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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 June 2023
My sincere thanks to Dr. Elena Procario-Foley and the editorial staff of Horizons for the invitation to participate in the golden jubilee of this magnificent journal. Congratulations on fifty years!
75 Senior, Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal.
76 Raymond E. Brown, “Gospel Christology.” 35–50. Brown eventually revised the contents of this address and published the updated version in An Introduction to New Testament Christology (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), 6–15. [Editor's note: the Horizons article was also reprinted in the Catholic Mind 74 (June 1975): 21–33.]
77 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 36.
78 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 39.
79 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 41–42.
80 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 43–49.
81 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 46 (italics his).
82 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 47.
83 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 47 (italics his).
84 McKnight, Scot and Gupta, Nijay K., eds., The State of New Testament Studies: A Survey of Recent Research (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2019), 1–5Google Scholar.
85 Rebekah Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” The State of New Testament Studies, 139–60; David B. Capes, “New Testament Christology,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 161–81.
86 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 36. For a discussion of Brown's commitment to the historical-critical method, see Senior, Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal, 59–75, esp. 60–63.
87 For a review and analysis of these developments, see Fernando F. Segovia, Decolonizing Biblical Studies: A View from the Margins (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000), 3–52.
88 According to Senior, Brown “later in his career … would somewhat grudgingly acknowledge the value of other methods beyond the historical-critical” but “was never at home with them” (Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal, 61).
89 McKnight and Gupta, The State of New Testament Studies, 2.
90 McKnight and Gupta, The State of New Testament Studies, 2.
91 McKnight and Gupta, The State of New Testament Studies, 2.
92 McKnight and Gupta, The State of New Testament Studies, 2.
93 Doing so could inure one against the sort of criticism leveled at Gerald O'Collins's Christology: A Biblical, Historical, and Systematic Study of Jesus, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). Despite delving deeply into biblical scholarship, some scholars criticized O'Collins for adopting Richard Bauckham's views as if they represented consensus. See his discussion of the matter in Gerald O'Collins, Christology: Origins, Developments, Debates (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2015), 25–26. While Bauckham's theses on eyewitness testimony in the NT Gospels (see Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, 2nd ed. [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2017]) have influenced the discussion, they have yet to hold sway among many (Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 150).
94 Capes, “New Testament Christology,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 162.
95 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 46.
96 In Brown's own updated conclusion published in 1994, he wrote “that scholarship has come to no universally accepted positions on the relationship of Jesus’ Christology to that of his followers, except that the extreme positions on either end of the spectrum … have fewer and fewer advocates” (Brown, An Introduction to New Testament Christology, 15).
97 For example, Bart D. Ehrman, How Jesus Became God: The Exaltation of a Jewish Preacher from Galilee (New York: HarperOne, 2014); Maurice Casey, From Jewish Prophet to Gentile God: The Origins and Development of New Testament Christology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 1991). Casey, in particular, ascribes Christian deification of Jesus to the later decades of the first century.
98 Capes, “New Testament Christology,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 179. See Larry W. Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2005); Larry W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2003); Larry W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998).
99 Andrew Ter Ern Loke, The Origin of Divine Christology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 5–6.
100 Capes, “New Testament Christology,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 163.
101 See the overview in John P. Meier, “The Historical Jesus,” in The Jerome Biblical Commentary for the Twenty-First Century, 3rd fully revised ed., ed. John J. Collins, Gina Hens-Piazza, Barbara Reid, and Donald Senior (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2022), 145–63, esp. 153–59. Eklund points out that Jesus's self-understanding as the Danielic Son of Man is of special interest to scholars and cites Dale C. Allison, Adela Yarbro Collins, and John J. Collins as in agreement that Jesus identified himself as such; Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 153.
102 Dale Allison Jr., Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2010), 304, quoted in Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 153.
103 Capes, “New Testament Christology,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 165–76; Brandon D. Smith, “What Christ Does, God Does: Surveying Recent Scholarship on Christological Monotheism,” Currents in Biblical Research 17, no. 2 (2018): 184–208. For example, Adela Yarbro Collins and John J. Collins, King and Messiah as Son of God: Divine, Human, and Angelic Messianic Figures in Biblical and Related Literature (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 2008).
104 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 146–49.
105 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of the Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (New York: Macmillan, 1968 [1906]).
106 Martin Kähler, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ, (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1964 [1892]).
107 Senior, Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal, 159–65, esp. 162–63. Compare Loke's response to the conundrum posed by Schweitzer, Kähler, and postmodernist thinkers who pose similar questions about the enterprise of studying Jesus (Loke, The Origin of Divine Christology, 10–11).
108 McKnight and Gupta, The State of New Testament Studies, 2.
109 McKnight and Gupta, The State of New Testament Studies, 2.
110 McKnight and Gupta, The State of New Testament Studies, 2.
111 McKnight and Gupta, The State of New Testament Studies, 2.
112 Again, the sample size is small, and my goal is not to single out Capes specifically but to highlight that this is a systemic issue that affects the discipline more broadly than the work of an individual scholar suggests. I invite the reader to consider the following status quaestionis essays and see if this trend is maintained: Sven-Olav Back, “Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of Faith: Approaches to the Question in Historical Jesus Research,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, ed. Tom Holmén and Stanley E. Porter, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 2:1021–54; Smith, “What Christ Does, God Does,” 184–208.
113 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 154–58.
114 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 154.
115 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 154.
116 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 155.
117 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 155.
118 Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen, “Christology in Africa, Asia, and Latin America,” in The Blackwell Companion to Jesus, ed. Delbert Burkett (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 378 (italics his), quoted in Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 155.
119 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 155.
120 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 156.
121 Sven-Olav Back, “Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of Faith,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 2:1021–54.
122 Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 154, quoting Teresa Okure, “Historical Jesus Research in Global Cultural Context,” in Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus, 2:953–84; quotation is from page 981.
123 R. S. Sugirtharajah, ed., Asian Faces of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), viii, quoted in Eklund, “Jesus of Nazareth,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 155.
124 Indeed, the reason Brown included non-scholarly views is because their prevalence means “we must be aware of them when we teach”; Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 36.
125 Note that, after articulating his conclusion that continuity between what Jesus thought about himself and what the early church believed about him “seems more firmly marked than was thought possible in scholarship earlier in the century,” Brown told his audience: “I would urge you who are college teachers of religion to stress this positive point to your students and, through them, to a wider lay and clerical audience in the Church”; Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 49.
126 Jean-Pierre Ruiz, Readings from the Edges: The Bible and People on the Move (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2011), 13–23.
127 For a theoretical articulation of Catholic biblical interpretation that presumes strict limits between the different roles played by different parties, see Angelo Tosato, The Catholic Statute of Biblical Interpretation (Rome: Gregorian & Biblical Press, 2021).
128 Senior, Raymond E. Brown and the Catholic Biblical Renewal, 77–107.
129 Ruiz, Readings from the Edges, 17 (italics his).
130 Ruiz, Readings from the Edges, 17.
131 Ruiz, Readings from the Edges, 17–22. Ruiz is especially concerned about anti-Jewish biases in biblical research that theologians passively assume in their own constructive tasks. For another set of reflections concerning the intersection of biblical studies, Christology, and Christian anti-Judaism, see Paula Fredriksen, “What Does Jesus Have to Do with Christ? What Does Knowledge Have to Do with Faith? What Does History Have to Do with Theology,” in Christology: Memory, Inquiry, Practice, ed. Anne M. Clifford and Anthony J. Godzieba (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2003), 3–17. Fredriksen's essay stems from a keynote address she delivered at the 2002 meeting of the College Theology Society.
132 Ruiz, Readings from the Edges, 23 (italics his).
133 Ruiz, Readings from the Edges, 23.
134 Ruiz, Readings from the Edges, 23.
135 Ruiz, Readings from the Edges, 23.
136 Here I am thinking specifically of Daniel J. Harrington and James Keenan's Jesus and Virtue Ethics: Building Bridges Between New Testament Studies and Moral Theology (Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward, 2002).
137 Rosario-Rodríguez, Rubén, “Sources and En Conjunto Methodologies of Latino/a Theologizing,” in The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Latino/a Theology, ed. Espín, Orlando O. (Chichester, England: John Wiley and Sons, 2015), 53–70CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
138 For example, Matera's, Frank narrative approach (New Testament Christology [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1999]Google Scholar) might be better suited than historical-critical approaches for certain systematic explorations into Christology. Capes raises C. Kavin Rowe and Richard Hays as examples of scholars who bring other methods (narrative criticism and figural interpretation, respectively) into the study of Christology in the Gospels (Capes, “New Testament Christology,” in The State of New Testament Studies, 176–77).
139 Brown, “Gospel Christology,” 35.