Jesus Secret Teachings
EDITOR'S NOTE:
Craig Blomberg has noted that "Because the New Testament has been
scrutinized with more intensity than any other work of literature in the history
of the world, it is not surprising to discover that virtually every passage in
the gospels has been seen as conflicting with some other passage by someone or
other at some time in history." Regardless of one's stance on the
multitudinous issues surrounding the accuracy, authority, inspiration and
inerrancy of the Christian Canon,
it can be agreed that the pursuit of the original intent of the New Testament
authors is a laudable endeavor. Brian Stanley takes up that endeavor in
his response to the following allegation of self-contradiction by Jesus of
Nazareth:
During his hearing before the
high priest, Jesus says, "I spoke openly to the world. I always taught in
synagogues and in the temple, where the Jews always meet, and in secret I have
said nothing" (John 18:20 (NKJ)). But the New Testament show that this is
untrue. Jesus did not always teach in synagogues and in the temple. He taught
on a mountain (Matthew 5:1-2), on a boat (Matthew 13:1-35), on a plain (Luke
6:17-49), and in houses too (Luke 5:17-19). So Jesus lied about where he had
been teaching.
Jesus' Secret
Teachings?
-Brian K. Stanley,
3/4/2000
This is the kind of
"discrepancy" which, it seems to me, the opponents of Christianity
would not bother with if the "every word verbally inspired and wholly
infallible" school of proof-text hunters did not give them an opening.
Taken by itself, the sentence "I spoke nothing in secret" is literally
inaccurate.
The words have to be understood in
their context. Suppose I were indicted and put on trial for advocating the
assassination of the President of the United States. Suppose the prosecutor said
in his opening: "This traitor used the very means of interstate -- indeed,
global -- communication which were put at his disposal through the wisdom and
generosity of the very government over which Bill Clinton, this would-be
murderer's victim, presided over (to say nothing of the technological genius of
his friend and companion, Vice-President Gore)!" Suppose the judge then
began to question me: "What have you advocated with regard to the President
of the United States? Who are your adherents?"
Now, as a matter of criminal
procedure in our legal system, such patently non-neutral questioning by the
judge would ensure a mistrial or reversal on appeal. And neither the prosecutor
nor the judge could be questioning me at all, unless I had previously waived my
privilege against self-incrimination. But there is every reason to suppose that
the ancient Jewish trial process was more inquisitorial than adversarial -- as
it is today almost everywhere in the world, outside those countries which have
based their legal systems on English law. And though there was no privilege
against self-incrimination as such, the requirement that capital charges be
established by the testimony of two direct witnesses (it being implicitly
understood that the accused himself could not be compelled to be one of the two)
provided something of a substitute.
Suppose, further, that I knew that
the event which actually precipitated the federal investigation and indictment
was an article I published on the Internet which gained some notoriety and which
someone in the Justice Department had chosen to interpret (it is not essential,
for purposes of the analogy I am constructing, to say he had necessarily
misinterpreted) as advocating the assassination of the President of the United
States. Suppose, finally, that what is contained in my Web article is consistent
with what I have said in previous writings published in national magazines
and/or via mass mailings. (We have already supposed, implicitly, that although
this is a U.S. court the rules of criminal procedure are being adapted from the
practice and usage of the ancient Sanhedrin -- so I can't simply invoke the 5th
Amendment and demand a mistrial, assuming an acquittal here is what I want.)
If I answer the judge, "Why
do you ask me to characterize my statements? What I did or did not advocate was
written out for anyone to read on the World-Wide Web. Whatever I've said, I've
said publicly. So if I'm charged with saying something criminal, let the
prosecution bring on its evidence of what I have said," am I
"lying"? (Note that the statement of Jesus from which our
"skeptic" quotes continues at v. 21, is interrupted at v. 22, and
concludes at v. 23.)
Clearly, on one level I am not
really making any assertion about my previous utterances, but merely presenting
a challenge to the prosecution based upon the testimony-of-two-direct-witnesses
rule with which everyone in the room is familiar. If I made a highly public
utterance which it was a felony for me to utter, then there should be no trouble
about producing the two witnesses who will agree as to just what I said, and
where and when I said it. If I am supposed to have made the felonious utterance
in secret, then the prosecution must either produce two witnesses who can reveal
this secret or else admit that it cannot provide the legally required
substantiation for the accusation.
My statement -- and Jesus' -- has
an additional procedural dimension, though to bring it out I need, for the
moment, to add an additional supposition to my hypothetical statement of facts:
Suppose what my article actually said was, "Bill Clinton is a big fat
fibber!" and suppose (for some truly unfathomable reason) this assertion
not only attracted the attention of the public, but was widely deemed
controversial, if not subversive. My challenge, "What I did ... advocate
was written out for anyone to read ... Whatever I've said, I've said publicly.
So if I'm charged with saying something criminal, let the prosecution bring on
its evidence ..." would be not only an invocation of the procedural rule
requiring that two witnesses provide direct and consistent evidence establishing
the charge against me, but also a demand to know the substance of the charge
which is actually to be proved (if any) before attempting to answer it. There is
no point in my saying, "I didn't say anything about killing Clinton; I
merely said he's a big fat fibber," if the government has two profoundly
respectable witnesses lined up to say, "And then the Defendant said, 'Death
to that Lying Demon, Bill Clinton! Great will be the reward in heaven of the
godly warrior who slays him!'"
But even to the extent my
challenge may be taken as substantive, as well as procedural (i.e., as an
assertion about how and where I have or have not engaged in political advocacy,
as well as an implicit invocation of the two-direct-witnesses rule and of the
fundamental impossibility of my answering a charge which has not even been fully
revealed to me), it would certainly be unfair to extract my words,
"Whatever I've said, I've said publicly," not only from the context of
my defense-as-presented, but also from the context of the actual trial and the
charge which the prosecutor intends actually to make out against me.
The actual substance of the charge
against Jesus was (partially, and somewhat manipulatively, if not quite
deceitfully) revealed to Pilate in the words "He made himself out to be the
Son of God," John 19:7 (i.e., the Messiah; cf. Matt. 26:63, John 1:49 -- as
an aside, I venture to think that this particular Messianic epithet was then
enjoying a relatively brief vogue, initiated in part for the very reason that
the cosmopolitan piety of Judea's de facto ruler, and of others who shared his
background during those early Imperial days, was such that giving the Messiah
this title could indeed make the Procurator "the more afraid," and
ending, outside Christian circles, precisely because this title had become
associated with the Crucified One). For anyone to claim to be the Messiah is
certainly blasphemy and worthy of death (Lev. 24:16), unless that one is,
indeed, the Messiah -- but to the high priest and his companions nothing could
have been more certain that, if there were to be such a thing as a Messiah, he
could be in no danger of being killed by a Roman execution squad. Whether it was
the initial strategy or was resorted to only when it became obvious that the two
witnesses had been inadequately coached, one way could be seen to bypass the
two-witnesses-who-agree requirement and avoid useless wrangling over precisely
what Jesus had said and whether or not those particular words were necessarily
blasphemous: get Jesus to repeat His claim and then raise the cry that the
prisoner had blasphemed in the very hearing of the judges. (For though the
accused could not usefully be compelled to testify against himself, there was
nothing to prevent one or more of the judges from denouncing the accused on the
basis of his own knowledge -- in effect, becoming a witness to capital crime,
while remaining a judge of the same cause.)
The high priest's dramatic
reaction to Jesus' self-proclamation may have been good courtroom theater, but
given that Jesus' announcement of himself as the Messiah had been made openly in
the Temple and elsewhere in the city, it provoked an obvious -- even if not
technically relevant, legally -- question: Some if not most of the Sanhedrin had
been present on one or more of those occasions, yet none of them had rent his
garments, cried "Blasphemy!" and taken up a stone, though clearly
bound to do these things, and more, if blasphemy had been uttered in their ears
(within the courts of the Holy Temple, most especially).
(It is an unfortunate accident of
culture that even as Jesus' emphatic affirmative response to "Art thou the
Christ?" comes off, literally translated, almost as waffling, without study
and assistance most of us are unable to recognize as the most specific and
emphatic of self-announcements, which they certainly are, such incidents as the
children crying, "Hosanna to the Son of David!" and the chief priests
and scribes asking indignantly "Do you hear what they are saying?" and
Jesus answering "Yes! Have you never read, 'Out of the mouths of babes and
sucklings hast Thou perfected praise'?" or elsewhere, "If these were
silent, the stones would cry out.")
Even a stupid person can be
surprisingly clever when matters immediately pertaining to his prospective
execution are in hand, and Jesus was not stupid. It is clear He anticipated
arrest, and it is surely likely that He presumed there would be some pretense,
at least, of a trial. That He might be demanded to claim or abjure Messiahhood
must have occurred to Him; nor could He have thought to do other, in the event
the current high priest should solemnly inquire, than to solemnly affirm Himself
to be who and what He was (and is). If the high priest should thereupon deem it
right to tear his own clothes and make an outcry against blasphemy, Jesus must
surely have realized, no further answer could be given -- save such answer, if
any, as the Lord God of Israel should Himself see fit to make.
Even though the previous disregard
of the "chief priests and scribes" for their plain duty to respond
immediately when the supposed "blasphemy" was uttered in their
presence would not constitute a legal defense to the charge of blasphemy (and,
indeed, nothing would constitute a legal defense against the mute accusation of
the high priest's torn garments), it was the one point Jesus could make in
anticipation of such conduct on the high priest's part. It is a point Jesus made
as soon as he was arrested (Matt. 26:55), and it is the point He made again in
the words quoted by our "skeptic" here.
A "lie" is an inaccurate
statement made with intent to deceive; it is not a remark, made in a specific
and limiting context, which, removed from that context and simply given a global and
literal interpretation, would become inaccurate. In the context of my
hypothetical trial, my words "Whatever I said, I said publicly" would
be "true" (whether or not it were technically relevant) so long as the
explicit or implicit charge against me is based upon my Web article or my
previous magazine or mass-mailing publications. If the prosecution surprises me
by producing a witness who claims that I called for the assassination of Clinton
in an address to a secret meeting of 15 "militia" leaders held in his
barn 3 years ago and by basing its charge upon this alleged speech, and if,
indeed, I did give a secret speech to a clandestine meeting 3 years ago, then it
would be a "lie" for me to maintain that I had "said nothing in
secret" -- even if my speech, though critical of Clinton, did not actually
contain any advocacy of assassination or other violence.
In Jesus' case, whether he had or
had not privately confirmed to his students his status as the Messiah would
plainly have been an insignificant question, in light of the perfectly explicit
and exceedingly public self-announcement(s) He made, within the week preceding
His trial, by and in connection with His triumphal entry into the city and the
Temple. Furthermore, there was absolutely no danger that his immediate auditors
could reasonably misunderstand "I spoke nothing in secret." For if we
mean to be hyper-literal about the meaning of Jesus' exact words, we should note
that this clause is not restricted to "teachings" or "religious
pronouncements" or any other kind of speaking. If, at the outset of the
family visit to Jerusalem reported in Luke 2:41 ff., the adolescent Jesus had
been asked by his parents to hide some coins somewhere in the baggage or
equipment, and had then secretly advised Joseph as to just where he had hidden
the coins, then twenty years later Jesus' assertion that he had "spoken nothing
in secret" would, clearly, be literally inaccurate. Nobody who was even
trying to give the remotest impression of fair-mindedness would, on that
account, call the statement made by Jesus at his trial a "lie."
This point is the more apparent if
we know a little about Jewish religious and intellectual life during that
period. It was commonly understood that a rabbi, or religious teacher, who
attracted a body of full-time adherents-followers-students
("disciples") would, as a religious teacher, be engaged primarily in
the transmission of his corpus of learning to his disciples, as the peculiar
arcanum of their school. Obviously, nobody could be engaged exclusively and
continuously in public speaking to the multitudes for years at a stretch; and
nothing would have been more fully expected than that as such a teacher traveled
or lodged with his disciples in between addresses to the general public, the
private conversations of master with disciples would involve deeper, more
detailed explication of the master's distinctive doctrine. (Though more than a millennium
had passed by then, it is instructive that such a phenomenon is easily traced in
the lives of the early Chasidic rabbis, including the Besht himself.) The
gentlemen of the Sanhedrin who heard Jesus' defensive remarks (if they can be
called that) would never have referred His statement about "saying nothing
in secret" to such private doctrinal talks between a rabbi and his
students, rather than to the highly portentous things which everyone knew very
well Jesus had recently proclaimed in public.
To a considerable extent, our
"skeptic" reveals that the focus of his concern is not actually the
thought that Jesus attempted to deceive his judges regarding the substance of
the blasphemy charge when he pointed out that his offending claims of
Messiahhood had been made in the Temple before assembled multitudes of Jews and
issued the challenge (both procedurally and substantively significant),
"Question those who have heard what I spoke to them." Rather, the
"skeptic" discloses that the real target of his ire is Jesus' having
kept some points of doctrine "in reserve" by not speaking of them
publicly or doing so only in a sort of code. This, of course, is an entirely
different issue, and this article has gone on more than long enough already. It
should suffice to note, as a general indication of the direction of a potential
response, that the "secrets" fall into two basic categories: (1)
testimonies or accounts of events which participants were asked to keep
confidential; and (2) doctrinal instruction given in parabolic or other indirect
form, so that some might not understand even though they heard. Category 1
events all relate to Jesus' need to contain the news of events which might be
taken as equivalent to an open assertion of Messiahhood until "His hour had
come." Category 2 teachings involve fuller understanding of Jesus' doctrine
of the Kingdom of Heaven, but none of them is essential to salvation, nor should
failure to achieve such understanding prevent anyone from responding in his own
heart to Jesus' claim to be God's anointed, come into the world to save sinners.