Scripture and God in Christianity

emerged out of particular "living situation" (Sitz im Leben) they already had behind them a history
which had helped to shape them, had already been passed on as the message of Jesus. The
evangelists- undoubtedly not merely collectors and transmitters, as people once thought, but absolutely
original theologians with their own conception of the message- arranged the Jesus narratives
and Jesus sayings according to their own plan and at their own discretion... The evangeliststhemselves
certainly active engaged in missionary work and in catechizing- arranged the traditional
texts to suit the needs of their communities. They interpreted them in the light of the Easter
events, expanded them and adapted them where they thought it necessary. Hence, despite all their
common features, the different Gospels each acquired a different profile of the one Jesus." 50
John Hick puts the point in a nutshell: "None of the writers was an eye-witness of the life that
they depict. The Gospels are secondary and tertiary portraits dependent on oral and written traditions
which had developed over a number of decades, the original first-hand memories of Jesus
being variously preserved, winnowed, developed, distorted, magnified and overlaid through the
interplay of many factors including the universal tendency increasingly to exalt one's leaderfigure,
the delight of the ancient world in the marvelous, opposition to the mainstream of Judaism
from which the church had now been separated, an intensification of faith under persecution,
factional polemics within different streams of the Christian community itself, and a policy of presenting
events in Jesus' life as fulfillments of ancient prophecy or as exemplifying accepted religious
themes." 51 Clearly, argues Hick, "the attempt to form a picture of the life that lay forty to
sixty or seventy years behind the written Gospels cannot yield a great deal in the way of fully assured
results." 52 Howard Kee observes, that unlike our times the historians and writers of the first
century, "were not interested simply in reporting events of the past, but saw their role as providing
the meaning of those past events for readers in the present." 53 Therefore, during these sixty
years or so, the Gospels were developed, in the words of Paula Fredricksen, "from oral to written;
from Aramaic to Greek; from the End of time to the middle of time; from Jewish to Gentile;
from Galilee and Judea to the Empire..." 54
From the facts like these of oral transmission, Easter experience, missionary zeal, and compilation
of Jesus's sayings after a period of 30 to 60 years, many modern scholars doubt the authenticity
and integrity of most of the New Testament books. Ernst Kaesemann argues, that "the individual
sayings and stories it must be said that from their first appearance they were used in the
service of the community's preaching and were indeed preserved for the very reason. It was not
historical but kerygmatic interest which handed them on. From this standpoint it becomes comprehensible
that this tradition, or at least the overwhelming mass of it, cannot be called authentic.
Only a few words of the Sermon on the Mount and of the conflict with the Pharisees, a number
of parables, and some scattered material of various kinds go back with any real degree of probability
to the Jesus of history...The preaching about him has almost entirely supplanted his own
preaching, as can be seen most clearly of all in the completely unhistorical Gospel of John." 55
John Hick claims that, "The identifiable consensus begins with a distinction between the historical
Jesus of Nazareth and the post-Easter development of the church's mingled memories and interpretations
of him. And it is a basic premise of modern New Testament scholarship that we
have access to the former only through the latter." 56
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