Avoiding Anachronism whilst Reading the Gospels

Last updated on: May 6, 2020 at 1:15 am by Ben Witherington

Avoiding Anachronism whilst Reading the Gospels 2020-04-21T13:38:38-04:00 Ben Witherington

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Valerius Maximus, an important Roman historian, whose writing career seems to have mainly transpired during the reign of Tiberius and a bit beyond (in this case A.D. 14-37) was a contemporary of Jesus, and the original eyewitnesses of Jesus’ life. Like various other Greco-Roman writers he stresses the following about evaluating the character of important historical figures: “The condition of human life is chiefly determined by its first and last days, because it is of greatest importance under what auspices it is begun and with what end it is terminated; and therefore we judge that he only has been fortunate whose lot it has been to receive the light propitiously and to yield it back quietly.”–Memorable Doings and Sayings 9.12

Valerius is quite right about this and it is a guiding principle when it came to writhing ancient biographies like those found in Mark’s or Matthew’s or John’s Gospels. Above all the origins of Jesus and his end had to be explained, especially if his end seemed to be out of the ordinary, indeed even scandalous for a great or noble or famous teacher and healer like Jesus. So it is that a third of the Gospels spend time providing and explanation for why Jesus’ death happened, and happened in the particular way it did. There was much to explain, and indeed there was much to explain about Jesus’ origins as well, not least how it could be that Jesus was a good and godly person, and yet Joseph was not really his father. Mark, first out of the blocks, decides to skip right to the adult Jesus in telling of Jesus’ story, whereas the other three Gospels back up the story and tell interesting tales about Jesus being born via a virginal conception, or even about his incarnation after pre-existing in heaven. And then too there is no apparent interest at all in examining Jesus as a youth or how his character developed over time (Lk. 2.41-52 is the only exception on both counts). Ancient biographers thought persons were born with a certain character and personality and were stuck with— so their biographical portraits are quite static or lack the sort of interest modern psychological biographies post Jung and Freud (and Citizen Kane) show. In short, the Gospels have to be evaluated on the basis of ancient conventions for biographies not modern ones, and it is precisely the problem of anachronism, of reading modern ideas and concerns back into the text, and then asking the wrong questions of the Gospels, that causes so many misinterpretations of both the Gospels and Jesus himself. What does not help is modern theories of meaning that say dumb things like ‘meaning is solely in the eye of the beholder’ or ‘meaning is constructed in the interchange between the active reader and the text he or she reads’. Both of these wrong, not because we are not active readers with our own ideas brought to our readings, but because there are meanings encoded by the ancient authors into their ancient texts, and its disrespectful and just wrong to not make a good faith effort and reading these texts in light of their original contexts, so as to figure out the meanings these author’s intended us to ponder. As I like to say, a text without a context is just a pretext for whatever you want it to mean, and certainly for a Christian who believes the Gospels are God’s Word, we should respect the inspired text to allow it to speak to us on its own terms, not try to tell it what it must mean. Anachronism in reading the Gospels is frankly not merely a lazy way to read the NT. It is a sin.

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