Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Interpreting a text to make it seem orthodox Luke and its view of Jesus, written by Bart Ehrman, read by Ken Toutch in my previous post. In this thread, I tried to show how one way to show that a text that embraced a problematic view, for example, a potentially heretical understanding of Jesus as as an adopted son of God instead of, say, the eternal son of God, was by interpreting it in light of other texts that held more acceptable views. I named an example in my previous post. I end the thread here with this one.
[00:00:41] A similar emphasis might be detected behind the entertaining stories of other infancy gospels, including the one that is arguably the earliest, the infancy gospel of Thomas. It's true that later authors like Irenaeus found this set of tales distasteful and even heretical. According to Irenaeus, assuming that he was referring to our infancy Thomas, which I think he was, this was a gnostic text that inappropriately emphasized Jesus'gnosis at a young age when confronting his teachers with supernatural knowledge. But there's little in the text itself actually to suggest a gnostic origin. In fact, these stories about Jesus as a miracle working vundergent may well have been popular tales told among the proto orthodox who were interested in knowing what the miracle working Son of God was like as a child.
[00:01:33] What matters for my purposes here is that Jesus is shown in these tales to have supernatural powers simply as part of his being. He brings clay pigeons to life, he withers his playmates, he strikes dead those who offend him, he raises people from the dead, he heals snake bite. He pulls off a handy miracle now and then in the home and in the carpenter's shop. All of this is effortless and innate in his nature. Jesus is the miracle working Son of God because of who he is, not because he has been chosen as a human to fulfill God's mission on earth, and not because some other divine power has come upon him from the outside, enabling him to do miraculous deeds. I stress this point because here again, this set of tales is clearly dependent on Luke. The infancy gospel concludes with Jesus in the temple as a twelve year old and because in Luke's gospel there is in fact an alternative explanation for how and why Jesus does miracles. Recall that in Luke Jesus grows and becomes stronger chapter two, verse 40, and that he increases in strength and wisdom. 252 recall that he does no miracles until after his baptism, when the spirit comes upon him. Recall that he himself indicates at the outset of his ministry that he preaches and heals because the spirit of the Lord has come upon him in fulfillment of Isaiah 61. Recall that in the later summary of acts, chapter ten, verses 37 and 38, that God was said to have anointed with the Holy Spirit and power, allowing him to do good and to heal. Reading Luke's two volume work, one would naturally assume that Jesus was particularly endowed with the Spirit of God, which worked great deeds through him, but not that he was divine by nature. This stands in contrast with the infancy gospel of Thomas, which presumes knowledge of the account in Luke. Here Jesus isn't reliant on the spirit bestowed at his baptism to do miracles he is himself divine and innately able to work miracles already from the tender age of five.
[00:03:46] In other words, this is another alternative narrative that functions as a hermeneutical lens through which to read the account that was later deemed canonical. It is possible, of course, that those who used this hermeneutical lens would take matters too far and stress so much to their point that Jesus was divine that they compromised the equally proto orthodox idea that he was simultaneously human. This was not only possible, in fact, but it is something that we know happened and happened very early on in the christian communities. But the point to stress is that the circles in which this occurred were, by and large protoorthodox, the secessionists from the johannine community, the docetic opponents of Ignatius, the ostensible adversaries of Paul in third corinthians, and of the twelve apostles in the epistula apostulorum, even such heresiarks as marcion. All were believers who started out in protoorthodox communities, who ended up taking the emphasis on the deity of Christ to an extreme that was then at a later stage, deemed itself heretical. And how was that problem to be dealt with? The same ways the problems of adoptionism were dealt with. One, counter exegesis of key passages of sacred writings two, polemical treatises arguing that the opponents were stupid, blind, or demonic three, alteration of the texts accepted as authoritative four, formation of a canon comprising a range of theological perspectives five, popularization of alternative narratives that stressed, sometimes in subtle ways, the points of contention as a way to provide a hermeneutical lens through which to read the narratives popular in the churches. And so the arguments moved back and forth, often simultaneously, as protoorthodox. Christians early on but most pronouncedly in the second and third centuries, were embattled on different fronts simultaneously, for example, by adoptionists on one side and docitists on the other. What emerged from these conflicts, of course, was the paradoxical affirmations that became orthodox theology. The affirmation that Jesus really was divine against the adoptionists, that he really was human against the docetists, but that he was only one being, not two against the Gnostics. It is this paradoxical set of affirmations that eventually led to a doctrine of the Trinity and that created their own hermeneutical lens through which later christians would read and understand the texts that came to make up their sacred scriptures, including such originally adoptionistically open works as the gospel according to Luke.
