Continued from last week
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I remembered that the first year of my doctoral program I also waded through L.K.K. Dey's Intermediate Patterns of Perfection in Philo and Hebrews (1975). I didn't feel like I learned much of anything about Hebrews, but it was a baptism by fire into Philo.
25. I've mentioned that Cranmer Hall in the 1990s was an Anglican training school in partnership with the Wesley Study Centre. I'm having trouble ironing out all the details. John Pritchard had just come as the Warden of Cranmer Hall, and a man by the name of Philip was over the Wesley Study Centre.
On faculty was Bruce Longenecker in New Testament, Robert Fyall for Old. I attended his United Reformed Church while I lived in Durham, and he performed a ceremony for Angie and me in 1998 there. The church was evangelical in the British sense.
Michael Vasey taught liturgy. He published a book called Strangers and Friends during my time there. I believe Robert Song came during my second year as an ethics professor. In 1999 he would join the main Department of Theology. A woman named Liz taught theology. I haven't been able to pull up her last name yet.
I was privileged to be in England when the Anglican Church first ordained women (1994). I don't think Liz was in the first group, but I suspect she was ordained in York in May of that year. I seem to remember us sending her off as she got on the bus to leave. I jokingly made some stupid remark about not being sure that ordination was actually in the New Testament. She said, "Maybe, but I don't want to think about it since I've waited so long for this to happen."
I feel confident that the elements of the previous paragraph are true. I'm just not entirely sure about the combination. The first woman to be a bishop in the Church of England (Libby Lane) graduated from Cranmer the spring before I arrived. [1]
26. It seems to me that, in the fall of 1993, Cranmer was lacking someone to teach theology. So it became a team effort. I was privileged to be asked to cover Christology. There is something implicit about the thinking of the leaders to ask a Biblehead to teach the theology of Christ. It seems to assume that theology is more or less what the Bible says--or should be--which is far from how theology is often approached.
I was mindful of this distinction, although I also indulged myself. I believe there is a gap between the Bible and Chalcedon. My recent reading of Jesus Wars by Philip Jenkens has overwhelmingly confirmed that, unless one has a very strong sense of Providence, the path from the Bible to Nicaea and Chalcedon will seem little more than petty humans fighting each other--often literally.
I believe I gave three lectures. The first was on the quest for the historical Jesus. The second dealt with Pauline and early New Testament Christology. I believe the third focused more on John. Philip and Fiona Richardson were students then. We have kept in contact over the years. They have faithfully served as OMS missionaries over the years.
27. I spent a fair amount of time researching for this teaching. Apart from the New Testament Survey teaching I did for Midway College, it was really my first time teaching Bible. And I was privileged to do it on a high level. Don't get me wrong. I loved teaching Bible at IWU. But this was more like teaching for Notre Dame.
I used N. T. Wright's sense of the "third quest" for the historical Jesus to frame that lecture. The first quest ended with Albert Schweitzer. Many of the portraits of Jesus in the 1800s were some mixture of antisupernaturalist and romantic. David Strauss threw down the gauntlet of myth. Source criticism whittled Jesus down to Mark and then Wrede took that away.
Meanwhile, Schweitzer dubbed Jesus an apocalyptic stranger, a foreigner to what we want in a Jesus. Then comes Barth and Bultmann. Stop the quest! It's the Christ of faith that is important, not the Jesus of history. The quest seems to stop for a few decades.
Then comes the New Quest, launched by Ernst Kasemann. Maybe we can know a few things about the historical Jesus. Maybe he is relevant. The criteria come into play: dissimilarity, multiple attestation, coherence. Edward Schillebeeckx writes a 700 page book on Jesus with only a handful of certain sayings from Jesus. The Jesus Seminar perhaps culminates this era with its red letter Bible -- sayings of Jesus in red that came from him, pink if quite possibly, gray if probably not, and black if certainly not.
28. N. T. Wright spoke the third quest into existence. The "Jesus the Jew" quest. He pinned its beginnings to Geza Vermes' Jesus the Jew, The Aims of Jesus by Ben Meyer, Jesus and the Constraints of History by A. E. Harvey, and E. P. Sanders' Jesus and Judaism.
What Wright said distinguished it was the attempt to show the continuity between Judaism-Jesus-and Christianity rather than the dissimilarity. Going for dissimilarity gives you a small subset of what Jesus likely said and did. Wright aimed to find "double similarity."
I was quite enamored with Wright in those days. I couldn't wait for his Jesus and the Victory of God to come out. By the time it finally came out in 1996 I had moved on. But I did find the notion of the contraints of history and E. P. Sanders' approach to Jesus quite helpful. I met Wright in Durham at a conference in 1995. More on that later.
Over the years, I have given a paper for the Historical Jesus (1999) and Q Sections (2000) at SBL. Both had to do with Jewish afterlife traditions. Tom Wright came up after the historical Jesus paper and asked me for a copy. I like to think that it helped inspire some of his thoughts for the early sections of Jesus and the Resurrection of the Son of God. I never finished the work that all that afterlife research was headed toward. More on that later.
There have been some notable points over the years. John Meier's Marginal Jesus series was spectacular, I thought. Dale Allison's Constructing Jesus was a fine volume in its approach that asked more about the kinds of things Jesus certainly said and did rather than specific things. Dunn's Jesus Remembered I also found quite helpful, building off of some of the insights of Kenneth Bailey on oral tradition.
I managed to drive over to United Theological Seminary when Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne blew up the quest. The conference volume was published as Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (2012). Now there's a volume out called The Next Quest for the Historical Jesus also edited by Chris Keith with James Crossley joining in.
29. I'm sure that my next two lectures in Cranmer were thoroughly influenced by Dunn's Christology in the Making. The standard model for approaching New Testament Christology in those days focused on Christological titles. I spent a fair amount of time researching the title Son of Man. Maurice Casey's book From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God had come out in 1992.
There is currently a Waterstone's on Saddler Street that was a prize during my time in Durham. I believe it was a Dillon's back then, but it had a superb used theological section. I bought many biblical studies classics there during my time at Durham.
It's hard to remember where I took my thoughts on the Son of Man. Casey had written a book on the title in 1979. Barnabas Lindars came out with one in 1985. I have Douglas Hare's 1990 volume in my library to this day, but I don't remember being particularly impressed with it. Nor was I impressed with Casey's "I'm just a guy" conclusion.
Somewhere, I synthesized three main uses in the Gospels: 1) self-referential, 2) in relation to Jesus' sufering, and 3) in relation to a Daniel 7 apocalyptic figure. The fact that only Jesus uses the title in the Gospels seems to be strong evidence that he did in fact use the title.
So I played a little hooky from my own dissertation in order to fill in gaps in my knowledge of New Testament Christology. It probably wasn't entirely as much learning as a US doctoral seminar would have given me, but I enjoyed it very much.
[1] I should note that there is some resemblance of Bishop Libby Lane to the Liz of my memory, and Bishop Lane's first name is Elizabeth. But the only way that could have worked was if she commuted back from Blackburn to teach, which seems very unlikely.
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