Seeking the Identity of Jesus

Book

Beverly Roberts Gaventa and Richard B. Hays, eds. Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.

Reviewer

Rene Baergen, Emmanuel College, University of Toronto 

Seeking the Identity of Jesus presents the fruit of a three-year research project sponsored by Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry and conceived as a sequel to The Art of Reading Scripture (Ellen F. Davis and Richard B. Hays, eds. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). Intended to address the profusion of popular images of Jesus, the project seeks not to distinguish an “historical” Jesus from the church’s canon and creed but instead to investigate ways in which the latter might actually serve to clarify Jesus’ identity (5).

With this in mind, the analogy of choice is not the archaeological dig (where the “real” Jesus awaits unearthing) but the pilgrimage (where various “reports” anticipate a common destination), and the effect is not a recovery but an encounter via the diversity of canonical witness and church tradition.

Toward this end, editors Beverly Gaventa and Richard Hays divide the collected essays into three groups. In the first, William Placher, Robert Jenson, Markus Bockmuehl, Dale Allison, and Francis Watson endeavor to lay a methodological foundation that undoes the traditional disjunct of “Jesus of history” and “Christ of faith.” Particularly representative is Allison’s reassertion of the relevance of Jesus’ “history of influence,” canonical and otherwise, for an understanding of his identity (94).

The second and third groupings follow, which is to say they represent the working out of this proposal: Dale Allison, Joel Marcus, Beverly Gaventa, and Marianne Thompson assess the identity of Jesus in the four gospels; Richard Hays and Katherine Grieb consider the “story” of Christ in the letters of Paul and the “sermon” of Hebrews respectively, and Gary Anderson and Walter Moberly discuss the christological resonance of Moses, Jonah, and Isaiah.

Brian Daley, David Steinmetz, Katherine Sonderegger, and Sarah Coakley then shift attention to the testimony of the church, exploring in turn the identity of Jesus in patristic theology (via Irenaeus, Athanasius, Cyril of Alexandria, and Maximus the Confessor), in the early Reformation debate over the nature of the Eucharist, in the act of Christian worship, and in the practice of mercy to the poor.

Coakley’s argument that the recognition of Jesus demands the “sustaining matrix” (311) and “cumulative tangle” (316) of Christian practice -- especially vis-à-vis the poor -- represents the collection’s most adventurous moment, but the epistemic transformation she envisions embodies well the project’s creative edge.

Next to the wandering sage and/or mysterious guru of popular consumption, Seeking the Identity of Jesus gives no neat summary of the identity of Jesus: “no ‘sound-bite’ Jesus can ever be faithful to the evidence,” Gaventa and Hays conclude, “because the testimony of the variety of witnesses to Jesus -- past, present, and future -- cannot be collapsed...” (324).

The collection’s embrace of rich complexity proceeds rather under the sign of identity. Whatever else it is, Jesus’ “identity” is a social product (Allison’s words) that necessarily includes Jesus’ own (continuing) reception history among his followers, then and now. This is the crux of the project, and a timely and productive contribution.

What the individual essays contribute substantively regarding the identity of Jesus in the Gospels, for instance, or in the letters of Paul, will no doubt be found a helpful orientation to their study; but this identification of the church’s ongoing tradition as the privileged locus of encounter promises a basic reorientation of the scholarly discourse surrounding Jesus.

Tensions undoubtedly remain. The traditional quest for the historical Jesus remains methodologically relevant, whether “first half of an incomplete sentence” (95) or “antidote” (113), but it is not at all clear what substantive difference its demands make in the subsequent collation of canonical witness and church testimony.

At very least, how precisely the Jesus we know “through Scripture” relates to the Jesus we know “through the creeds” and the Jesus we know “through practice” deserves more sustained discussion. The volume concludes with a welcome affirmation of diversity and complexity (324), yet in its introduction summarily excludes everything extracanonical from the relevant history of reception, and this on historical grounds (14). Rhetorical celebration of canonical diversity seems similarly threatened by the apparent uniformity of “the church” and its singular testimony.

Still, this collection offers an important corrective to the modern critical paradigm that underlies the traditional quest, and in this it promises an opportunity for increased precision and perception in the study of Jesus.