Page History

...

The utter implausibility of any such reasoning, however, points up one thing about current arguments for the first option that ought to give any reasonable person pause -- namely, that they do nothing to preclude holding, on the contrary, that many, if not most, of their own theological intentions can be realized even by someone, like myself, who would argue against them for the second option for understanding normative Christianity. The first thing to be said, then, against anyone taking the first option is that arguments for it that are no more resourceful than Funk's fail to exhaust the real alternatives between which one may reasonably choose. For all such arguments show to the contrary, one may very well argue for the second option without in any way having to ignore or deny what is theologically, because existentially, significant in the position represented by those who argue for the first.

Wiki MarkupThe second thing to be said is related to the claim essential to arguments for the first option, to the effect that the Christianity expressed by the (Christ-)kerygma/creed rests on a profound misunderstanding of the Christianity of which Jesus himself is the founder. Thus Funk asserts, for example, that "\[t\]he Jesus movement very early on exchanged the vision for the visionary." Since the "first enthusiastic followers" of Jesus "were unable to hold on to the vision embodied in these verbal vehicles \ [_sc_. Jesus' parables and aphorisms\], they turned from the story to the storyteller....They turned the iconoclast into an icon" (_HJ_: 10 f.).

Wiki MarkupBut what is the evidence for this claim? It is striking, I find, that Funk nowhere provides any. He does say at one point that "\[m\]ost scholars \ [agree\] that Jesus talked about the kingdom of God, not about himself, contrary to the Fourth Gospel." "It is thus possible," he infers, "that the first followers of Jesus trusted what Jesus trusted: the rule of God" ("IC": 6). But having established at most a historical possibility, Funk proceeds to think and speak as though he has established a historical actuality, _without providing even the least evidence for doing so_. Thus he says in the very next paragraph, "Jesus pointed steadily at the kingdom of God in evidence all around him; his disciples first caught a glimpse of the kingdom but soon began to stare exclusively at the pointing finger" (7).

The deeper difficulty for those taking the first option, however, is that neither Funk nor anyone else making this claim can possibly provide the kind of evidence that is required to support it. Given the nature of our sources, there can be at most a theoretical -- and thus never an operational -- distinction between Jesus as he is represented in the earliest stratum of Christian tradition and Jesus as he was in himself. Consequently, however possible it may have been that Jesus' followers soon shifted attention from his own concern with God's domain to him himself as God's messiah, one could never establish that this was actually the case.

...