his coming to be. Freyne adds: “the gospel writers as transmitters of the kerygma include reference to the past as part of their overall intention, and so provide us with data about Jesus that needs to be critically evaluated, to be sure, by good hermeneutical practice.”4 Without imputing a conscious scheme to any specific writer, one may even “suspect that these texts may be hiding the real Jesus from us.”5 Jesus certainly does seem opaque at times, his language vague, evasive, almost intentionally obscure. A recent translator tells us: “to be honest, I have come to believe that all the standard English translations render a great many of the concepts and presuppositions upon which the books of the New Testament are built largely impenetrable, and that most them effectively hide (sometimes forcibly) things of absolutely vital significance.”6 If so, the reader has the additional task of reflecting on the relationship between the possible concealments (though the reasons extend beyond translation) and Jesus’ revelations. We have yet to consider how Jesus’ language may be so unique, so creative, in part invented to serve his incomparable meanings, that it had to be necessarily elusive ←10 | 11→to his first-time hearers and modern readers. He became intelligible over time; multiple hearings were necessary, as were innumerable discussions by all those who persevered after his death and collectively remembered, began to assemble a doctrine, and ultimately wrote about their experiences. How, and for what reasons, the gospels are composed therefore becomes an essential problem, one inseparable from the initial act of reading and understanding any writing available to them; it will not be solved by sensationalist claims and proposals about “unlocking secrets,” making world-altering “discoveries” or exposing conspiratorial “cover ups.”7
With the gospels’ obvious reliance on scripture to manage Jesus’ meanings, each of the writers necessarily becomes “a sort of creative editor,”8 an observation repeated whenever we recognize “the editorial hand of the evangelist.”9 The gospels are “heavily edited versions of Jesus’ life and thought.”10 Dibelius describes them as “principally collectors, vehicles of traditions, editors.”11 One notices “Marks’ editorial tampering,”12 especially important considering he is by virtual consensus the first to write a gospel. His account contains “editorial additions.”13 Finally, Hengel rhetorically asks if Mark is “a collector or creative ←11 | 12→theologian?”14 The modern reader (neither ideal nor implied, but real, and aware of the challenges) is met with an immediate and persistent self-demand; no wonder the scholars of the Jesus Seminar15 went to such lengths to attempt to determine the authentic sayings of Jesus – while knowing, one presumes, they were making equally baffling editorial decisions as the gospel writers themselves. Any forthcoming decisions on how to deal with if not solve the dilemma can only begin with an initial proposal. My reading of the gospels will depend on this one motivation. Everything follows from one commitment: if (as I believe – and as John metaphysically confirms) Jesus is an unprecedented human being who conceives of himself as the pre-creation logos capable of a second act of human creation and who generated himself uniquely and alone in his relationship with his conception of God and the spirit, then he must be so-defined from out of his life and his words and from a singular self-consciousness open and given, as revelations, to the reader.
A hermeneutics of the gospels begins from one premise, one attitude in relation to reading: “to proclaim the Spirit of scripture anew,” as Oeming writes, and “something that transcends any method.”16 Instead of being relational, the narrative accounts will be read so as to first of all make Jesus independent of any prophetic announcements and to interpret his life, words, and his self-consciousness, from out of himself alone and as a revelation who will unveil and disclose what has remained, until him, imperceptible and un-thought. The dynamic of the gospel narratives regenerate themselves in the relationship (direct, without mediation) with a reader who assumes, at the same time, the responsibility of interpretation and the effort to recognize a disjunction between the spirited words of Jesus and the narrative of events. Jesus embodies the apokalypsis – not to precipitate eschatological events and any “last things” or an end, but rather to reveal what has been recognized by many and often repeated as a “new creation.” To anticipate the future from out of the past resulted in once again establishing, without knowing it, a limit to being. Jesus could not be anticipated; he was inconceivable prior to his coming into the world. In self-conception, Jesus preceded creation and gives himself over to another genesis, a moment understood from the ←12 | 13→stunning proclamation “Before Abraham was, I am,” (John 8:58) one of the rare sayings reflecting his unparalleled language and consciousness.
As Paul was the first to understand and commit to writing, Jesus is, then and now, “the revelation of the mystery, which was kept secret since the world began” (Rom. 16:25). The Pauline community will remain most faithful to this one remarkable insight by the apostle and continue to regard Jesus as “the mystery that has been hidden throughout the ages and generations but has now been revealed” (Col. 1:26). All prior generations could not perceive the mystery, had no access to witness the concealments of the social world; to then relate Jesus to a carefully constructed genealogy, whether in Matthew or Luke, gives him a descent entirely inappropriate to him, with historical individuals who could not precede him as his progenitors. Jesus cannot be an heir; he inherits nothing from the past (surely not any monarchical pretensions) except a limit soon to be definitively breached. Jesus nullifies all apocalyptic expectations, any last things or end, since he is the revelation of what has remained concealed from prior to the beginning of being and now makes it possible for humanity to recollect it from his words. Achtemeier writes: “Jesus, through his language, gives us a new being.”17 The challenge of a hermeneutics depends on making the revelations of Jesus’ words effectual, capable of disclosing precisely how this “new being” will come about both in an individual and, equally important, in a world in time to come, with the demands of the here and now never more crucial and consequential. Hermeneutics will require the inter-related attitude of suspicion, reflection, and recollection, a three-part reading leading to the meaning of Jesus’ words and the events of his life between history and faith, in relation to both, but determined by neither.
The gospels have been defined by Bultmann as “an original creation of Christianity.”18 Ellis believes “the gospels constitute their own literary genre,”19 as does Collins who calls them “a unique Christian 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