Vorkosigan

Jesus After 2000 Years
Gerd Ludemann
Prometheus Books, 2001. 693 pp.

Gerd Ludemann's ambitious Jesus After 2000 Years represents an attempt at what Ludemann describes as a "long overdue" historical stocktaking of the writings about Jesus, including both canonical and non-canonical writings. Ludemann's expressed aim is to produce a comprehensive work that is accessible to the lay reader, not a life of Jesus, which he says is not currently possible, but an historical analysis of what people said about him later. In this aim he is admirably and thoroughly successful, producing a work of unexcelled usefulness and clarity that should become a well-thumbed entry on the bookshelf of every person interested in New Testament research and writing.

Ludemann's masterwork covers nearly 700 pages, the standard size in a field where gigantic tomes are the norm (I fully expect steroid scandals to break out in the NT academy. How else can anyone tote all these books around?). It is broken up into three major sections: a short introduction laying out his historical methodology, a weighty second section that offers a pericope-by-pericope study of the canonical gospels, and a shorter section on the non-canonical gospels. A short final chapter offers a life of Jesus in extremely tentative form. There is no review of the letters of Paul.

The key section of the book is the analysis of the Canonical gospels. Each pericope is presented in a fixed format. First the text of the gospel is presented, with redactional additions from each evangelist printed in italics. Ludemann then presents a quick verse by verse discussion of the redaction and tradition history, followed by a separate section on historicity. To save space, Ludemann simply presents his conclusion. For example, on Luke 8:1-3, he writes: "Apart from the names, the historical yield is nil." The reader is left to work out the reason from the information presented on the section in Redaction and Tradition, and in light of Ludemann's methodological criteria.

Frequently the key information for historicity is presented in the section on Redaction and Tradition. For example, in the section on Luke 8:1-3 Ludemann states about verse 3: "[3]For Joanna cf. 24:10. Only the information that she was married to Chuza, a steward of Herod, and the name Susanna reflect tradition. The note about well-to-do women in the company of Jesus derives from later times...Luke has projected them back into the time of Jesus."

The usefulness of this approach is immediately obvious. The exegete interested in a quick-and-dirty glance at any passage in the Gospels need only look it up in Ludemann. Not only will there be discussion of the redaction history and historicity, but frequently Ludemann provides other information, such as links to the OT, links to other NT writings, or explanations of the literary or theological function of the verse. A veritable information storehouse, Ludemann will probably never be read in its entirety at a single sitting, but I have found it incredibly enjoyable in small chunks.

Ludemann's prose style is also a major joy for its ruthless elimination of adornment and rhetoric. The magisterial authoritarianism of a John Meier or the Irish eloquence of a Dom Crossan are nowhere in evidence. Even when utilizing the favorite method of Historical Jesus scholarship, the Declarative Method ("It's true because I say it") Ludemann is extremely spare: "It is impossible to doubt that the two brothers were followers of Jesus and were fishermen by profession," he says of Mark 1:17. That crusty "It is impossible to doubt" is the limit of his rhetorical invention.

Ludemann offers a number of seemingly sensible methodological criteria for ferretting out what is historical in these writings. Some of the them, such as multiple attestation, are familiar and need no explication. In a major step forward, he also offers criteria of inauthenticity, making explicit the assumptions of a number of exegetes. These latter criteria include violations of the laws of nature, offerings of solutions to community problems of a later time, and several others. Ludemann rightly rejects the criteria of plausibility that some exegetes have been drawn to, criticizing it as too woolly.

Unfortunately Ludemann's own criteria are no improvement. Crossan has dealt effectively with the various criteria that have been proposed, and Ludemann apparently either missed that discussion or did not take it to heart. His authenticity criteria are vulnerable to the same criticisms that Crossan made; namely, such criteria are subjective, incoherent, and ultimately just discover their own assumptions.

For example, Ludemann offers the criterion of rarity, "which relates to those actions and sayings of Jesus that have few parallels in the Jewish sphere. Jesus absolute prohibition against judging (Matt 7.1) is a candidate for this." The critical reader will note several problems. First, how many parallels constitute "few?" Second, what is the "Jewish sphere?" Do we count only those who resided in Palestine? Do sophisticated Hellenized Jews influenced by Stoic philosophies like Philo count? How about the Herodians and their families? Ludemann gives us no clue in setting boundaries, so ultimately criteria like this lose all meaning. Additionally, the example he gives is a common ideal found in many cultures and contexts, and thus unlikely on the criterion of rarity to go back to Jesus (why limit "rarity" to only the Jewish sphere?). Finally, why should rarity itself be a criterion of historicity, and why should it cover both actions and words? Certainly "rarity" as such would be almost a requirement of fiction (why would anyone want to read about someone who was exactly the same as everyone else?). A much more rigorous and comprehensive discussion of these criteria is necessary to justify both their inclusion and the way they are constructed.

A second and even more serious problem is that where criteria clash Ludemann offers no way of resolving the problem. For example, in the famous pericope about the Syro-Phoenician women Mark 7:24-30), Jesus terms her a "dog." Ludeman reads this anecdote as deriving from debates in the early Christian community about the role of gentiles, declaring that a historical core is undetectable. Yet, one might well argue that it falls under his criterion of offensiveness (Ludemann apparently rejects this) in that Jesus behaves immorally in insulting a woman who has come to beg his help.

It goes without saying that Ludemann, as with all NT HJ scholars, offers no set of criteria to support the idea that there is historical data in the Gospels to begin with. That is simply an unexplored axiom.

There are minor issues. Ludemann never raises the issue of the Cynic parallels to the sayings of Jesus, probably because his mentor James Robinson was opposed to that idea. Though there are occasional penetrating analyses of the literary style of the Gospels (for example, he explains that the Trial before the Sanhedrin and the Trial before Pilate are parallel, and thus, the former is a fiction based on the latter), in the main the breaking up of the text into pericopes tends to obscure larger structural features that may indicate their purely literary and fictional origin. Additionally, he does not reach for creation via the Old Testament as often as this reviewer thinks he should, except in the Passion Narrative.

All in all, I highly recommend purchasing the exceptionally useful and informative book. Despite its weak points, which in any case are not so much Ludemann's as they are faults of all New Testament historical scholarship, this work should be on everyone's NT bookshelf.

Vorkosigan