The Goodness and Divinity of Jesus

A week ago I posted about a review of Benedict XVI's Jesus of Nazareth written by Geza Vermes, a Jewish scholar (and ex-Catholic priest), for The Times (London). I wasn't very impressed by Vermes's comments, nor was Father Dwight Longenecker, and some other Catholic bloggers. Some folks, including Father Joseph O'Leary (in a very long "review" of Benedict's book) and "Sarx," thought Vermes was spot on, with the latter scoffing at my criticism of the review: "Props to Ignatius 'Insight' which, having ironically pre-decided the truth, seem to close their eyes to anything with which they pre-disagree." Not the deepest or most compelling of counter-arguments, reminding me of Chesterton's famous remark, "It is generally the man who is not ready to argue, who is ready to sneer."

Anyhow, in my original post I examined Vermes's remark about Jesus and his disciples being "sent only to the 'lost sheep of Israel'" and found it wanting. There was also this criticism from Vermes, which I didn't address:

For a scholarly critic, one of the most disturbing aspects of the book is the  absence of reference to texts that in some way contradict Benedict’s  cherished beliefs. For instance, he finds in the Gospels scores of allusions  to the divinity of Christ. They are all made explicit by the Pope and  considered as proven. Yet, try as you may, nowhere will you read in this  “Gospel according to Benedict” that Jesus refused to accept the title, “Good  Master” on the grounds that it would implicitly suggest that he possessed a  divine quality. “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone”  (Mark x, 18).

Mark Brumley, fortunately, left an excellent comment, which I overlooked initially, but am now posting here for the benefit of friends and foes alike:

Set aside the question of Jesus' divinity for a moment. Do Synoptics really regard Jesus as not being truly "good"? For that is one implication of Vermes' argument, and necessary element of his argument against Jesus' divinity.

When Mk, for example, quotes the Roman Centurion looking at the crucified Jesus as saying, "Truly this man was the Son of God" (Mk 15:39), we are to understand that Mk does not regard Jesus as "good"? Or when Mk describes the Transfiguration of Jesus and Mk declares that Jesus' "garments became glistening, intensely white, as no fuller on earth could bleach them" (Mk 9:3), this should be understood as meaning that Jesus was "not good"? That Mk's graphic language about Jesus' appearance is about the quality of Jesus' clothing only and should not be taken as implying anything about Jesus' "goodness"? Likewise, when Mk depicts the voice of the Father from heaven saying of Jesus, "This is my beloved Son; listen to him", Mk means us to understand that Jesus isn't really "good", not even derivatively as Son of God?

Similarly, when Mt depicts John the Baptist saying to Jesus upon the latter's approaching the former for "baptism of repentance from sin", "I need to be baptized by you and you come to me?", we are to think that Mt does not regard Jesus as "good" (Mt 3:14)? Or when Lk depicts Gabriel saying to Mary at the Annunciation, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God" (Lk 1:35), that Lk wants us to understand that although Jesus was to be "holy" and "the Son of God", Lk does not think Jesus was "good"? Or when Mk tells of Jesus' encounter with the demon-possessed man at Capernaum (Mk 1:21) and the man is depicted as saying with diabolic supernatural knowledge of Jesus, "I know who you are, the Holy One of God", Mk recounts this story in the manner he does because he does not think Jesus is "good" and he wants his readers to know it?

And so on and so on.

"Yes, but," you might object, "Vermes' point is about the divinity of Jesus, not his goodness." But that point misses the point. For Jesus' comment to have force against any claim to divinity for him, it must be understood as a denial by Jesus that he is good. Otherwise, if God alone is good and Jesus doesn't deny that he is good, then Jesus' comments can't be taken as a denial that he is God.

Now it is theoretically possible, though highly unlikely for reasons I can't go into here, that on this point the Synoptic writers simply misunderstood Jesus. That Jesus meant to deny that he was God and that he did so by denying that he was good. I think there are plenty of historical arguments to be mustered against that conclusion, but right now that's not really my point.

Whatever you think of that scenario, you must see that the Synoptic writers themselves did not understand Jesus to be implicitly denying that he was God because the Synoptic writers did not regard it as true that Jesus wasn't good. They stated that he was good in any number of ways. And therefore since Jesus is presented to us by the Synoptic writers as good, it cannot be the case that they intend us to see him as denying being divinity because "no one is good but God".

There is insufficient space here to develop the way the various Synoptic authors deal with the question of Jesus' identity and how Jesus interacts with people who either explicitly or implicit make claims about his identity that those people themselves do not understand. However, I think readers who review the pertinent exchange between Jesus and the Rich Young Man in Mk 10:17-22--to take what many modern scholars, whether rightly or wrongly, regard as the most primitive version of the incident among the Synoptics--can see that Jesus doesn't say, "I am not good" and therefore by implication, "I am not God". He asks a question of the young man, who presumes to address Jesus as "Good Master", without seeming to be aware of the full implication of the word "good". Jesus' response, as reported by Mk, does at least two things. First, it underscores that God alone is the source of all goodness and therefore the term "good" should not be used of mere human beings as if they possessed this quality in their own right and not as derived from a relationship with God. Second, it conceals Jesus' identity without Jesus denying the truth of the attribution of goodness. This is a major theme in the Synoptics, especially in Mk. Those who should know Jesus' identity don't, and this is partly due to Jesus' keeping it a secret (the so-called Messianic secret) and thus requiring of his audience a proper disposition of heart to be open to the Holy Spirit to reveal Jesus' identity. And those whom we might expect would not know Jesus' identity--the Roman centurion looking at Jesus dying on the cross--do (Mk 15:39). (What's more some of those who do know who Jesus is are depicted in Mk as having imperfect knowledge because they have imperfect faith and they have not allowed themselves to believe that the Christ, the Son of God, must suffer and die [such as the disciples of Jesus, see Mk 8].)

I realize that Mk has selected among the sayings and deeds of Jesus and that he has told his story to make certain points about Jesus. Those points differ (though they do not for that reason contradict) certain points the other Evangelists make, sometimes using the same material. My point here is that notwithstanding that process, it remains clear that Mk regards Jesus as "good" and therefore that whatever Mk wants us to make of the Rich Young Man's comment to Jesus--patronization, naive yet genuine respect, or whatever--and whatever Mk intends us to make of Jesus' reply--a subtle rebuke to the patronization, a challenge to a naive young man to understand the implication of his words, or a subtle redirection that conceals Jesus' identity, etc--Mk does not want us to think that he regards Jesus as not "good". Since Mk does not intend for us to think Jesus is not good, he cannot, on the principle that "no one is good but God", intend for us to conclude that Jesus is not God or that Jesus denied being divine.

We could make an even stronger argument against thinking that the Evangelists understand Jesus as denying his divinity, if we looked at Mt and Lk's treatment of the incident (especially Mt, Mt 19:16-22). We don't have time for that here, but they would be worth people's perusal in light of other things Jesus says and does in those gospels.

One last point--and this is a return the theoretical possibility I mentioned. It could be claimed that Jesus himself--whatever the Synoptics and others later thought about him and what he said--denied that he was good and by implication that he was divine. Refuting that claim would require a hefty amount of historical work. Here we can only say that the burden of proof rests on those who make the claim and the case seems weighted against them.

It is clear that the earliest witnesses to Jesus' exchange with the Rich Young Man--Mt, Mk, and Lk--did not understand Jesus to have denied that he was good and therefore that they did not understand Jesus to have denied being divine. One might argue that Mt slightly revised Jesus' wording to avoid people drawing the conclusion Vermes' and others draw. (One can also argue that Mk may have played up the starkest form of the exchange for reasons of his own and that Mt didn't follow him here.) In any case, though, Mt thinks it the wrong conclusion to draw from the exchange. And Mk, regardless of his more provocative form of the exchange, clearly doesn't read it as Vermes and others do. He, too, rejects Vermes et al. on the point. Likewise, Lk.

Thus, the earliest witnesses to Jesus' exchange--the ones on whom we are wholly dependent for our knowledge of the incident at all--did not think Jesus meant to deny either his goodness or his divinity. If we are to contradict these sources, we need some rational or historical grounds for saying that their understand of Jesus is wrong. In other words, we need more than a priori assumptions or theories based on an interpretation of much later sources.

Moreover, Jesus' words can be interpreted in a way consistent with the other things these sources, and other early sources, tell us about Jesus. Meanwhile, Vermes and others' interpretation of Jesus' words and actions are inconsistent with those other sources--for example, with what we understand about Jesus' perception of his relation to the Father, his mode of acting as the Father's emissary, his evident identification of himself as the Son of Man of the Book of Daniel and of the righteous suffering Servant of Second Isaiah. (To name only a few things.)

Of course Vermes and others can dispute that the historical evidence supports the aforementioned points, but, again, the burden of proof rests upon them to prove their position. Our earliest and best sources--the NT writings considered as historical documents and not as canon--lead us to think otherwise. Why, then, should we think Vermes et al. know better? As Father Groeschel likes to ask such critics, "You were there?"

Comments

[Gibbons in SF]

Mark's great commentary made me think that Jesus'question "Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone," might be understood as an invitation to understanding, in the manner of his question "Who do you say that I am?"

[karen]

Go to www.choosejesusrightnow.com & click on BUMPER STICKERS.

[Mark Brumley]

Gibbons, you may be right. That is certainly the way some commentators have taken Jesus' comment.

A related notion: the man calling Jesus "good" seems to want to take Jesus--for all the man knows, a mere human being--as the norm for the Good, as the one who will tell him what he has to do to inherit eternal life.

Jesus challenges the idea that a mere man, as his interrogator takes Jesus to be, can determine such a thing--God alone is good in the sense of being the underived norm or standard of goodness. That is why Jesus immediately directs the man to God's commandments--to God's answer to the question, "What must I do to inherit eternal life?".

[Carl Olson]

Vermes' review and Mark's comments indicate clearly that however good of historian Vermes may be, he isn't much of a Christian theologian. Of course, he's not a Christian now, but this is a man who was once a Catholic priest. Yikes.

[Joseph O'Leary]

Vermes is quoted in some Vatican document -- his material on the Jewish Jesus is highly respected.

As to his criticisms of Benedict, they seem to be shared by Cardinal Martini, another highly respected scriptural scholar; see the discussion of Vittorio Messori and Alberto Melloni in Corriere della Sera, May 25.

Benedict's book is fine as a spiritual meditation; but as a contribution to scriptural scholarship -- insofar as it even attempts to be that -- it is old-fashioned and of little scholarly value.

[Joseph O'Leary]

See the updated version of my review, as well as a published shorter version, at josephsoleary.typepad.com, scroll down.

[martinha]

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http://www.iqons.com/Jesus+%C2%A9opyright

???

[MARY LAYNE SIIMPSON]

THE STATEMENT THAT JESUS WAS THE "GOOD MASTER" FOLLOWED BY THE SECOND STATEMENT BY CHRIST IS A FORM OF LOGIC. CHRIST EXPECTED HIS LISTENERS TO CONNECT THE DOTS. THAT IS IF CHRIST IS THE GOOD MASTER AND ONLY GOD IS GOOD THEN IT FOLLOWS THAT CHRIST IS GOD.
CHRIST WASN'T DENYING HIS DIVINITY, HE WAS MAKING A SUBTLE POINT EXPECTING REFLECTIVE LISTENERS TO MAKE THAT LEAP OF FAITH.
MARY LAYNE SIMPSON

[GEOFFREY JOHANNES]

Mary Lane Simpson's comment is spot-on; We may recall that at Pentecost Peter preached of the Jesus of Nazareth everyone knew--who had "gone about doing good"--that is that no-one doubted that Jesus's works were demonstrations of perfect loving compassion and were truly good. Jesus said to the Jews who were against him (those whose own lack of good works were obvious to all the people) "is it lawful to do good or evil on the sabbath?". Again he is emphasising that he is doing good works. It is in this context that he is challenging the hearer of his statement "no man is good save God alone" to attest his good and perfect works, and see in them the face of God. Goodness of this sort is truly divine: TO SEE JESUS IS TO SEE THE VERY IMPRINT OF THE LIVING GOD.