Introduction

I wrote Jesus against the Scribal Elite for several reasons. One reason was my conviction that, in an earlier book, Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee, I had not said all that I had to say about the significance of literacy and social status when it came to Jesus of Nazareth. Although that book concluded with an opinion about Jesus’ scribal-literate status, namely that he was not a scribal-literate teacher but was likely often perceived as one, I wanted to pursue the fuller significance of this conclusion for our interpretation and understanding of Jesus’ conflicts with other teachers. Jesus against the Scribal Elite provided the opportunity to pursue this question.

Another reason I wrote the book was that there was strong interest (sometimes too strong) in the topic of Jesus’ literacy from a lay and student audience but significantly less interest in reading Jesus’ Literacy, which was written as a monograph for other specialists in New Testament studies and Jesus studies. Some potential readers wanted to know more directly about Jesus and the Gospels, not every single known reference to “knowing letters” in Second Temple Judaism, and I cannot blame them.

Yet another reason I wrote the book, and specifically as a textbook, was that its focus on the early period of Jesus’ career as a teacher seemed, to me, to be something distinct among textbooks in terms of chronology and topic. In terms of chronology, I was unfamiliar with any book-length study specifically focused upon the earliest days of Jesus’ ministry and how he went from being a presumable “nobody” to being a recognized teacher. In terms of topic, and to be blunt, many scholars considered (and still consider) the issue of Jesus’ literacy and education to be a joke of a topic. I was convinced otherwise, that Jesus’ literate status was directly linked to the controversy surrounding his emergence onto the authoritative pedagogical scene. Far from being a joke, I saw the topic as quite a crucial aspect of his ministry. I thus wrote Jesus against the Scribal Elite to fill these lacunae in both student and specialist discussions of Jesus.

Collectively, then, my goals were admittedly broad, insofar as I wanted to write a book that was accessible to a lay and student readership but also made a scholarly contribution. This Syndicate symposium gives me encouragement that I have accomplished the latter goal. Regardless of their assessments of Jesus against the Scribal Elite, that scholars such as Dagmar Winter, Tobias Hägerland, Christopher Skinner, and Jason Lamoreaux would take the time to read and respond to the book indicates that the topics it addresses are indeed worthy of more scholarly attention than they have previously received. I confess, however, that I am also quite pleased that their respective assessments of the book were largely complimentary. I am equally pleased that their more critical comments have helpfully spurred me on to consider ways in which I could have strengthened my arguments or at least stated them with more clarity. Each of the essays addressed methodology in some form or another, and other common topics were the connection between the beginning and end of Jesus’ career and the implications of some of my arguments for both the church and the academy. These issues are perennial topics in Jesus studies, and are so because they are important. It is a pleasure to discuss them here with the respondents.

Ancient and Modern Scribal Elites: A Response to Dagmar Winter

I am honored to have Dagmar Winter comment upon Jesus against the Scribal Elite. She is a genuine trailblazer who carved out a methodological path in Jesus studies in the late 1990s and early 2000s that was wide enough for me and many others to follow. At my very first SBL annual meeting, as a young seminarian, the sole book that I purchased was her and Gerd Theissen’s (then) newly-translated The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria. At the time, it was way over my head. But I eventually caught up to it, with my studies in sociological approaches to memory giving me a new appreciation for exactly what Winter accomplished in that book. She is correct that the methodological approach that I take in Jesus against the Scribal Elite is indebted to her criterion of plausibility since it “honours the intermediaries” of the Jesus tradition rather than “seeing them as noise and annoyance.”

Jesus, Outdoorsman

I appreciate Winter’s effort to highlight the fact that, although the topic of Jesus’ literacy can have a “novelty” ring to it, it is actually an important part of Jesus’ status as a recognized teacher in Second Temple Judaism. Along these lines, Winter wonders whether I could have made more of Jesus’ outdoor teaching and whether this pedagogical location could have marked him apart from the scribal elite “more clearly than Chris would have us believe.” Undoubtedly, I could have said more on this topic, although I did note that Jesus never steps foot in a synagogue after he is rejected in his hometown in Mark’s and Matthew’s Gospels (pp. 49, 51) and mentioned briefly some outdoor teaching locations in arguing that Jesus’ mixed audiences would have led to mixed perceptions of him as a teacher (p.104). Social construction of space is a crucial issue, as many social-scientific studies of the biblical periods are demonstrating. Winter is right that teaching outdoors could have separated Jesus from teachers who primarily taught in synagogue, just as Jesus’ positive reception in synagogue likely aligned him with such teachers. Hopefully the volume captures the likelihood of this variety of perceptions of Jesus, even if I could have emphasized the significance of Jesus’ outdoor location more.

Class-Based Interpretations

Winter also asks pointedly about the significance of my arguments in light of the “unhappy antijudaist history” of scholarship on Jesus’ conflicts with other Jewish teachers. She states, “The social context classist interpretation has the potential of quite unwittingly reviving some old chestnuts about Jewish learnedness. Where does this leave the Pharisees who seek in their own way to make religion accessible to hoi polloi with whom they live cheek by jowl?” She then asks whether “scribal-literate authorities” is really helpful since it “conjure[s] up a level of organisational structure and learning that was hardly borne out by the reality at the time in Galilee.”

Let me say, first and foremost, that Winter is correct that we must guard against class-based interpretations if they feed into problematic larger constructions of the ancient world, especially constructions of “Judaism” versus “Christianity” in the time of Jesus. I suspect that she at least has in mind the ways in which some previous interpreters have used the construction of rules-obsessed official “Jewish” teachers as a foil for a more love-driven “Christian” Jesus. In addition to other serious problems, this presentation unfairly juxtaposed Judaism and Christianity in a way that hardly reflected historical reality in the time of Jesus. I affirm, then, that we should not use the category of social class in order to foist upon the ancient world a structure that was foreign to it.

We also, however, would not want to pretend that social class and power were modern inventions and rob them of any warranted aid they can offer modern interpreters in understanding a complex ancient Judaism that was, in many ways, a world of haves and have-nots. In this vein, I obviously do think that “scribal-literate authorities” is a helpful term and one fully justified by the evidence. Palestinian Jews did not use these precise words (or any other English words, of course) to describe each other, but they did often explicitly and implicitly refer to the literate status of various individuals and the social esteem (or not) attached to that status. This reality is borne out as clearly in the literary texts of Ezra-Nehemiah, Sirach, Josephus, and Philo, as it is in the documentary papyri of the Bar Kokhba era, to speak of only a few sources within relevant ancient Jewish contexts, though the comparative evidence is no different on this matter. Furthermore, later Christianity similarly evinced this social phenomenon—the Christianities of Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and others attest the literate few among the illiterate many.

Although the “potential” of “unwittingly” making a misstep when it comes to class-based interpretations should therefore never be disregarded, that potential also should not stop us from confidently saying what we can say, so long as we do so with appropriate caution and nuance. On this basis, I must reject the notion that a term like “scribal-literate authorities” “conjures up a level of organisational structure” that was foreign to first-century Galilee, at least in the sense that I have used it. She asks about the Pharisees who lived alongside “the many,” but my argument did not depend upon where they resided physically. I defined “scribal-literate authorities” quite specifically in terms of literate abilities and with many qualifications so as not to be restrictive at the individual level or too inflexible for exceptions (p.29). The extent of social “structure” that I affirm in the book is simply that few people were literate, many people were illiterate, and that much power therefore resided with the literate few, especially when it came to sacred texts.

The Scribal-Illiterate Jesus and Modern-Day Scribal Literates

Winter’s final observation, regarding the modern significance of a scribal-illiterate Jesus, is perhaps the most fascinating of her remarks. I have thought about this issue much over the past ten years while I have been simultaneously researching ancient literacy and watching a particular anti-intellectual crisis rear its ugly head in some streams of modern (especially American) Christianity. Noting my dedication of Jesus against the Scribal Elite to Anthony Le Donne and Christopher Rollston, Winter observes that many church cultures have replaced literacy as the means of controlling authoritative interpretation with “shibboleth issues” such as creation/evolution, homosexuality/gay marriage, women’s roles in the church, or even academic pedigree. She places a challenge before me in light of the non-scribal Jesus for whom I have argued in this book:

I would be interested to know which conclusions, if any, Chris draws for today from Jesus’ teaching style which is distinctive from a scribal elitist one. It would certainly seem that the restrictions placed on some biblical scholars today in order to control particular interpretations or hermeneutical approaches, are put in perspective by an illiterate Jesus.

Indeed they are. And there is a part of me that would like to run with this stream of thought and lash out about the decisions that led Anthony, Christopher, and many others in similar positions out of their positions.

But there is another issue at play that perhaps takes us beyond the parochial waters of American Christian subcultures and into the deeper waters of multi- and non-faith biblical scholarship, wherein scholars often function as interpretive authorities in whatever communities they find themselves. To speak personally as someone who belongs to faith-based communities in addition to non-faith-based ones, the irony is not lost on me that I have taken years and years to study the biblical texts, gained proficiency in dead and modern research languages, pursued and attained multiple degrees, submitted myself to rigorous peer criticism, moved internationally multiple times, asked my family to make great sacrifices on my behalf, written books and articles, presented at learned conferences, hung out with people who wear bow ties, and essentially made myself—like all scholars do—into a modern-day scribal-literate authority . . . only to publish a book arguing that the founder of the religion I profess, a religion that calls me to be as much like that founder as is possible, not only was not a scribal-literate person like me but started his famed teaching career in dispute with such figures. Stated otherwise, some time ago it became impossible for me to read the Gospel narratives without realizing that, with all my privilege, education, knowledge, interpretive authority, and debates with other people like me, I would be cast alongside the antagonists in the story of Jesus.

At this point, I cannot do anything about that fact. I can, however, try to be conscious of that status and keep some perspective about the relative value of being a scribal-literate interpreter. At least one conclusion that I would draw for today from Jesus’ impact as a non-elite teacher is therefore simple: Without being dismissive of the seriousness of our task as interpreters, let us also not take ourselves too seriously. No matter how important education, honor, power, and “being right” are—and let us not kid ourselves, they are often very important—those who hold such things at any given time do well to remember that they do not hold them alone and they do not hold them forever. Equally important, our knowledge always pales in comparison to our ignorance. Humility is thus always in order, particularly when interpreting the Bible. I think this is something that we should affirm whether we look to Jesus as kyrios, look to Jesus as just a good ancient teacher, or do not look to Jesus at all.

Tobias Hägerland’s response to Jesus against the Scribal Elite is as clear as it is compelling. Unfortunately, at least for those who may be reading this dialogue in the hopes of seeing some fireworks, I can only note my overall agreement with him. (Such readers will be pleased to know that our disagreements are on display elsewhere, however!)

Hägerland has made his own important contributions to historical Jesus research with his Jesus and the Forgiveness of Sins. He also knows well the important social implications of education in the ancient world, as he is currently working on the significance of the apostle Paul’s educational background. I was pleased to see that, with regards to my arguments about Jesus’ education and social status, as well as the general contours of the initial conflict with the scribal elite, Hägerland finds my arguments persuasive.

Social Upheaval and a Successful Jesus

On this basis, however, Hägerland asks whether I have perhaps left out something “quite essential” from my consideration of Jesus’ conflict with authoritative teachers—“the socio-political implications of scribal-illiterate people’s engagement in scriptural interpretation, and the possibility to view the scribal elite’s ambition to prevent it as a rational measure to maintain social order and political stability.” In making these observations, Hägerland pushes further into the open air of discussion something that I mentioned only briefly in the book, which is that, at least on occasion, Jesus was regarded as successful in his debates with the scribal elite by some of his audiences (p.107–8). This success would inevitably have contributed to the rising conflict.

Hägerland also, however, asks us to think about this situation from the perspective of the scribal elite. In resisting Jesus and other scribal-illiterate teachers who attracted followings, the Jewish scribal elite were possibly “motivated by care for the greater good and by anxiety to preserve a functioning society.” To put this in the language of Lenski, the scribal elite teachers were simply trying to function well in their capacity as the retainer class. In their own ways, John’s Gospel and Mark’s Gospel portray the Jewish authorities as being conscious of the broader social implications of the unrest associated with the Jesus movement and, as Hägerland notes, there is no good reason to doubt these portrayals. Hägerland is furthermore correct that the Gospel narratives have predisposed their readers toward seeing the Jewish authorities as the historical villains rather than seeing their decisions as pragmatic. From the pragmatic perspective, the bigger problem with Jesus was less his lack of credentials and more his success: “The fanatic interpretations of scribal-illiterate people need not be a problem as such, unless those interpretations encouraged the masses to join large, potentially subversive, movements.”

In retrospect, I am surprised that I did not make this point more, and more clearly, in Jesus against the Scribal Elite. Clearly, it strengthens my argument. In defense, I did argue that Jesus’ success was a key component in the growing hostilities. I very willingly concede to Hägerland, though, that Jesus’ success played a more prominent role than I have indicated. I would offer a slight qualification, however, in answering the following rhetorical question regarding my attribution of the conflict to issues involving honor and shame: “Is it not more plausible that the establishment’s ultimate concern was to prevent the Jesus movement from growing into an uncontrollable factor that threatened the political stability of the society, including of course the elite’s place within that society?” Yes, that is highly plausible, but such factors do not operate outside of concerns for honor and shame. Happily, then, our perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Hägerland’s suggestion also has the added advantage of asking us to think about Jesus more generally in light of other scribal-illiterate teachers and messianic figures of Second Temple Judaism.

A “Common Denominator” between the Beginning and the End

More importantly, Hägerland is, I think, right to identify elite concerns about the social upheaval associated with the Jesus movement as a “common denominator” between the beginning of Jesus’ conflict with the scribal elite in Galilee and the end of that conflict in Jerusalem. He thereby reiterates a criticism of Winter, which is that I could have perhaps connected the beginning of the conflict and its end even more strongly than I did. Hägerland’s careful language here is important and good, for a “common denominator” explanation does not assume a direct cause-and-effect relationship. It was the latter type of explanation, or at least an overstated version of it, that I was attempting to avoid in my study.

I purposefully concluded Jesus against the Scribal Elite by noting the necessarily preliminary nature of its main argument (p.155). To conclude this response to Hägerland, therefore, I thank him for his careful reading of that argument and willingness to carry it further into the larger socio-political realities of Second Temple Judaism.

Christopher Skinner is one of the most insightful (and productive) Gospels scholars around, so it is a pleasure to dialogue with him about Jesus against the Scribal Elite. With the exception of a quibble over the criterion of embarrassment, Skinner is complimentary of the book and focuses more upon its reception among academic and church culture alike.

A Quibble about Embarrassment

I will first address Skinner’s quibble because he makes some important observations about the usefulness of the “idea” of embarrassment that provide me an opportunity to clarify some points where I think I have sometimes been misunderstood and misrepresented, though not by Skinner. While “largely agree[ing]” with my criticisms of the criteria of authenticity, Skinner states:

I would probably stop short of jettisoning criteria altogether and take a more nuanced stance, especially since I am not completely convinced that embarrassment—if not the criterion, certainly the idea—is completely devoid of value. On that point, I am not satisfied that Luke’s presentation of Jesus as a scribal literate teacher isn’t rooted in an embarrassment at how Jesus is presented elsewhere.

Recognizing that this is indeed a minor quibble between Skinner and me, I have three brief responses. First, I must defend myself and state that my jettisoning of the criteria of authenticity is also a nuanced stance. I raise this point because, in offering a reply to my arguments in the form of stating basically that I have gone too far, some critics (again, not Skinner) have not appreciated or represented the nuance with which I have forwarded those arguments. Second, and in basic agreement with Skinner, I have never denied the usefulness of the concept of embarrassment. In Jesus’ Literacy: Scribal Culture and the Teacher from Galilee and subsequent work, I have made it a point to defend the usefulness of embarrassment as a “category,” but not embarrassment as a “criterion of authenticity.”1 Some may think I am here splitting hairs here between a hermeneutical category and a historiographical criterion, but they are important hairs to be split. My concern is not with the notion that early Christians could have been embarrassed about things and that this embarrassment could help scholars conceptualize the historical Jesus. Of course they occasionally were embarrassed. And I think Skinner is correct that Luke could have been embarrassed about the idea that Jesus was rejected as a synagogue teacher because he was a tektōn (“carpenter,” “artisan,” “workman”). My full argument about Luke’s revision of Mark’s presentation of Jesus in the Nazareth synagogue, whereby he removes that identification of Jesus, downright requires this notion and prompted my earlier defenses of the category of embarrassment.

Third, then, and more substantially, Skinner’s quick distinction between the “idea” of embarrassment and the “criterion” of embarrassment carries substantially more significance than may first appear. The language here is important; for I have not jettisoned “criteria” in the general sense of historical methodology but specifically criteria of authenticity. Using “embarrassment” as a hermeneutical category that describes some early Christians’ position vis-à-vis the past, a position that requires a historical explanation but does not dictate the contents of that explanation, is not methodologically or epistemologically the same thing as using “embarrassment” as a criterion that substitutes for a historical argument and automatically yields the “authenticity” of an un-interpreted past reality.

To state the previous point more bluntly, just because a given early Christian (1) could have been embarrassed about something but (2) left it in his account of Jesus, does not necessarily mean that it really happened. In some cases, a given tradition can suggest this course of events and thus the criterion of embarrassment can have a veneer of helpfulness. For example, it is true that, in light of the social stigma of crucifixion, it is highly unlikely that early Christians invented Jesus’ crucifixion. It is thus likely that Jesus really was crucified and early Christians simply dealt with it as best they could. But scholars cannot afford to allow examples like this to lead us to assume that early Christians responded monolithically to a potentially embarrassing past and necessarily had their hands forced by the historicity of that past. Examples such as Luke’s removal of Jesus’ quotation of Psalm 22:1 from the cross or the aforementioned traditions where Luke has removed Mark’s identification of Jesus as a tektōn (Mark 6.3//Luke 4:20-22) and as someone who was unlike scribes (Mark 1:22//Luke 4:32), indicate that early Christians were fully capable of not having their hands forced by the inherited past—when they wanted to remove a potentially embarrassing element, they did so.

My point, simply, is that early Christian embarrassment is one, and only one, factor for which scholarly assessments for the historical Jesus must account. But it did not necessarily work the same in all instances, which means that the relationship between “what really happened” and embarrassment is never predictable, even if it is occasionally understandable. (I should add that Rafael Rodríguez has convinced me that it is less understandable than scholars often assume.) Even after noting the potential for early Christian embarrassment in a given presentation of Jesus, the scholar always has work left to do, in the form of narrating a plausible historical scenario, before connecting that presentation with the historical Jesus.

All in all, therefore, I agree with Skinner that the concept of embarrassment is not “devoid” of value and have never suggested otherwise. We should not, however, pretend that the historical task is as simple as just noticing that early Christians could have been embarrassed about something, much less that “authenticity” is even available in the first place. Skinner, I think, agrees.

Drawing the Ire of the Academy and the Church

The bulk of Skinner’s assessment of Jesus against the Scribal Elite addresses its capacity to draw the ire of both the academy and the church, or at least certain sections within each. With regard to the academy, Skinner “wonder[s] if certain objections to the social memory approach are more about attempts to preserve an academic legacy and less about a legitimate search for the most available conception of the historian’s task.” I have “wondered” similarly and am fairly well convinced that at least some responses do indeed have this protective impulse at base. Along these lines, one particular response that has intrigued me, which I mentioned already, is the charge that I have gone to an extreme by stating that the criteria of authenticity are broken beyond repair. Although perhaps I should be, I am not too concerned with this critique. Of course, in principle it is possible that I am wrong and have gone too far. I have made mistakes before; I am certain that I will make them again. At the same time, whenever one person charges another person with operating at an extreme, it is simultaneously a move to place him- or herself at the center. It is not as if I am unaware of the rhetorical nature of such language or the way in which it privileges safe conclusions that recycle received knowledge.

Aside from these observations, all I can say is that I honestly do not think that the “authenticity” that the criteria approach seeks (un-interpreted past reality, for this is indeed what those who designed the criteria sought with them)2 is available to the historian and, if this is the case, then the historian’s task must be re-thought. If others want to continue to use the criteria approach, that is their business. I am certain that the field will still learn much from such scholars. But the rest of us are not obligated to follow them methodologically solely on the basis that this is how “we” have done it for a hundred or more years.

The criticism from the church that Skinner notes has been more personal, and I wish to be careful with my language here. On the one hand, no one who writes about Jesus should be under the illusion that he or she will escape criticism, whether that criticism comes from the high-brows of the academy, the pew-sitters of the church, or the keyboard warriors of the internet. They may not like what you have to say because you are wrong. They may not like what you have to say because you are right. But rest assured—someone somewhere will not like it for some reason or another. That is the nature of the discussion.

On the other hand, Skinner is correct that there are some, particularly within the ecclesial contexts, and even more particularly ecclesial contexts of the first world, who respond viscerally and unjustifiably to the idea of an illiterate Jesus. I once watched a dinner to which my family was invited with other families devolve into Lord of the Flies when the host mentioned that I was writing a book about Jesus being illiterate. And at a previous employer, I had a senior colleague tell people in my church that I was a “heretic” simply because he had heard that I argued that Jesus was illiterate in a book that he had not read and had never discussed with me. (The book had not yet even been published.) Strangely, it seems that some Christians are perfectly fine with Jesus’ eyewitnesses having asked questions about his literacy (John 7:15), but not contemporary scholars. Regardless, I tend to think that words that carry as much weight as “heretic” should be used a bit more responsibly.

The problematizing of Chalcedon is part of it. The ethnocentrism of modern Western Christianity, wherein the vast majority of Christians are literate, is another part of it. I had to explain that I was not claiming that Jesus was stupid so many times that it became tragically comical. Anyone with any familiarity with the non-industrialized world knows that literacy and intelligence are not always tied together, but that does not stop many others from reading their socio-historical contexts onto Jesus. It seems that historical Jesus scholars are not the only ones who stare down the well of history in search of Jesus and see themselves looking back.

On account of this, Skinner wonders if “Keith’s contention that Jesus was not a scribal literate will ever truly earn a hearing among people of faith.” I suspect that Skinner has judged correctly when it comes to some people of faith and incorrectly when it comes to others. Thankfully, the anti-intellectual elements in Christianity do not have a monopoly on the church’s brain.

Jason Lamoreaux’s response to Jesus against the Scribal Elite helpfully brings the dimension of pedagogy to this symposium. I appreciate this focus because the book was, after all, written as an upper-division and graduate textbook. Lamoreaux comments especially upon the book’s usefulness for his state university students who come from an evangelical or conservative background. One should not be deceived by the simplicity of his focus on the classroom, however. For, by the end of his brief essay, he has moved swiftly from his classroom to questioning the usefulness of historical Jesus research altogether. I could not possibly address all of his penetrating and interesting questions in the limited space afforded, but I will do my best to answer three of his most important questions, all of which involve the significant issue of “perspective.”

Should all the king’s horses and all the king’s men put Humpty Dumpty back together again?

Lamoreaux states that “the center of my critique of Keith’s work as well as, paradoxically, praise” concerns the usage of social memory theory in order to highlight “perspective” when considering the Gospels and the historical Jesus. He rightly notes that this emphasis stems from, among other places, the sociological studies of Clifford Geertz, who was very influential upon Barry Schwartz, the leading scholar of social memory theory in English-speaking scholarship, who has been influential on me. Applied to the issue of Jesus’ conflict with other teachers in the Gospels, such an approach, in my study, respects the presence of different views of Jesus in the Gospel narratives and the inherent likeliness of different views of Jesus among those who were witnesses to his life and teaching. Lamoreaux also rightly notes that, in my work, such an approach is meant to stand against an “all or nothing approach of some historical Jesus scholars” who simply label traditions in the Gospels as either authentic or inauthentic.

Lamoreaux agrees in general that an all-or-nothing approach is “ripe for criticism.” Yet, and although he commendably does not attribute such a motivation to me, Lamoreaux is slightly uneasy about such an approach based on his experiences with students. He states:

My students often claim that the Gospels each represent a ‘perspective.’ What they mean by this is that . . . they can somehow reconcile between what seem to be contradictory claims in the Gospels but aren’t contradictions at all because they see them as puzzle pieces to a larger historical ‘Jesus.’

Therefore, although Lamoreaux praises my emphasis on varying perspectives about Jesus, his “concern . . . is the possibility of the analysis being viewed as another ‘Humpty Dumpty’ approach in which Jesus is stitched together from different viewpoints.”

Lamoreaux attributes these claims to his students but I have heard them also from credentialed scholars who are usually striving to maintain some view of inspiration (such as inerrancy) that precludes the idea of disagreement among biblical authors. I addressed this issue briefly in the book (p.69n.3) but it will be useful to state matters explicitly here as well. Lamoreaux’s students are correct that the Gospels each represent a “perspective.” (How could it be otherwise?) Furthermore, I would affirm that all work in historical Jesus studies is a “Humpty Dumpty approach” in the general sense that a given scholar is always trying to do the best he or she can with fragmentary evidence.

Lamoreaux is correct, however, that one cannot use this insight to fuse different perspectives together uncritically. In addition to other matters, sometimes the “perspective” of one author is deliberately designed to contradict the “perspective” of another author. As I detail in Jesus against the Scribal Elite, Luke not only offers a “different perspective” on Jesus as a synagogue teacher, he flat-out intends to communicate that Mark’s account is wrong about Jesus’ scribal-literate status. For Luke, it simply is not the case that Jesus was not like the scribes (per Mark 1:22) as a tektōn (per Mark 6:3), so he removes both indications in Luke 4:32 and 4:22 and outright attributes to Jesus the ability to read publicly in synagogue in Luke 4:16–20, claiming it was his custom in Luke 4:16 (cf. Mark 10:1). In other cases, the Gospels may offer complementary “perspectives” on Jesus, but in instances such as these, we are dealing with competing perspectives, not complementary ones.

I cannot help but wonder, however, if, in attempting to assert rightly a concern about uncritical usage of “perspective,” Lamoreaux has perhaps slightly overcompensated. He cites with some concern my claims that the Jesus traditions have origins in the life of Jesus of Nazareth and those who knew him. He fails to mention, however, that I argue that some of those perceptions were historically inaccurate. Yes, I think that the Jesus tradition begins with eyewitnesses of Jesus, their perceptions, and their retellings of the past; but those eyewitnesses must have misunderstood things sometimes and transmitted those misunderstandings.

Similarly, Lamoreaux states that “the question becomes ‘If memory is unreliable or is a matter of perspective, then how can we know which perspective even has a kernel of history in it?’” Although I think I know what Lamoreaux is ultimately getting at with this question, I have some concerns with its phrasing. My first issue is the juxtaposition of “unreliable” with “a matter of perspective,” which seems either to treat the terms as synonymous in some way (“memory is unreliable, that is, a matter of perspective”) or posit an either/or between them (“memory is either unreliable or a matter of perspective”). I am not certain of Lamoreaux’s meaning and perhaps it is neither of these two possibilities. To state matters frankly, however, memory is a matter of perspective, and that holds true regardless of whether that memory is historically reliable or historically unreliable. Stated otherwise, in observing the perspectival nature of both individual and group memory, we have not yet taken a step toward demonstrating the memory’s historical reliability one way or another.

As a minor second issue with the phrasing of Lamoreaux’s question, I would object to using the phrase “kernel of history” because, whether or not Lamoreaux was using it in this sense, it carries heavy historical-positivist connotations. The phrase was a favorite of the form critics and their heirs precisely because it conveyed the idea that there was a core of un-interpreted historical reality surrounded by “interpretation.” As I argue in the book, understanding the historical task as peeling back layers of interpretation until one gets to an “authentic” objective past is, in my opinion, misguided.

I think, however, that Lamoreaux is simply asking how we go about having the historical discussion at all if all memory is perspectival. If this is the case, the answer is simple and probably more boring than we would like: We forward arguments about what best explains the evidence that we have. I understand that some readers may think that answer is too elementary or perhaps too broad to be helpful. After all, who doubts that we must forward arguments? The point, however, is that we must get away from a one-size-fits-all mentality that prescribes how we must approach the historical Jesus. In my opinion, the criteria approach inculcates this mentality—we simply submit individual traditions to a battery of criteria and we can trust whatever survives the procedure. In addition to other matters, such an approach fails to recognize that not every issue involving the historical Jesus can be treated the same way in light of the vagaries of the evidence, the varying levels of confidence we may have in our answers to different questions, and in general our need to formulate hypotheses about what we can know in light of everything that we do not know. We therefore do not need our methodology to straitjacket our investigations.

That is not to abandon methodology, of course, for this is not a free-for-all, and I hope that my articulations about which questions I was attempting to answer and how I was methodologically attempting to answer them are sufficiently clear in Jesus against the Scribal Elite. But the nature of our sources and the nature of our questions mean that the theorist, not the theory, must be in control of our efforts to make claims about the historical Jesus. So we must forward arguments and in any given instance, the question we seek to answer and the evidence that we must explain will shape how we forward that argument. Importantly, however, explaining the evidence we have is paramount, not dismissing that evidence based on its status as a biased perspective on the past. The perspectival nature of memory is therefore not a hindrance to asking historical questions; it is a precondition.

Why do we need the ‘historical’ Jesus at all?

Based on his concerns, however, Lamoreaux goes straight to the heart of the matter with another question: “My question becomes, why do we need the ‘historical’ Jesus at all?” My first response to such a question is to ask who “we” is. Lamoreaux’s conservative students? Historical Jesus scholars? Lamoreaux? Me? I think I know why confessional Christians find value in the idea of the historical Jesus. I think I know why many scholars, regardless of religious status and needing no further justification than mere curiosity and the desire to have a career in studying ancient history, find value in the idea of the historical Jesus. In reality, however, there are many people interested in the historical Jesus for many different reasons. I thus find it difficult to respond to such a question with a single answer. I am not sure that there even is a single answer.

An easier question to answer, at least on the surface, is the following from Lamoreaux: “Who is Jesus . . . and why does it matter which questions we ask?” We could expand the question. Why study the New Testament? Why study the Jewish and Christian Scriptures? Why study religion? To a certain extent, the answer to any of those questions would apply to the others.

Lest the reader think I am being facetious, let me state clearly that I am not. In answering why our questions about Jesus or Christianity or religion in general matter, a real motivating factor can and should be the dangers of not asking questions, the dangers of asking the wrong questions, or the dangers of offering the wrong answers to the right questions. It is a well-known fact in historical Jesus scholarship that some Nazi New Testament scholars asserted that Jesus was an Aryan. They got Jesus wrong, dreadfully wrong, and it had tragic consequences since this Jesus was then co-opted into their version of Christianity, a version that legitimated one of the worst atrocities in human culture. Yes, that is an extreme example, but extreme nature of the circumstances in which this Jesus scholarship participated does not make it any less real. It simply highlights the ever-present truth that, as long as terms like “Jesus,” “Christianity,” “God,” and “Bible” have cultural power into which we can tap, there is the potential for abuse of that power. We scholars cannot pretend that we are immune to that power’s appeal, but as people who have trained to be authoritative interpreters, it is our responsibility to make sure that the questions are asked and answered in a responsible and critical way. The need for accountability for our own thoughts is why peer review and criticism, including a symposium such as this one, are intrinsic to our ability to fulfill these responsibilities.

The Sufficiency of Perspective

Finally, I would like to address some of Lamoreaux’s observations on “perspective” and the nature of historical research. After asking, “Is the object of historical inquiry simply the authors of the texts and their recipients?” Lamoreaux states, “The ‘perception’ that Keith uses in his analysis and the memory theory that he proposes points to the authors as the primary locus of historical inquiry.” He then asks, “Is this sufficient?”

Sufficient for what? I ask this counter-question because scholars sometimes ask such questions in order to shift New Testament scholarship away from its traditional center of the historical-critical method, which is not a single method but several methods that share the assumption that “what really happened” or the “author’s intended meaning” are the only true and legitimate foci of scholarly efforts. I am not sure whether this is the rhetorical point of Lamoreaux’s question, so I will not attribute to him this motive. If it is, however, I can say that I agree with him. I share the desire to see the traditional boundaries of New Testament scholarship expand beyond just asking “what it meant” or “what it means,” even if I think such questions are still legitimate ones to ask.

Perhaps, however, Lamoreaux is very politely accusing me of using a new methodological veneer for a very old procedure. If that is the case, I have to plead both guilty and not guilty. As I hope Jesus against the Scribal Elite demonstrates, I do not think that a memory-based approach is similar to older historical research when it comes to aims, methods, and, generally, its view of the proper task of the historian. At the end of the day, however, I am still interested in asking boring old historical questions about what most likely happened. Some other New Testament scholars using memory theory have criticized me on this point. They would have me wave the white flag on historical questions. But I still think, as was just stated, that asking such questions and proposing answers, however tentatively, are useful and important. In this sense, whether proceeding on the basis of perspectival memory is “sufficient” is, for me, dependent upon one’s goals. I find it sufficient for the task that I asked it to perform. Whether it is sufficient for other tasks is another matter.

Conclusion

I have spent much of the proceeding dialogue trying to defend or explain minor points of correction and disagreement between the respondents and me. It has probably unfairly given the impression that disagreements between the respondents and me were great when they actually are not. Each respondent has raised important points about the argument of Jesus against the Scribal Elite in the context of offering praise for it as well. I am grateful for both the corrections and the commendations and thank Dagmar Winter, Tobias Hägerland, Christopher Skinner, and Jason Lamoreaux for helping me to consider more thoroughly the origins of Jesus’ conflict with authoritative teachers. It has been a privilege to learn from them. They have, thankfully, proven correct my claim that the early stage of Jesus’ teaching career is worth scholarly attention in its own right (p.155).

In addition to the respondents, I thank Chris Tilling as editor of this volume of Syndicate and Christian Amondson, editor at Cascade.