literary form.”20 Auerbach has stated that the writings of the New Testament as a whole “would not fit into ←13 | 14→any of the known genres.”21 Kümmel adds: “viewed as a literary form, the gospels are a new creation.”22 Hermeneutics is here less interested in the “form” of the gospels or, for that matter, the various disputed and uncertain sources, than what their meanings disclose and what the consequences of what an “original creation” and a “new creation” mean, today, for us. The fundamental problem remains ontological. Jesus re-animates being, gives it once more the breath of the spirit to begin to regenerate itself. But as writing, the gospels are under the considerable strain of fully, adequately representing Jesus; as interpretations, they expose their intent for the necessity of their present that, for us, can no longer be binding. A three-part hermeneutics intent on interpreting the meaning of Jesus is indifferent to the intention of the author, the work’s Sitz im Leben, or the immediate reader and listener of early Christian communities.23 Some believe “one’s first question should be about the meaning and intentions of those who recorded the words that now appear in the gospels.”24 The immediacy of the gospel writers and their situation, however urgent for them, has receded into a distant and, perhaps, no longer recoverable past. The author’s motivations, his history, or the first readers of the gospel, cannot determine our present. The one and only certainty remains the text and the reader, in a necessary relationship to see and hear the one individual who, by virtue of his self-consciousness, and with that singular and many times repeated self-designation, “the son of man,” became and continues to be a revelation. His presence, then and now, was not intended to be a merely individual accomplishment, for himself alone. Jesus shows himself to others and thereby introduces a possibility in the world of a fundamental transformation of the human, in one individual, in everyone to come in a second act of creation. Jesus inaugurates, from out of himself, and from the two extreme moments of the figures of the virgin birth and the resurrection, a new possibility of being.
Jesus’ revelation are a disclosure, for thought more than vision looking for signs and epiphanies, and for a future entrusted with making his unveiling possible, actual, and true. In one of his most remarkable sayings and first announced, ←14 | 15→as we saw earlier, at the end of Paul’s letter to the Romans, Jesus tells his listeners, “I will utter things hidden since the foundation of the world” (Matt. 13:35). What he reveals by speaking are hidden meanings that, when fully understood, will contribute to the beginning of perpetual task: to draw, into the world, what has been described – with historical language inappropriate to the future – a kingdom (Gr. basileia) a word in itself bound by history and still reflecting an imaginable alternative to our world. The human imagination has not yet been able to conceive a completely other form of being, one that cannot be reduced to what has already taken place. Kingdoms are antiquarian and irrelevant, royal individuals more so. The revelations of Jesus disclose previously concealed realities that are incomparable to all previous historical forms.
For the first time, and independent from any past or singular tradition, Jesus understood himself in a way difficult for his disciples and followers to fully share; he speaks, at times plainly, at times in parables, at times enigmatically, with meanings that are often obscure. Revelations are not simply given, and certainly not for plain sight, to simply stare at passively and in stunned wonder to any “signs.” They demand reciprocity, acuity of perception, an abiding interiority. As a teacher, he seems unwilling or unable to better explain his meanings; his words often leave his listeners bewildered, utterly at a loss, and, strangely, not infrequently in fear. Luther’s belief in claritas scripturae does not leave us any more confident; on the contrary, and in one of the many instances of a human Jesus (disappointed and frustrated) he can only ask: “why do you not understand what I say” (John 8:43)? The reader, today, also hears the question; it has been perpetually asked as a reminder of the difficulties involved, in reading, in hearing, and in making Jesus present.
Even as a twelve-year-old, people “did not understand what he said to them” (Luke 2:50). He left his listeners astonished by the newness of his ideas even as they struggled with its meanings. “The Gospels record the difficulty his disciples – those simply fishermen, innocent of hermeneutics – have as they try to decipher”25 Jesus’ message. The gospel writers, however, are much less “innocent of hermeneutics.” They are continuously making decisions of inclusion and omission; they have motivations, and if they are neither interested in argument nor persuasion, there is sufficient commentary and drama to attempt to influence the reader and listener of their time. The reader, today, experiences the difficulty of deciphering the innumerable layers – of speech and writing, Jesus’ sayings and ←15 | 16→narrative constantly inter-related and with no certainly about its origin except when attributed to the scriptural. The gospel writers are even in more of a predicament: all they have are oral testimonies and written accounts, one or perhaps more sources, requiring them to make decisions – of inclusion, of redaction, each with life situations no longer relevant for the present. Hermeneutics has another purpose: instead of accepting the gospel writers and their interpretation of the sources and how their intentions attempt to influence the reader, it is necessary above all to offer other alternatives, other meanings. If, as Kermode believes, the “hermeneutic potential” of the gospels is “inexhaustible,”26 then there continues to be a “need to rediscover the meaning of the words and figures employed in the New Testament, a task entrusted to the exegete first of all.”27 The present interpreter will bring hermeneutics to bear on the gospels so as to attempt to recollect both the collective memories of Jesus and how he necessarily exceeds them in his life and words – beginning with the profound meaning, one certainly not reducible to a biological fact, to the gynecological condition of a body, of the virgin birth.
Reading the gospels writers involves being attentive to their interpretations. With the exception of “the son of man,” his singular and repeated self-designation, all titles given to him (whether Messiah or Christ, Lord or son of God) are derived from conceptions that may fail to recognize Jesus the unprecedented human being. The gospel writers cannot understand Jesus without depending on parallels. They need support; foundations are necessary, and this is the reason they continuously relate him back to a traditional history. He is heralded, previously “spoken of by the prophet,” (Matt. 3:3) and confirmed since “it is written in the book” (Luke 3:4) and, more provocatively, “the time is fulfilled,” (Mark 1:15) and “this was to fulfill the word spoken by the prophet Isaiah,” (John 12:38) as if he was the sign of God once again, and after a significant absence, intervening in the world to alter its history once and for all. For the writers of the gospels, Jesus can only be legitimate when he becomes the fulfillment of tradition; he is authoritative not due to himself (to his individuality and what he reveals by speaking, in sayings that astonish everyone for their newness) but through an association to scripture and to the utterances of prophets. Borg and Crossan make us aware that
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it is sometimes difficult to discern whether “prophecy historicized”
is being used to comment about something that actually happened
or whether it is being used to generate a narrative or a detail within
a narrative. But such discernment is not our present concern. The point,
rather, is the use of the passages from the Jewish Bible in the telling
of the story of Jesus and what such use suggests
