Michaelmas in England 2

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34. St. John's was laid out in the most interesting of ways. These were Georgian townhouses retrofitted to become a college. The summer before I came they had done some renovation, so returning students found the corridors somewhat altered. My favorite feature of all was the stairway that ended in a wall.

I think it was sometime in my first year that Principal David Day decided to restore the original Baroque colors of the entrance way, which included a long stairway to the first floor (remembering that the ground floor was not the first floor). Let's just say that puke green did not have the desired effect. It was immediately repainted in a more tolerable although less accurate green.

I remember hearing Day comment on a visit he made to Independence Hall in Philadelphia. The tour guide apparently commented on how old some stairway was, dating to the mid- to late 1700s. Day commented that the stairway outside his office was older.

The timescale of Europe was something to get used to. I grew up in Florida and was born in Indiana. Although Florida was settled early by the Spanish, Fort Lauderdale was largely developed in the mid-twentieth century. Indiana went back to the early 1800s.

Now I was an hour drive away from Hadrian's Wall, built in AD122. It was hard to fathom. The cathedral was started at the end of the 1000s. Begun in the Norman style, its west end ended in the Gothic period. Suddenly I found Mr. Stock's senior humanities class coming alive, flying buttresses and all. It was just as he had said, that his class made Europe come alive, something I never dreamed might happen at the time.

If you followed the Bailey down past St. Cuthbert's, you came to Prebends Bridge. Here was once a lamppost that allegedly inspired C.S. Lewis. Inscribed there was also a poem by Sir. Walter Scott of Scottish fame: "Grey towers of Durham, yet well I love thy mixed and massive piles. Half church of God, half castle 'gainst the Scots, and long to roam these venerable isles with tales long since forgot."

I guess some Scots were imprisoned in the cathedral at some point. I was told they defaced much inside. Unlike Westminster, the inside was plain, the gold removed during the Protestant Reformation. It fit my sensibilities. I liked it much better than the showy cathedrals of London.

35. My typical day was quite leisurely. My sense was that the British day didn't start as early as the American one. At 8am, things still didn't seem to be moving much. There was prayer in St. Mary the Less every morning. I wish I could say I was a regular attender but I slept in most mornings. I didn't have much in the way of video games, but Tetris did sometimes take some of my time.

I had a bathtub with no shower. That was a change. I would usually stroll out in time for the 10am tea that the staff of the college had every weekday morning.

Sundays there was high table, like the table in front in the banquet hall in Harry Potter. Everyone wore their black academic robe, as in Harry Potter. I got a used one from somewhere. One of the new dietary elements was lamb, with the possibility of mint sauce. I never got the hang of it. There were of course plenty of sheep in the surrounding countryside, but lamb was never my preferred cup of tea.

I met with Dunn privately perhaps once a month. I'm sure I was quite boring. At times in fact he looked to be falling asleep while I was talking, but he would have exactly the right thing to say whenever I might pause. His office was a library in itself, with row after row of bookshelves.

A highlight was the Monday graduate research seminar. It was a time to be with other professors and doctoral students. Occasionally there would be visiting professors wandering through. That year, the other two New Testament professors were Sandy Wedderburn and Stephen Barton. Bruce Longenecker was teaching for Cranmer that year and also attended.

Occasionally some Hebrew Bible professors might attend. Walter Moberly was a regular. I don't remember Robert Hayward ever coming. His office was right above the entrance way. I remember seeing him one day from the Palace Green below standing in his large window. He gave a slight wave with his head slightly tilted to one side.

36. The school year was divided into three terms--Michaelmas, Epiphany, and Easter. The student exams were in the third term. It was an interesting setup because they only had classes in the first two terms. The third term was high stakes with only study preparation and exams. Instead of letter grades, the grades were numbers (e.g., "a first").

In the third term, we graduate students gave papers in the research seminar. That was always the least interesting of the year, I hate to say. During the other two terms, we might work through a recent book that had been published or, if Dunn was writing something, we might go through a book of the New Testament. It was conventional for professors, if they were writing a book, to offer a course on that subject. Their lectures might then be chapters from the book they were writing.

My first term, I believe we read through Geza Vermes' The Religion of Jesus the Jew. I believe the semester in fact culminated with him visiting the seminar. In the end I was not particularly impressed.

It was an interesting point in time to be doing doctoral work. The so-called "third quest for the historical Jesus" was in full bloom, and Dunn was in the thick of it. I've already mentioned that the third quest was an abandonment of the overly restrictive criteria of the "new quest" of the sixties. I've also mentioned that Wright's chapter at the end of Stephen Neill's The Interpretation had been my entry into this third quest.

Wright singled out four books as indicative of the beginning of this new phase in historical Jesus study: A. E. Harvey's Jesus and the Constraints of History, E. P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism, Ben Myers' The Aims of Jesus, and Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew. I would say that two things in particular distinguished this new phase. One is a move beyond looking at just the sayings of Jesus to the events of Jesus' ministry. The second was a fuller appreciation of the Jewishness of Jesus.

37. In those days, I was thirsty for a sure footing. So many arguments I had heard seemed to blow away with a puff of wind. A little like Descartes, I wanted to know what could not reasonably be doubted. I was no longer in an echo chamber. I was in England. There was no Wesleyan Church around the corner. I now had to defend my positions with real arguments.

The resurrection seemed fairly easy to defend historically if one allowed for miracles philosophically. Let me point here to one of Dunn's books, The Evidence for Jesus. It is entirely plausible from the evidence that many people claimed to see Jesus alive after his death. It is entirely plausible that there was no body in the place where they had laid him. Sprinkle the possibility of miracles on top and you have a plausible resurrection.

It seems to me that the incarnation is neither disprovable nor provable on the basis of history. It is purely a matter of faith. It does not stand or fall on the virgin birth for reasons I have already mentioned. I believe it is a coherent concept. I do not believe that Jesus' self-limitation is problematic for it. In short, it is almost entirely a matter of faith, not reason.

Nevertheless, I was thirsty for historical evidence that supported the general contours of Jesus' ministry as it is presented in the Gospels. Sanders provided some of this for me, particularly in his shorter version, The Historical Figure of Jesus. He argues for the historical plausibility of twelve disciples, for example. Later work by John Meier, Dale Allison, Wright, and Dunn has also been helpful to me.

In my mind, even if we were to bracket faith and think purely historically, we would conclude that the Gospels give us the basic, historical story of Jesus. [1] It is not essential to prove all the details are historical. Nevertheless, we would conclude that Jesus followed in the train of John the Baptist and that he called twelve disciples to symbolize the reconstitution of Israel. We would conclude that he was known for casting out demons and healing people. We would conclude that he taught non-violence in the face of the Romans and that religious leaders found him problematic because he didn't follow their rules. We could conclude that he taught God was going to save his people and that he was going to die as part of redemption. We would conclude that he created a disturbance in the temple, that he was crucified as a messianic pretender, and that his followers believed he appeared to them after his death.

I was delighted in the spring of 94 to teach three sessions on Christology in Cranmer. I recently ran into Fiona Richardson at Houghton, who now works with her husband Philip for OMS. She was one of the Cranmerites in those sessions. I did a lecture on the historical Jesus as one session. Another one was on early Christology in Paul and Acts. I believe a final one was on John.

[1] That is to say, the "Jesus of history" coheres with the "Christ of faith."