seminary, Greenmeadows, and then was rector in turn of a university hall of residence and the Marist tertianship. He is now living in retirement at St. Patrick’s College, Silverstream. He is the author of Evolution and Philosophy (1949), Hans Kung and Reunion (1964), Teilhardism and the Faith (1968), and Beyond Reasonable Doubt (1987). His last article in HPR appeared in October 1992.

Excerpts from Pope Benedict's 'Jesus of Nazareth'

TUESDAY, MARCH 15, 2011

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(SOURCE) VATICAN CITY — Here are some highlights from Pope Benedict XVI’s new book, “Jesus of Nazareth: Holy Week — From the Entrance Into Jerusalem to the Resurrection."

In his foreword, the pope explains the purpose of his project:

In the foreword to Part One, I stated that my concern was to present “the figure and the message of Jesus”. Perhaps it would have been good to assign these two words — figure and message — as a subtitle to the book, in order to clarify its underlying intention. Exaggerating a little, one could say that I set out to discover the real Jesus, on the basis of whom something like a “Christology from below” would then become possible. The quest for the “historical Jesus”, as conducted in mainstream critical exegesis in accordance with its hermeneutical presuppositions, lacks sufficient content to exert any significant historical impact. It is focused too much on the past for it to make possible a personal relationship with Jesus…. I have attempted to develop a way of observing and listening to the Jesus of the Gospels that can indeed lead to personal encounter and that, through collective listening with Jesus’ disciples across the ages, can indeed attain sure knowledge of the real historical figure of Jesus.

The pope looks at religiously motivated violence and says Jesus brought something new and different:

There has been a noticeable reduction in the wave of theologies of revolution that attempt to justify violence as a means of building a better world — the “kingdom” — by interpreting Jesus as a “Zealot”. The cruel consequences of religiously motivated violence are only too evident to us all. Violence does not build up the kingdom of God, the kingdom of humanity. On the contrary, it is a favorite instrument of the Antichrist, however idealistic its religious motivation may be. It serves, not humanity, but inhumanity.

But what about Jesus? Was he a Zealot? Was the cleansing of the Temple a summons to political revolution? Jesus’ whole ministry and his message — from the temptations in the desert, his baptism in the Jordan, the Sermon on the Mount, right up to the parable of the Last Judgment (Mt 25) and his response to Peter’s confession — point in a radically different direction, as we saw in Part One of this book.

No; violent revolution, killing others in God’s name, was not his way. His “zeal” for the kingdom of God took quite a different form.

He explores the idea of “eternal life” offered by Jesus:

“Eternal life” is not — as the modern reader might immediately assume — life after death, in contrast to this present life, which is transient and not eternal. “Eternal life” is life itself, real life, which can also be lived in the present age and is no longer challenged by physical death. This is the point: to seize “life” here and now, real life that can no longer be destroyed by anything or anyone.

The pope emphasizes the importance of the historical foundation of the events recounted in Scripture, but notes the limits of the historical method:

The New Testament message is not simply an idea; essential to it is the fact that these events actually occurred in the history of this world: biblical faith does not recount stories as symbols of meta-historical truths; rather, it bases itself upon history that unfolded upon this earth (cf. Part One, p. xv). If Jesus did not give his disciples bread and wine as his body and blood, then the Church’s Eucharistic celebration is empty — a pious fiction and not a reality at the foundation of communion with God and among men.

This naturally raises once more the question of possible and appropriate forms of historical verification. We must be clear about the fact that historical research can at most establish high probability but never final and absolute certainty over every detail. If the certainty of faith were dependent upon scientific-historical verification alone, it would always remain open to revision.

Jesus was not a political agitator, the pope says:

Through the message that he proclaimed, Jesus had actually achieved a separation of the religious from the political, thereby changing the world: this is what truly marks the essence of his new path….

In his teaching and in his whole ministry, Jesus had inaugurated a nonpolitical Messianic kingdom and had begun to detach these two hitherto inseparable realities from one another, as we said earlier. But this separation — essential to Jesus’ message — of politics from faith, of God’s people from politics, was ultimately possible only through the Cross. Only through the total loss of all external power, through the radical stripping away that led to the Cross, could this new world come into being. Only through faith in the Crucified One, in him who was robbed of all worldly power and thereby exalted, does the new community arise, the new manner of God’s dominion in the world

He says it is wrong to blame the Jewish people for Jesus’ death:

Now we must ask: Who exactly were Jesus’ accusers? Who insisted that he be condemned to death? We must take note of the different answers that the Gospels give to this question. According to John it was simply “the Jews”. But John’s use of this expression does not in any way indicate — as the modern reader might suppose — the people of Israel in general, even less is it “racist” in character. After all, John himself was ethnically a Jew, as were Jesus and all his followers. The entire early Christian community was made up of Jews. In John’s Gospel this word has a precise and clearly defined meaning: he is referring to the Temple aristocracy.

He says the truth of the Resurrection is crucial for the faith:

The Christian faith stands or falls with the truth of the testimony that Christ is risen from the dead.

If this were taken away, it would still be possible to piece together from the Christian tradition a series of interesting ideas about God and men, about man’s being and his obligations, a kind of religious world view: but the Christian faith itself would be dead. Jesus would be a failed religious leader, who despite his failure remains great and can cause us to reflect. But he would then remain purely human, and his authority would extend only so far as his message is of interest to us. He would no longer be a criterion; the only criterion left would be our own judgment in selecting from his heritage what strikes us as helpful. In other words, we would be alone. Our own judgment would be the highest instance.

Only if Jesus is risen has anything really new occurred that changes the world and the situation of mankind. Then he becomes the criterion on which we can rely. For then God has truly revealed himself.

The Resurrection, he says, does not contradict science but goes beyond science:

Naturally there can be no contradiction of clear scientific data. The Resurrection accounts certainly speak of something outside our world of experience. They speak of something new, something unprecedented — a new dimension of reality that is revealed. What already exists is not called into question. Rather we are told that there is a further dimension, beyond what was previously known. Does that contradict science? Can there really only ever be what there has always been? Can there not be something unexpected, something unimaginable, something new? If there really is a God, is he not able to create a new dimension of human existence, a new dimension of reality altogether? Is not creation actually waiting for this last and highest “evolutionary leap”, for the union of the finite with the infinite, for the union of man and God, for the conquest of death?

Throughout the history of the living, the origins of anything new have always been small, practically invisible, and easily overlooked. The Lord himself has told us that “heaven” in this world is like a mustard seed, the smallest of all the seeds (Mt 13:31-32), yet contained within it are the infinite potentialities of God. In terms of world history, Jesus’ Resurrection is improbable; it is the smallest mustard seed of history. … And yet it was truly the new beginning for which the world was silently waiting.

Taken from: http://christophersapologies.blogspot.com/2011/03/excerpts-from-pope-benedicts-new-book.html