Knowing Jesus: His Glory in His Disciples

What Have They Done With Jesus: Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History - Why We Can Trust the Bible
By Ben Witherington III
HarperSanFrancisco, 2006
(352 pages, $24.95, hardcover)

reviewed by S.N.D.

I find the title and long subtitle of this book a bit misleading, for two reasons. First, they suggest a defense of, an apology for, the reliability of the New Testament’s depiction of Jesus. But one doesn’t get far into Witherington’s introduction (“The Origin of the Specious”) before realizing that this book does not merely defend; it launches an outright counter-attack against the legions of “strange theories and bad histor[ies]” that have raised up against orthodox beliefs about Jesus in recent decades. And second, I think the title and subtitle mislead because Witherington’s polemics, as insightful and incisive as they are, take up only a minor part of the book and enclose a much more valuable treasure: a portrait of Jesus, and the glory revealed in Him, painted from studying the “impact crater” He left in the lives and thoughts of His earliest inner circle of followers—the ones who saw Him risen—an impact lovingly remembered and faithfully reflected in the New Testament writings.

Witherington admits:

We could quibble about who should be included in that inner circle, but I would urge that the following is a reasonably short list: Mary, James, and Jude from Jesus’s own physical family; Peter, the Beloved Disciple, Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Paul from outside his immediate family. (9)

But he also argues:

If it is true in any sense that Peter stands behind the Gospel of Mark (as is often argued) and that Paul was a sometime companion and mentor of the author of the Gospel of Luke, then my short list could be said to account for a least three of the gospels (that is, all but Matthew), the book of Acts, the Pauline corpus, the Johannine letters, the Petrine letters, and the sermons/letters of James and Jude. In short, it could be said to account for almost all of our earliest written witnesses about early Christianity. . .I believe that this focus on specific historical persons is more likely to help us understand [Jesus] than abstract analysis of social or anthropological or even historical factors could do, though we cannot ignore such factors. (10,11)

This personal focus in Witherington’s book also conveys to its readers, I think, a sense of liveliness and excitement and solidity that many historical studies of Jesus lack. At the end of most chapters, Witherington summarizes what we learn about these early disciples from the New Testament and what that knowledge tells us about their Master.

In Part One Witherington discusses what can be known or reasonably surmised from the New Testament about two early female disciples of Jesus: Joanna and Mary Magdalene. He thinks that Joanna, the wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, “would have been a middle- or even high-status woman apparently able to travel on her own or with friends without reprisal.” (16) He also presents an interesting case for her being Junia, the wife of Andronicus, whom Paul mentions in Romans. (Witherington thinks she was divorced and remarried.) Paul describes this couple as “kinsmen” (fellow Jews), “before me in Christ” (hence from Palestine), and also possibly “apostles.” While Witherington argues strongly for Junia being a full-fledged apostle in the early sense of the term, he does not—in this work at least— try to apply that conclusion to current issues about the ordination of women.

Witherington spends a few pages in Chapter 1 discussing what we can know about Mary Magdalene (Miriam of Migdal) from the gospels. Then he devotes the longer Chapter 2 to a discussion of the later Gnostic writings and the myth and legends about her that they contain.

Part Two studies the vivid portrait the New Testament, especially Matthew’s gospel, paints of Peter, the “principal shepherd” of the early Church.

Part Three contains two chapters about Mary, the mother of Jesus. Chapter 5 discusses the gospel accounts of Jesus’s conception and birth and what we learn from them about Mary. Chapter 6 surveys later passages about Mary in the gospels and Acts.

I think Chapter 5 was the only chapter that disappointed me. Amazingly Witherington fails to even mention Mary’s Magnificat, let alone explore what it tells us about this remarkable teenage Jewess and the influence she must have had on her Son. I hope he does not mistakenly believe that Mary was not capable of composing such a hymn, rich with Old Testament allusion and precedent, and that it was purely a creation of Luke or the early church. If so, I would dispatch to him a very eloquent prayer written in verse by one Louisa May Alcott, age ten. The Magnificat reveals a Mary who is at once humble enough and fierce enough to bear and raise the Lamb of God and the Lion of Judah. For a hint of the insights that I think were missed here, I would urge our readers to see the introductory chapter of C. S. Lewis’s Reflections on the Psalms.

I would guess that Part Four (Chapters 7 and 8) will cause some controversy. For here Witherington speculates about the identity of the Beloved Disciple and his relationship to the gospel and letters of “John” and the book of Revelation. In Chapter 6, he argues the very intriguing case that “the evidence of [the Fourth] gospel taken as a whole certainly does not point to the Beloved Disciple being a Galilean disciple, much less John of Zebedee, but rather a Judean disciple, most likely Lazarus.” (155)

Witherington devotes a longer Part Five (Chapters 9-11) to the brothers of Jesus: James and Jude. Many readers will gain, as I did, a new respect for James as a mediator and peacemaker within the early Church:

He was a Torah-true Jew who at the same time was committed to Jesus as the Jewish Messiah and to the Good News about Jesus. He was the first great leader of the church who felt strongly about both the inclusion of Gentiles in this religious movement and the inclusion of Jews who would remain observant of the Mosaic Law. (204)

And Witherington finds surprising theological richness in the brief twenty-five verses of Jude’s epistle, which he believes was written by Jude and early, in the 40s or 50s, perhaps even before the letter of James:

Jude is Trinitarian in his thinking, speaking of praying in the Spirit, keeping oneself in God’s love, and waiting for the mercy of the Lord Jesus to bring the gift of eternal life (clearly seen in the future). Nor is he shy about stressing high Christology, speaking about Jesus being the believer’s only sovereign and Lord. (221)

In Part 6 (Chapters 12 and 13) Witherington seeks to go beyond a summary of Paul’s career and teaching and “to go deeper and probe what made him tick.”

In his final Chapter 14, and in the last part of 13, he argues that while the different streams of the early Jesus movement certainly disagreed about ecclesiological and practical issues, there is no evidence that they disagreed in their views about Jesus. The Christology of the inner circle reflected in the New Testament was “high Christology” and described Him in both human and divine terms from the beginning.

In a closing appendix, Witherington resumes his counter-attack on bad, or at least badly flawed, history and critiques James Tabor’s recent book The Jesus Dynasty, which apparently argues, among other strange things, that Jesus intended to found a family dynasty. He acknowledges Tabor’s work to be “serious,” “well-written,” and “beguiling” but also finds it filled with problems—presuppositional, archeological, historical, and exegetical.

With both his polemics and his “personality profile” approach in What Have They Done With Jesus?, Witherington adds a uniquely powerful work to a growing arsenal of conservative scholarship that combats all the patent nonsense published lately about Jesus and the origins of Christianity. And the cumulative effect of his portraits of Jesus's inner circle is a larger, more suasive portrait of the One whose glory hit their world like a meteor, "glory as of the only begotten of the Father."