Scholars and students of the New Testament will recognize many of the views taken in The Four Witnesses; they will know, too, how many other solutions have been proposed to the questions through which we have threaded our path. For we traverse some of the most hotly disputed terrain in scholarship. Some examples of these open questions may be helpful to readers of The Four Witnesses.
It's worth emphasizing a general point: A good many of the sources quoted in the book cannot be securely placed or dated. Over and over, for instance, we refer to the Aramaic translations of the Old Order. We certainly cannot be sure that in the 1st century CE all these were circulating in the form in which they have reached us; the translation of the Song of Solomon, for instance, may have reached its present form only in the 5th century.
We place Matthew's gospel in Antioch; the second version of the Story of the Maccabees (Books 3 and 4) is likely to have been written there as well. But both suggestions can be questioned; and readers will recognize that such comparisons are working with a combination of likelihoods and possibilities not with the certainty attainable in some more recent or securely documented history.
To look more closely at the gospels:
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It's frequently held that Mark's gospel was composed in Rome. In The Four Witnesses we date its completion in the aftermath of 64 CE. And how soon after the fire? So little evidence has reached us that any suggestion must be a guess. One passage may reflect the siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, and the Roman military standards set up in the Temple's ruins. Mark's Jesus says: "When you see the 'abomination of desolation' standing where it should not let the reader understand then let those in Judaea flee to the mountains." (Mark 13.14) We do not know how long the church's persecution lasted in and after 64 CE.
The ending of Mark's gospel presents scholars with a puzzle as fascinating as any in the New Order. Did Mark write a longer and less ambiguous ending which has since been lost? Did he never manage to finish his book? (Some writers have even wondered if he was arrested before he could write of Jesus' Easter appearances. This is a poignant scenario, but with no evidence in its support.)
In The Four Witnesses we work on a distinctively "modern" solution: The young man at the tomb directs Jesus' pupils to return to Galilee: "There you will see him." The direction's for the readers too: Mark is sending his readers back to the "Galilee," where Jesus first appears. The argument has been variously advanced over the past twenty years, and without commanding general assent; it seems so clearly an interpretation that the late 20th century would discover and promote. Readers are warmly invited to discuss the proposal further.
You will see that I maintain the argument precisely by expanding it to involve the whole gospel's structure and strategy. From being an arbitrary and ad hoc explanation of the gospel's end it becomes the key to the whole text: The gospel is a giant parable. Those "outside" see only its surface meaning and remain excluded from the underlying truth. Mark's readers see ever more of this truth as they read the gospel over and over and find themselves confronted in the story of the "earthly" Jesus with the risen Jesus too.
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Robin Griffith-Jones' View of Matthew
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It's widely (not universally) believed that Matthew's gospel came to completion in Antioch after the catastrophe of 70 CE. How does Mathew's church stand to the synagogue? Many scholars hold two possible positions in view: either Matthew and those that he expected to read his gospel still attended the synagogue as acknowledged (if recalcitrant) members of its community who accepted the authority of that community's leaders, laws and way of life; or Matthew and his intended readers had left the synagogue and were recognizable as a separate community.
The reconstruction offered in The Four Witnesses is perhaps more nuanced: We know that 300 years after Matthew wrote there were those in Antioch who attended synagogue on Saturday and church on Sunday. If the borders between the two were still permeable in the circa 390 CE, we cannot assume they had been clearly defined in the circa 80 CE. The church's leaders may have declared themselves independent of the synagogues' authority; they may have set up distinctive forms of initiation and of discipline that looked only to Jesus' authority and their own. But ordinary worshippers may have been far less sure; they were hedging their bets. Matthew is working to persuade, cajole and if necessary threaten those under his influence to abandon the synagogue and to declare their allegiance to the church alone. His position is subtle. He must rebut those who (in the name of Jesus) belittle the Law to which his readers were loyal. He must refute as well the more conservative leaders of his own church who denied (again in the name of Jesus) that gentiles had a full or honorable place within it.
You will see here, perhaps more clearly than anywhere else, how we reconstruct the life addressed by the gospel from the evidence of the gospels themselves. This is clearly a circular argument: we read a situation out of the texts and then discover how closely the text matches and answers that situation. It is a standard technique in the historian's repertoire and remains a famously fragile procedure. I hope you will enjoy watching its application.
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Robin Griffith-Jones' View of Matthew and Paul
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In Chapter 5 and 6 of The Four Witnesses, we meet with the missionary Paul. Here readers will encounter some unfamiliar claims. Once our argument for Galatians 1.16 is in place, you will see its implications expand to affect our whole "reading" of Paul and his letters. Almost all translations and commentaries still render the crucial clause as follows: "When it pleased God to unveil his son to me." The most natural translation of the Greek is slightly but significantly different: "When it pleased God to unveil his son in me." Perhaps the tide of interpretation is turning. Professor Gaventa has argued the case for the translation "in me," Galatians 1 and 2: Autobiography as Paradigm, Novum Testamentum 28, 1986, 309-326, cf R.B.Hays, Christology and Ethics in Galatians: The Law of Christ, Catholic Biblical Quarterly 49, 1987, pp 268-290.
The complicated passage at 2 Corinthians 3.12-18 's frequently discussed. Most commentators adopt there the procedure that we have explored throughout The Four Witnesses: to discover what circumstances in the church and in particular what opposition to Paul's own gospel might have given rise to his particular emphases. I look rather to Paul's self-understanding as the Moses of the New Order; I am indebted here to my own first professor, the late Professor Ernst Bammel in Cambridge, who developed the theme in characteristically brisk style, Paulus: Der Moses des Neuen Bundes, Theologia 54, 1983, pp 399-408, repr E. Bammel, Judaica et Paulina Tubinger, 1997, pp 205-14. To see here, as I do, the danger of idolatry and its prevention by Paul is to go far beyond Professor Bammel's own thesis.
In Chapter 12 we encounter Paul again. This time we are concerned with the function that he intends his Letter to the Romans to fulfill, in and through the course of its reception. Modern readers expect to find in Paul the exposition of a doctrine; his aim rather was to transform the reader. There is overlap, of course: an inspiring instructor can "open the eyes" of a pupil so dramatically that the pupil might be thought of as "transformed." But Paul, like John, suspects that more is to be undergone than any merely human agent or argument can effect. Each writer is in a strange position: each must use words to do what words alone cannot achieve and the result will be one that words alone cannot describe. We need not share our writers' conviction to recognize how powerful (and how enigmatic) are such ideas and aspirations. I hope that readers will enjoy the book's introduction to this reading of Paul; and I look forward to its further discussion.
Throughout The Four Witnesses we speak of "unveiling." The Greek word is vivid. I have avoided the traditional and more distant terms "apocalypse" and "revelation"; these are derived from the Greek and the Latin words respectively for "unveiling." Modern readers tend to associate these traditional terms with the natural and political catastrophes anticipated in the Bible as the prelude to God's final and undisputed reign on earth. But the Greek word refers to "disclosure": to the unveiling of truths normally kept from human view. These truths cover a wide range of subjects. Just one among them is God's plan for Israel and her enemies. This plan is settled and subject to no reversal. The "seers" who were privileged to see its course could report to their contemporaries, in full detail, the vindication that God has in store for those who remain loyal to his Order. However fearful the present may be, the reward for God's people 's sure. Here was the reassurance that Jews needed and valued at times of persecution.
Nearly twenty years ago Oxford Professor Christopher Rowland brought to scholars' attention that disclosure is the theme that drives "apocalypse" not this cataclysmic future that such apocalypse sometimes portrays. His book The Open Heaven (Oxford 1982) set a new agenda for the subject's study. It was thanks to many conversations with Professor Rowland (my later professor) that I came to see how central is "disclosure" to the four gospels themselves, and how skilfully and effectively they show readers its importance: The heavenly insights traditionally restricted to a handful of privileged seers were now available for all the gospels' readers to see. The texts invite us not only to assess such disclosure but to undergo it; and they realize that for this we need "opening up," by every technique at their command, to the accessibility of this disclosure and its working.
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Robin Griffith-Jones' View of Luke and John
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In The Four Witnesses we emphasize Luke's "political" agenda. This is not a fashionable reading of the text. I have, unsurprisingly, brought all the evidence to bear in its favor that I can; the connection between Luke's Easter story and the Battle of Emmaus is rarely recognised.
Strategies for "disclosure" are most fully developed by John. In Chapters 9-11 we explore three important themes and explore their connections:
(i)The motif of Jesus' extended trial was brought to prominence by A.E. Harvey in Jesus on Trial (London, 1976).
(ii) John's role as his readers' "midwife" is rarely explored: John sets out to bring his readers to the new birth of which he speaks in and through the reading of his gospel.
(iii) The text, then, is the active, effective "presence" within John's reading community that Jesus' own presence was in the story itself. The parallelism between these two functions was noted (in terms rather different from our own) by W.A.Meeks in The Man from Heaven in Jewish Sectarianism, Journal of Biblical Literature 85, 1966, pp 159-69, repr J. Ashton (ed), The Interpretation of John (London 1986). In the interlude "From Matthew to Luke" and at the start of chapter we bring to view the analogous roles that Paul sees for himself and for his letters. Here is the key that unlocks for us the secrets of this most enigmatic gospel and of Mark and Matthew in their turn. John is usually thought of as the one gospel unlike the other three; but in exploring the gospels' planned effects we see Luke function far more like an "ordinary" narrative than the other three. His sequel removes the need to overlay the earthly Jesus of the gospel's narrative with the risen Jesus "present" to the community faced with the text.
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