Baker Academic

Wednesday, January 8, 2014

Aposynagōgos and the Historical Jesus in John, Jonathan Bernier--Chris Keith

I've always found the argument that the references to expulsion from the synagogue in John's Gospel definitely refer only to the later experience of the Johannine community to be lacking.  It's not that this is impossible; quite to the contrary, it's utterly plausible that later Christians experienced friction in the synagogue.  But a later plausibility is not, in and of itself, evidence of an earlier impossibility.  To say it another way, I believe this argument, so forcefully articulated in J. Louis Martyn's History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel, gets its grounding from the fact that it makes so much sense in the later context, not from its demonstration that there's no possible way it could have happened in Jesus' context.  This second issue still needed a thorough treatment.  I was thus excited to hear from Anders Runesson about his student Jonathan Bernier, who was working on this issue for his PhD at McMaster University.  Jonathan successfully defended and now his study is available as a Brill monograph, in which he argues against the reigning view of Martyn.  I'm happy to feature it here and have asked Jonathan to provide a synopsis of his study.  (Note that this is a McMaster study from top to bottom, as he draws from Meyer and Runesson!)  If he's right, then he has just opened up this important issue in Johannine studies to further discussion.  Jonathan has indicated that he's happy to interact with any questions in the comments section.

From Jonathan:
In Aposynagōgos and the Historical Jesus in John I survey a range of issues relevant to the historical study of the Johannine expulsion passages (John 9:22, 12:42, 16:2). I evaluate the long-standing supposition that it is implausible that any of Jesus’ followers could have experienced expulsion from the synagogue during his lifetime, and that as such the passages in question should be read as a two-level drama, one level ostensibly telling the story of Jesus and the other actually telling the story of the Johannine community (which is said either to have experienced expulsion under the Birkat ha-Minim, or to have experienced no expulsion at all but rather be engaged purely in identity-building). Against both I argue that such an experience of expulsion is quite plausible during the late 20s or early 30s, when Jesus was active.

I build my argument on the basis of both hermeneutical and empirical critique and investigation. On the hermeneutical side, aided by the critical-realism developed by philosopher Bernard Lonergan and introduced into New Testament studies by Ben F. Meyer, I conclude that there is no warrant for reading the aposynagōgos passages on two distinct levels. On the empirical side, aided by recent advances in our knowledge of the synagogue through the contributions of such scholars as Donald Binder, Lee Levine, and Anders Runesson (the latter of whom supervised the dissertation of which this monograph is a revised edition), I conclude first that the Birkat ha-Minim is of no relevance to the interpretation of these passages, and second that whilst there is no evidence for formal mechanisms of expulsions in the 20s and 30s there could well have been sufficient informal pressure such that Jesus’ followers found themselves effectively prohibited from synagogue participation.

12 comments:

  1. Thank you, Jonathan. This sounds fascinating!

    Would you be willing to interact with Lee Levine's work a bit. I see you've mentioned Levine as an important conservation partner above. I'd be interested in hearing how you've utilized his work on early synagogue culture.

    -anthony

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    1. *conversation* partner.... although I'm all for conservation too.

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    2. Thanks for your comment, Anthony. Lee Levine's work is of course indispensable for our understanding of the ancient synagogue. His primary utility for my work is the emphasis that he puts upon the synagogue as a sort of civic centre, i.e. it includes a political as well as a religious dimension. This allowed me to move the discussion of the aposynagogos from one exclusively about a religious conflict to one that took into account political matters.

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  2. This coheres well with what Daniel Boyarin has argued in Border Lines about the insignificance of the Birkat ha-Minim for understanding Jewish-Christian relations in the first century of the Jesus movement(s).

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    1. Thanks for your comment, John. You're absolutely right, and indeed I engage with and essentially agree with Prof. Boyarin (any disagreements with him on the matter being in the area of quibbles).

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  3. I notice that the dissertation is available through DigitalCommons@McMaster: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/7697/

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    1. Thanks for pointing this out Ken. I would note that of course the dissertation differs somewhat from the published monograph. It definitely would give you a sense of the major arguments, though.

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  4. Thanks for calling attention to this work. I found that the dissertation is available through DigitalCommons@McMaster: http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/opendissertations/7697/

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  6. I would like to thank Chris and Anthony for providing me with this opportunity to promote my work. I would also like especially to draw attention to Chris' comment about this being a "McMaster study from top to bottom," and make specific reference to the contribution of Ben F. Meyer to my overall thinking. Although Prof. Meyer taught in McMaster's Department of Religious Studies for the better part of thirty years, sadly he passed away before I went there to study. Nonetheless, his legacy looms large in the Department (as does that of E.P. Sanders, with whom he taught alongside). I say that by way of explanation for why I gravitate towards his hermeneutical work more than, say, the excellent philosophers and theorists of history with which Jens Schröter engages with in his work. This should not be read as a judgment that Meyer's thought is superior to these other thinkers, but rather as indicative simply of my academic heritage. That said, one thing that I would love to do down the road is to bring the ideas of Lonergan and Meyer into dialogue with Droysen and others. I am firmly convinced that at this point genuine progress in historical Jesus studies will come primarily through engagement with matters of the philosophy of history, so welcome any discussions along those lines.

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  7. Well done, Jonathan! Good to see your book out there.

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  8. What according to the author is a "level" exactly when talking about the GJ? Aren't there always two levels in the Gospels, viz. one pertaining to the subject matter and one pertaining to the "world" of the author?

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