The
Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach. By Michael R. Licona. Downers Grove: IVP
Academic, 2010, 718 pp., $40.00.
Michael
R. Licona’s The Resurrection of Jesus: A
New Historiographical Approach (IVP Academic, 2011), represents a
substantive scholarly contribution to the wealth of academic literature on the
resurrection. In this series of 4 blog
essays, I am providing an in-depth interaction with Licona’s careful work. In the first three essays I summarized and
interacted with the main chapters. Now
it is time to dive into some constructive criticism.
Critique and Concluding Thoughts
Licona’s
New Historiographical Approach to the
resurrection of Jesus truly is unique and valuable. He makes a significant addition to the
conversation about a central issue in Christian doctrine and history. He provides an unparalleled discussion of
historiographical concerns, including a rational and persuasive summons to all
historical Jesus scholars to bracket their own horizons when approaching their
subject-material. Nonetheless, no
scholar is perfect, and there are a couple of critiques I would like to close
with.
One
element of Licona’s critique of Crossan seemed quite strange from my
perspective. Licona noted, quite rightly
I believe, that CsH is highly ad hoc (556-57).
The grounds on which he does so, however, are somewhat inconsistent. On the one hand, Licona notes: “Although CsH a priori excludes an interventionist
view of God, Crossan provides a defense of his worldview and thus does not fall
prey to an ad hoc component in this respect.” (556) On the other hand, Licona
identifies a highly ad hoc use of sources, particularly the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter (and Crossan’s beloved Cross Gospel identified within it), within
Crossan’s hypothesis: Licona senses a purely “arbitrary” operative methodology
(556-57). I agree with Licona’s second
argument—Crossan’s use of sources is highly arbitrary, ad hoc, and looks very
much like a “salvage operation” intended to preserve his metaphorical
resurrection hypothesis.
Ironically,
however, Crossan spills much ink to explain and defend his apparently arbitrary
use of textual sources. Crossan spends
the better part of a decade identifying and defending his use of sources, not
only in The Cross That Spoke (1988),
which Licona cites in his bibliography, but also in a number of earlier works
which Licona has not consulted—including Crossan’s significant monographs In Fragments: The Aphorisms of Jesus (1983);
Sayings Parallels: A Workbook for the
Jesus Tradition (1986); and most importantly Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon (1985), which
defends his treatment of Thomas and
introduces his Cross Gospel
hypothesis. Numerous scholarly articles
from the 70s and 80s also deal with Crossan’s source-critical conclusions—e.g.
“Redaction and Citation in Mark 11:9-10 and 11:17,” in Biblical Research 17 (1972); his crucial contribution “Empty Tomb
and Absent Lord (Mark 16:1-8),” in The
Passion of Mark (1976, ed. Werner Kelber); “A Form for Absence,” in Semeia 12 (1978); and “Materials and
Methods in Historical Jesus Research,” in Forum 4.4 (1988).
I
concur with Licona’s overall assessment—Crossan’s use of textual sources is
arbitrary, purely conjectural, highly dubious, and ultimately a foundation far
too weak to support the superstructure Crossan erects upon it. The irony, however, is that while Crossan
strives valiantly to explain and defend his textual hypotheses (which as Licona
notes are absolutely crucial to CsH), Crossan does not defend his naturalistic worldview. Licona states that “Crossan provides a
defense of his worldview” (556), but does not point us to such a defense. All Licona can do is refer, first, to Crossan’s
complaint that a literal understanding of Jesus’ resurrection “requires a
‘supernatural interventionist’ understanding of the way God relates to the
world” (519); and second, to Crossan’s insistence that “I have made certain
judgments about what I’m going to call ‘divine consistency’—how God works in
the world. . . . I don’t think it was different in the first century from the
twentieth.” (519-20) ‘Divine consistency’, however, is not an argument or
defense—it is merely an assertion, a statement of naturalistic
presupposition.
Having
completed a doctoral dissertation focusing upon Crossan’s worldview
presuppositions and their impact upon his historical Jesus research, I can say
with full confidence that nowhere in his vast corpus does Crossan provide a defense
of ‘divine consistency’—what Licona cites is the fullest defense he gives. But whereas similar assertions and stances
cause Licona to accuse Goulder, Vermes, and Lüdemann of presupposing
anti-supernaturalism in an ad hoc or a priori fashion, Licona inexplicably states
that Crossan has defended his worldview.
I thus find it ironic, and not entirely accurate, to accuse Crossan of
being ad hoc in his amply-defended textual hypotheses while giving him a pass
for his statements of divine consistency.
If anything, it ought to be the other way around.
The
above might seem like a somewhat trivial critique in a 640-page volume. After all, I concur with Licona’s overall
assessment of Crossan’s argument.
However, I believe the specific critique also points to a larger
critique which strikes closer to the heart of Licona’s enterprise. In his discussion of historiography, Licona
notes the need for the critical historian to seek to bracket his own worldview,
and proposes six helpful tools intended to approach worldview neutrality, or
objectivity, in their study. I applaud
Licona on this count—I fully agree that bracketing worldview is a necessary
component to critical history, and I believe his six-fold method to doing so is
the most helpful and comprehensive method on the market. The question I raise now is twofold: (1) has
Licona satisfactorily employed his own six tools; and if not, (2) is it even
possible to do so?
In
response to the first question, I contend that Licona has not, despite his best
efforts, been able to fully bracket his own worldview. He has made, so far as I can tell, the most
consistent and complete effort to do so amongst scholars who have studied and
written on the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
(His note that Goulder, Craffert, Vermes, and Lüdemann make no attempt
to do the same is both accurate and representative of the general state of the
literature in the field, from both friends and foes of the traditional
Resurrection Hypothesis.) Nonetheless,
he has not completely succeeded.
Licona’s sixth (and perhaps most central) tool for bracketing worldview
emphasizes “detachment from bias.” (58) It further insists that historians
“must achieve full understanding of and empathy for the opposing view.” (60-61)
There
are clues throughout that Licona has not set aside his own acknowledged bias in
favor of RH (the traditional Resurrection Hypothesis). First, there are two slight linguistic
tendencies: (a) consistently referring to the “appearances” of the risen Jesus
to the disciples (many critical scholars label them ‘apparitions’ or
‘visions’); and (b) occasionally speaking of what happened “after the
resurrection of Jesus” rather than ‘after the death of Jesus’ (e.g. 455), which
appears to prejudice the discussion before his historical method has been completed. Second, on a few occasions Licona slips into
pejorative language when describing the alternative naturalistic hypotheses—for
example, Geza Vermes is described as having “jettisoned his Christian faith in
1957,” (470) rather than simply as ‘changing his perspective,’ ‘transcending
his worldview horizons,’ or ‘converting to agnosticism.’ Third, I would argue that at least in Crossan’s
case, Licona has not achieved “full understanding and empathy for the opposing
view.” I have already noted that Licona’s
discussion of Crossan’s textual hypotheses fails to take into account a large
swath of Crossan’s earlier scholarship.
There is, in fact, a large body of Crossan’s work from the 70s and 80s
which already anticipates, explains, and defends his metaphorical
reconstruction of the resurrection. To
truly achieve “full understanding and empathy” for Crossan’s position, Licona
would have needed to gain a fuller understanding of Crossan’s earlier work. Crossan’s early literary criticism and
structuralism defined his understanding of human language and religion, and
help illuminate that puzzling exchange between Crossan and William Lane Craig
which Licona (wrongly, I think) takes as indicating that Crossan does not
believe in God (44-45).
Thus,
I have to conclude that Licona has not been able to entirely satisfy his own
desire to bracket his worldview biases, and fully understand alternative
positions. But, to answer the second
part of my earlier question, I think it may be an impossible task. In Licona’s case, this task was made even
more difficult by the massive scope of his project. After all of the intricate historiographical
and textual work in the first four chapters, Licona tackled not one, but five resurrection
hypotheses. Each hypothesis was the result
of a long period of academic study, including (in Crossan’s case, at least) a
stunning array of literary output. I
would certainly not criticize the length and depth of Licona’s bibliography
(which fills a full fifty-six pages), but I must note that he has not gotten the full depth and flavor of
Crossan’s position. Honestly, I don’t
think it would have been possible for him to have done so in the context of
this project.
Licona comes as close to worldview neutrality as
any scholar I have seen. His goal was to
advance as close as possible to bracketing his worldview during his historical
investigation—that goal was achieved.
His failure to achieve absolute objectivity does not reflect his
scholarly or personal failure; rather, it reflects the abiding and unavoidable
influence of worldview presuppositions in historical Jesus research.
