A.N. Wilson’s Life of Jesus Revisited
Like many of his students, I could not begin to calculate my indebtedness to Paul Holmer or to measure my regard for him. I, therefore, was especially attracted to the Holmer interview on A. N. Wilson’s book, Jesus: A Life (New York, Fawcett Columbine, 1992), published in the Spring, 1995 issue of Pietisten. As has so often happened to me in the past, Holmer’s comments sent me to a book I probably would otherwise never have read, and once again I found his analysis a good deal more illuminating than the book.
The Holmer interview emphasizes that any “search for the historical reality in the life of Jesus of Nazareth,” as the publisher proclaims Wilson’s book to be, must recognize the limited relevance of historical information for theological understanding. I am reminded of many hours of clarifying examination of this and related issues under Holmer’s tutelage, against the backdrop of Kierkegaard’s examination of Lessing’s thesis that “the transition by which it is proposed to base an eternal truth upon historical testimony is a leap.”
Wilson has not fully assimilated this thesis or its implications, but, with perfect alacrity, he announces “going in” that his study accepts all the caveats about the limited logical relevance of historical knowledge for theological understanding. He does not intend his book about Jesus to be a historian’s rebuttal to orthodox Christology—although his “Life” contains a good deal of debunking of the more simplistic of dogmatic formulations. Rather, he advances a chastened account of the historical reality he has uncovered behind the Jesus of Christian faith, replete with repetitious “perhapses,” “possiblys,” “conceivablys” and other qualifiers when it comes to the historical details, all to reassure the reader that these are only one person’s suppositions. They are offered in the hope that some readers, at least, will find the Jesus presented in Wilson’s surmises and constructions as interesting and inspiring as He has become to the author.
The basic difficulty with Wilson’s book is not the one on which Pietisten’s interview with Holmer focused. The basic problem is the problem of Wilson’s “historical” methodology. He offers his book as a historian’s portrait of Jesus, but he starts with the admission that discovering the Jesus of history is strictly speaking impossible. The trouble is that he cannot leave it at that. He acknowledges the obvious fact that there are scarcely any sources of historical information about Jesus outside of the gospels. Yet the gospels, he continually emphasizes, may not be read as if they are history or even imperfect history. They are, in his view, “narratives framed by communities of believers who entertained certain beliefs about Jesus which they took for granted” (p. xiv).
It is a point much belabored in a century and a half of New Testament scholarship since the years of Schleiermacher’s ground-breaking lectures on the life of Jesus. So what shall a historian do? Admit that the Jesus of history is the unknown? Not at all, says Wilson. The historian’s task, as he sees it, is to sift through all these Biblical materials, recognizing that they are laden with interpretations which make them unreliable as history, in hopes that he can uncover some historical reality behind these narratives.
Like a growing number of religious writers, Wilson thinks of these narratives as “stories.” His method of handling them, however, is more that of a teacher of language and literature (which was his occupation for some years) than that of a historian or a theologian. The result is that he has produced a book which, he cheerfully volunteers, might seem pointless not only to many New Testament scholars, but also to many historians.
The scholarship which Wilson brings to his writing is substantial, occasionally excellent, though generally selective. The sections in which he summarizes the Biblical narrative are often painfully rudimentary, although every now and then an insightful exegetical paragraph appears. He follows quite stereotypic (and dubious) interpretations of the role of the Apostle Paul as the “founder” or “inventor” of Christianity, of the history of Christian anti-semitism, and of Catholic doctrine, and his preoccupation with these stereotypes appears at times to be an obsession.
The scope and rigor of scholarship required to write a coherent life of Jesus are simply beyond Wilson’s reach. But he does not mind acknowledging his limitations. Neither is he deterred by them.
When reading the stories of Jesus, for example, he does not think it important to distinguish between the canonical and the apocryphal—to select, as Schleiermacher sought to do, texts which are likely to be historically reliable, as distinguished from those which are likely to be quite fictitious. Either type of story, he seems to think, may be productive of historical knowledge when given an imaginative reading. Wilson sees his task as “historian” as that of forming an opinion as to whether the stories about Jesus portray a happening or circumstance which he as reader can find imaginable or believable.
Wilson does not hesitate to present as historical research some quite gratuitous speculations, for example, as to how the feeding of the 5,000 or the arrest and trial of Jesus might be imagined to have taken place. As long as the author remembers to label these conjectures as his own surmise of opinion, the reader, Wilson seems to think, can be trusted to form his own assessment of what they are worth as history.
It is a quite remarkable method. It is the sort of thing that has been made something of an art in biblical criticism. But Wilson’s waving of his wand of creative imagination is quite a different thing. It leads the author to explain the proverbial obsessiveness of Paul as a psychological consequence of his having been present in the Garden of Gethsemane (as the servant of the high priest whose ear Peter had cut off with his sword). It inspires a series of suppositions about Jesus’ relationship to his family and a theory about the leadership role later exercised by his brother James in the Jerusalem church. And it invites wildly imaginative speculation as to what was in Jesus’ mind during the last week of his life, what were his intentions and expectations about the imminent end of the age as he made his final trip to Jerusalem, and what were the roles played in the final days by Judas Iscariot, brother James, and other figures of mystery who come on the scene of the Passion Week.
Wilson’s reconstruction of what actually went on during these final days is interesting and imaginative. It is also believable. But it is not history. A reader who is looking for a resolution of the long-standing uncertainty about that ancient, biblical history will be disappointed by what Wilson’s methodology has brought forth.
The Jesus of Wilson’s “history,” as Pietisten’s interview of Holmer notes, is Geza Vermes’ Jesus the Jew. Vermes, however, does a much better job than Wilson in casting the light of historical information concerning the religious, cultural, and political situation of inter-testamental times on the Jesus of the Gospels. That kind of scholarship can be an extremely useful tool in Biblical interpretation. Wilson’s book, on the other hand, though tantalizing because of its imaginativeness, is irrelevant because of its methodology.