A Thought on Memory and History

Dale Allison on the Temptation Narratives: Passage of the Week

A long-standing distinction in Jesus research is the ‘historical Jesus’ versus the ‘Christ of faith;’ the Jesus who can be recovered through historical criticism, versus the cultic Christ of dogma and theology.

In the last century, Jesus historians devised various criteria by which to extricate the former from the latter, and to recover a historical Jesus behind the Gospels.

This produced a pile of materials which were called ‘authentic’; materials which are attributable to the very earliest followers of Jesus; and another pile which which were ‘inauthentic’, the invention of early Christian scribes and oral tradition.

Much has been written in recent decades about the validity of the criteria, or lack thereof.¹ What I would like to focus on here is the binary between the ‘Jesus of history’ and ‘Christ of faith’. Is it legitimate to separate an ‘authentic’ Jesus from an ‘inauthentic’ Christ in the way that historians have often done?

According to the foremost Jesus scholar of our time, Dale Allison, it is not. In something of a mea culpa, Allison has explained why he has abandoned this distinction and the criteria which accompany it. So what changed his mind?

He argues that we consider the Gospel stories and sayings as memories of Jesus, the terms ‘authentic’ and ‘inauthentic’ do not map neatly onto these texts.

Take an example from a former post. There I pointed to the witticisms of Winston Churchill as an example of an (apocryphal) memory of Churchill that nonetheless points to historical truth. That is, were we only to have the witticisms, we could still garner an impression of Churchill that was not void of the historical figure himself.

So also it is with Jesus. Dale Allison provides several examples in the Gospels where an episode - or memory - of Jesus which is likely unhistorical, nonetheless contains truth about his historical person. In this way, Allison subverts the distinction between the Jesus of faith and Christ of history.

Here I quote a passage from his book, aptly titled The Theological Jesus and the Historical Christ, on an apocryphal memory which carries historical truth:

“Although I may be wrong about his, the temptation narratives in Matthew 4 and Luke 4 do not strike me as sober history. For one thing, and as Origen already observed, there is no high place from which one can see the whole world. For another, doubting the historicity of the similar dialogues between rabbis and Satan strikes me as sensible, and turnabout is fair play: Why should I evaluate the Synoptic encounter differently? In any event, I concur with many that our story is the product of a sophisticated Christian scribe who spun a delightful haggadic tale out of Deuteronomy and the Psalms. The Son of God repeats the experience of Israel in the desert, where the people were tempted by hunger and idolatry. Having passed through the waters of a new exodus at his baptism, Jesus enters the desert to suffer a time of testing, his forty days of fasting being analogous to Israel's forty years of wandering.

The Jesus Seminar colored all but a tiny portion of Matt. 4:1-11 and Luke 4:1-13 black, thereby indicating the conclusion that the paragraphs are largely or entirely fictive. I suppose I would have gone along with their vote on this one, had I accepted the invitation to join their deliberations, which I did not. But while a black vote was the end of the story for the Jesus Seminar, it is not for me. For this legend is steeped in memories of Jesus. Was Jesus not a miracle worker, as our story presupposes? Did he not refuse to give authenticating signs, just as he does here? Did he not think of himself as leading a victorious battle against the forces of darkness, for which Matthew 4 and Luke 4 stand as fitting illustration? Did he not have great faith in God, a fact that the dialogue between Jesus and the devil presupposes and expounds? The temptation narrative may not be history as it really was, yet it is full of memory. My judgment is that, taken as a whole, its artistic originator has managed to leave us with a pretty fair impression of Jesus, even if the episode does not contain one word that Jesus spoke or narrate one thing that he did. Memory and legend are not easily disentangled, so when we try to weed out the fictions, will we not be uprooting much else besides?"…”²

1. See Chris Keith, Anthony Le Donne (eds.) Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (London: T&T Clark, 2012).

2. Dale C. Allison, Jr., The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Cambridge, MA: William B. Eerdmans, 2009), 25-26