Spiritual Quote of the Day (John Dominic Crossan, on God’s ‘Collaboration’ With Us)

“You have been waiting for God, [Jesus] said, while God has been waiting for you. No wonder nothing is happening. You want God’s intervention, he said, while God wants your collaboration. God’s kingdom is here, but only insofar as you accept it, enter it, live it, and thereby establish it.”—Irish-American theologian and scholar John Dominic Crossan, The Greatest Prayer: Rediscovering the Revolutionary Message of the Lord’s Prayer (2010)

(The accompanying photo of John Dominic Crossan was taken during a lecture at Bellarmine University on Nov. 8, 2008 by Donald Vish.)

Quote of the Day (Luke Timothy Johnson, on How Best to Learn About Jesus)

“Jesus is best learned not as a result of an individual’s scholarly quest that is published in a book, but as a continuing process of personal transformation within a community of disciples. Jesus is learned through the faithful reading of the Scriptures, true, but he is learned as well through the sacraments (above all the Eucharist), the lives of saints (dead and living) and the strangers with whom the exalted Lord especially associates himself. Next to such a difficult and complex form of learning Jesus as he truly is—the life-giving Spirit who enlivens above all the assembly called the body of Christ—the investigations of historians, even at their best, seem but a drab and impoverished distraction.”—Luke Timothy Johnson, “The Jesus Controversy: Why Historical Scholarship Cannot Find the Living Jesus,” America, August 2-9, 2010 (available only to subscribers)

This portrait by Paolo Veronese, Jesus and the Adulteress (1585), illustrates “the strangers with whom the exalted Lord especially associates himself.” The incident, one of the most indelibly powerful among all four Gospels, also demonstrates the all-too-literal and deconstructionist tendencies in historical scholarship that take its cues from the “Jesus Seminar.”

For one thing, this story comes from the Gospel of John. As Johnson notes in his genial, but carefully measured critical analysis, the scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar tend to credit most the Gospel of Luke.

In fact, the Jesus Seminar calls this a “floating” or “orphan” story, one that the group wishes was true but cannot find in the earliest manuscripts related to the Gospels. I wish Johnson could have examined in greater detail some of the problems with what the new historical scholarship credits or calls into question (e.g., in a culture before the printing press, how much even ended up getting written down?).

I write this, as longtime readers of this blog realize, as someone fascinated by history, and, like Johnson himself, enthralled by the grace and charm of one of those associated with the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan. Yet historians, like scientists, have to learn to be humble about the limits of their knowledge.

Biblical historians, in particular, can, as Johnson observes, miss the big picture: how much the four Gospel writers, all coming from different backgrounds and writing at different times, still converge in attesting to the extraordinary influence of Jesus on those he touched in his three-year ministry, and, as an ineffable presence, in all the centuries since.

Quote of the Day (Albert Schweitzer, on the Historical Jesus and the One for Today)

“He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, he came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow me!’ and sets us to the tasks that He has to fulfill for our time. He commands. And, to those who obey, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings that they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.”—Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, quoted in John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (1994)