Ordo Ab Chao

Synoptic Christology So much of what you (are able to) see in a biblical (or any other) text has to do with your presuppositions about the author’s/text’s presuppositions: What does the author simply presuppose and what kinds of point might s/he actually be trying to *make*? In my view, one particularly crucial, faulty presupposition has bedeviled scholarship on the Synoptic gospels: “Oh my goodness!” gasps the modern Christologist, “I wonder how bold these texts will be; will they dare to depict Jesus as genuinely divine? How trepidatious and careful will they be about such linguistic and conceptual insinuations?!” Then, coming away from, say, Mark, the modern Christologist might say: “Well, there’s certainly a ‘high’ messianism here and there are certainly features that make one wonder just how closely the author associated Jesus with Israel’s God. But, I just don’t come away with the sense that the author or the community had yet gotten to that point, where they were bold enough simply to say: ‘This is God!’” The problem with this scenario—which characterizes virtually all modern historical-critical study of Synoptic christology—is that it *presupposes* that Matthew, Mark, and Luke were probably in a historical, theological, and ecclesial context where the divinity of Jesus was a serious and contested point that they may or may not want to make, and, should they make it, they would need to do so carefully and trepidatiously. Therefore, when we come with these presuppositions—and assume that the Synoptists shared them—we are left thinking: “Well, however high the christology, it certainly could have been stated in more overt terms.” But, again, the presupposition with which we’ve come to interpret the Synoptics in this regard is not necessarily historically appropriate—indeed, I doubt that it is. Given the evidence of Paul’s letters for the kind of divine christology that was widely uncontroversial in the period, it’s at least as likely—if not more so—that the Synoptists came to their task with exactly the opposite presupposition: “Well, of course, we and our ideal readers and auditors believe that Jesus is divine and have worshipped him for many years. But…how to depict him in this narrative with a historical realism and verisimilitude in which it is also clear that he was a genuine first-century Jewish human being? After all, most of our ideal readers/auditors have only known him as the exalted Lord.” Such a presupposition about the Synoptists’ presuppositions fundamentally changes how we approach the christologies of these texts.