Ben F.

Meyer and the Renewed Quest for the Historical Jesus

Jonathan Bernier, McMaster University

After two hundred years of historical-Jesus research, the bulk of which by common consent has

proved a failure, it would seem reasonable to ask the writer of yet another book [or presentation]

on the topic not to make the old mistakes. 1 Historical Jesus research seems today to be as much

at an impasse as it was when Ben F. Meyer wrote these words almost forty years ago. The

criteria of authenticity, which were still considered to be the state of the art in the late-1970s, are

now widely recognized as bankrupt historiographical instruments in need of serious revision if

not outright repudiation. 2 As is inevitable in such situations we are greeted on the one hand by

reactionaries who want to shore up the old ways of doing things 3 and on the other by nihilists

who tell us that if the old ways no longer work then there can in fact be no way. 4

1
Ben F. Meyer, The Aims of Jesus (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2002 [1979]), 13.
2
For the criteria approachs obituary, cf. the various contributions to Chris Keith and Anthony Le Donne,
eds., Jesus, the Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity (London: T&T Clark, 2012). For intimations of its eventual
doom, cf. Dale Allison, Jr., How to Marginalize the Traditional Criteria of Authenticity, in Handbook for the
Study of the Historical Jesus (ed. Tom Holmn and Stanley E. Porter; 4 vols.; Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1:3-30; James
D.G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Christianity in the Making 1; Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2003), 81-85, 330-
336; Morna Hooker, On Using the Wrong Tool, Theology 75 (1972): 570-581; Chris Keith, Memory and
Authenticity: Jesus Tradition and What Really Happened, Zeitschrift fr die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft und
die Kunder der lteren Kirche 102 (2011): 155-177; Anthony Le Donne, The Historiographical Jesus; Memory,
Typology, and the Son of God (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2009), 87-91; John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew
(4 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1991), 1:167-195, esp. p. 167-168, 183-184; Meyer, Aims, 81-87; Ben F. Meyer,
Some Consequences of Birger Gerhardssons Account of the Origins of the Gospel Tradition, in Jesus and the
Oral Gospel Tradition (ed. Henry Wansbrough; Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series 64;
Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1991), 424-440, esp. pp. 425-429; Rafael Rodrguez, Authenticating Criteria:
The Use and Misuse of a Critical Method, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 7 (2009): 152-167; Gerd
Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria (trans. M. Eugene
Boring; Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002 [1997]); Alexander J.M. Wedderburn, Jesus and the
Historians (Tbingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 161-182.
3
Cf. Paul Foster, Memory, Orality, and the Fourth Gospel: Three Dead-Ends in Historical Jesus Studies,
Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 10 (2012): 191-227, esp. p. 227.
4
Cf. the declaration of a New No Quest by Zeba Crook, Memory Distortion and the Historical Jesus
(paper presented at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, Baltimore, Md., 25 November, 2013), a
presentation that largely recapitulated the argument advanced previously in Zeba Crook, Collective Memory
Distortion and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 11 (2013): 53-76.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 2

Meanwhile, in the midst of all this, the most startling phenomenon is evident, namely

genuine advance in the field of Jesus studies, the precise content of which advance will be

defined more precisely below; for now let it suffice to say that the advance consists of bridging

the rupture that has for a quarter-millennium existed between historical Jesus studies and the

historical investigation of Christian origins. The thesis of this paper is two-fold. First, that this

advance is due in large part to a rediscovery of Ben Meyers work, most notably The Aims of

Jesus; second, that this advance can be furthered and deepened by a clearer understanding of

Meyers work and the Lonerganian framework in which it was self-consciously situated, a task

that will require us to look beyond Aims. 5 In developing these arguments I will proceed in three

step. First, I will survey briefly the history of historical Jesus studies, with special attention to

Meyers place therein and how his work has contributed to the recent advance in the field.

Second, I will more precisely define Meyers thought in relation to Lonergans. Third, I will

explore how this more precise definition might help us build upon the recent advance within

historical Jesus studies.

A Brief History of the Historical Jesus

The recent and ongoing advance in historical Jesus studies was inaugurated by Dunns

magisterial 2003 work, Jesus Remembered, the great contribution of which was to articulate in a

clear and timely fashion two insights. These can perhaps be most readily articulated through

reference to Willi Marxsens three settings for the Jesus tradition: the setting in Jesus ministry,

5
Special attention will be directed towards the historiographical and dialectical investigations undertaken
in Ben F. Meyer, The Early Christians: Their World Mission and Self-Discovery (Wilmington, Del.: Michael
Glazier, 1986), as well as conceptual insights contained in Ben F. Meyer, Christus Faber: The Master-Builder and
the House of God (Allison Park, Pa.: Pickwick Publications, 1992).
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 3

the setting in the early Church, and the setting in the gospels; 6 or, alternatively, the dominical, 7

the ecclesiastical, and the evangelical settings. The first insight advanced by Dunn is that the

entirety of the dominical material found in the New Testament and other early Christian sources,

regardless of their historical relationship to the Jesus of Nazareth, was brought into beingthat

is, effectedby the early Christians, and thus is always already ecclesiastical material; 8 the

second insight is that the early Christians were in turn effected by Jesus himself, such that the

ecclesiastical material took its distinctive shape precisely because of antecedent dominical

activity. 9 The evangelical material is ecclesiastical, yet the ecclesiastical is neither independent

of nor discontinuous from dominical activity; the three categoriesdominical, ecclesiastical, and

evangelicalare mutually entailed in a markedly dynamic fashion.

In order to understand why this represents genuine advance one must look at the history

of historical Jesus studies. Historical Jesus studies is often said to have begun with the work of

6
Cf. Willi Marxsen, Mark the Evangelist: Studies on the Redaction History of the Gospel (trans. James
Boyce, Donald Juel, William Poehlmann, and Roy A. Harrisville; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969 [1956]), 23-24.
Marxsens idea of three settings for the Jesus tradition represents a development from the work of Joachim Jeremias,
The Parables of Jesus (trans. S.H. Hooke; 2nd rev. ed.; London: SCM Press, 1972 [1947]), 23, who identified two
settings: the dominical and the ecclesiastical. Marxsens distinction between ecclesiastical and evangelical settings
was thus in effect always a distinction between non-evangelical ecclesiastical and evangelical ecclesiastical settings.
Jeremias was also to exert a significant influence on Meyers thinking as well; cf. Ben F. Meyer, A Caricature of
Joachim Jeremias and his Scholarly Work, Journal of Biblical Literature 110/3 (1991): 451-462.
7
There might those who will object to the use of the term dominical, stating that it inescapably affirms
Jesuss lordship, something verboten for a biblical scholar qua biblical scholar. To such a hypothetical objection I
would respond that by my usage I make no such affirmation. Rather, I use the word only because it is less
cumbersome to repeatedly write dominical setting than it is to repeatedly write the setting of Jesuss life.
Consequently one can read in my use of this word an affirmation of Jesuss lordship only if one abandons the work
of exegesis and takes up instead the work of eisegesis. As no responsible biblical scholar would abandon exegesis
for eisegesis I trust that no such an objection to the use of the term dominical will be forthcoming.
8
This insight is of course not original to Dunn. William Wrede, The Messianic Secret (trans. J.C.G. Greig;
Cambridge: James Clarke, 1971 [1901]) represents a classic articulation thereof, as well as the discussions collected
in Christopher Tuckett, ed., The Messianic Secret (Issues in Religion and Theology 1; Philadelphia, PA: Fortress
Press, 1983). Dunns great contribution was to move Wredes insight from the methodical margin of the subfield to
its methodical centre.
9
Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 125-134.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 4

Hermann Samuel Reimarus, 10 although it does not emerge as a clearly defined field of study

until David Friedrich Strausss 1835 monograph Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet. 11

Regardless of whether we proclaim Reimarus or Strauss to be the first historical Jesus scholar

each agree that the ecclesiastical and evangelical settings constitute a deep and fundamental

rupture from the dominical. Thus will Strauss (in)famously pose the Jesus of history over and

against the Christ of faith, 12 and never the twain shall meet. Subsequent work in historical Jesus

scholarship proceeded upon this rupture hypothesis, thus defining the historians task as the

elaboration of techniques by which to differentiate within the evangelical material two further

categories of material, the dominical on the one hand and the ecclesiastical on the other: the

dominical was declared to have come from Jesus, i.e. to represent what Jesus said and did and

was thus deemed relevant for the study of the historical Jesus; whilst the ecclesiastical was

declared to have come from the church, i.e. been a secondary imposition upon genuine

recollections of Jesuss activity and teaching and was thus deemed to be irrelevant to and in fact

misleading for the study of the historical Jesus.

Whether it was Reimarus in the 18th century, Strauss in the 19th century, Rudolf

Bultmann in the early 20th-century, 13 Ernst Ksemann in the mid-20th, 14 or John Dominic

10
Hermann Samuel Reimarus, Fragments (ed. Charles H. Talbert; trans. Ralph S. Fraser; Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress Press, 1970 [1774-1778]). Reimarus (1694-1768) apparently never intended for his historical work on Jesus
to be published. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing however published this material as a series of anonymous fragments
(known as the Wolfenbttel Fragmente) between 1774 and 1778.
11
David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (trans. George Eliot; London: SCM Press,
1973 [1835]). Eliots 1846 and still-standard English rendering was based upon the fourth edition of Das Leben
Jesu, published in 1840.
12
A phrase popularized by his 1865 work Der Christus de Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte, for
which the standard English translation is David Friedrich Strauss, The Christ of Faith and the Jesus of History: A
Critique of Schleiermachers Life of Jesus (trans. Leander E. Keck; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970 [1865]).
13
Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus (Tbingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1951 [1926]).
14
Ernst Ksemann, Das Problem des historischen Jesus, Zeitschrift fr Theologie und Kirche 51/2
(1954), 272-296.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 5

Crossan and the Jesus Seminar in the late-20th, 15 the central preoccupation of historical Jesus

studies has been for two-and-a-half centuries the discovery of dominical wheat among

ecclesiastical chaff. The criteria of authenticity, the elaboration of which had been the focus of

activity within historical Jesus studies for much of the 1960s through 1990s, 16 is but the latest

example of this preoccupation, and it was the breakdown of the criteria approach that created the

possibility not only for Dunns insights but just as crucially for the ready appropriation of those

insights throughout the subfield.

Dunns first insight reveals the effort to recover within the gospels material that is non-

ecclesiastical yet dominical to be quixotic; after all, if the gospels are produced by the early

church then what in the gospels would not come from the church? If the entirety of the

evangelical material is inescapably ecclesiastical then one cannot identify non-ecclesiastical

material in the evangelical. His second insight reveals that this does not mean that the material

does not come from Jesus; if the ecclesiastical is effected in whole or in part by dominical

activity then one cannot identify ecclesiastical material as ipso facto non-dominical. As a

consequence of the tremendous influence of Jesus Remembered we might suggest that whereas

the historical Jesus quest before Dunn supposed that there had been a dramatic rupture between

Jesus and the church, the historical Jesus quest after Dunn is increasingly interested in seeing the

church as precisely a consequence of Jesuss activity and thus to understand what sort of person

Jesus must have been to effect such a consequence; the aim now is to reverse the deleterious

15
John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San
Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1991); Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five
Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (Harper: Harper San Francisco,
1993).
16
It is good method to engage with the best rather than the worst articulation of a position, lest one
construct a straw man; for the criteria approach this is certainly Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:167-195. Unfortunately,
although the best articulation, it remains predicated upon a fatally-flawed dichotomization between ecclesiastical
and dominical material within the evangelical corpus.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 6

effects of the rupture hypothesis. Thus, writing concurrently with Dunns Jesus Remembered in

what is now the definitive work on the origins of Christ-devotion, can Hurtado argue along

similar lines that the only reasonable factor that accounts for the central place of the figure of

Jesus in early Christianity is the impact of Jesus ministry and its consequences, especially for

his followers. 17

It is through Dunns work that we can most clearly see the influence of Ben Meyer and

through him Lonergan upon the current advance being made in historical Jesus studies. In Jesus

Remembered Dunn explicitly align[s] [him]self with the basic thrust of Lonergans

epistemology and its application to history. 18 Although he does cite Lonergan in this section his

understanding of Lonergan is mediated by Ben Meyer, and his understanding of Meyer to a

certain extent mediated by N.T. Wright. Describing this epistemology as critical realism Dunn

quotes at length Wrights quite well-known (at least among New Testament scholars) yet highly-

problematic definition thereof, which reads as follows:

I propose a form of critical realism. This is a way of describing the process of knowing
that acknowledges the reality of the thing known, as something other than the knower
(hence realism), while also fully acknowledging that the only access we have to this
reality lies along the spiralling path of appropriate dialogue or conversation between
knower and the thing known (hence critical). This path leads to critical reflection on the
products of our enquiry into reality, so that our assertions about reality acknowledge
their own provisionality. Knowledge, in other words, although in principle concerning
realities independent of the knower, is never itself independent of the knower. 19

17
Larry Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Grand Rapids, Mich.:
Eerdmans, 2003), 53-54. Cf. pp. 53-64 for his more extended treatment of this theme. It is perhaps not entirely a
coincidence that the 2012 volume that signalled the final death knell for the criteria approach, viz. Keith and Le
Donne, Jesus, the Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity, was co-edited by former students of Hurtado (Keith) and
Dunn (Le Donne).
18
Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 111.
19
N.T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (London: SPCK, 1992), 35.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 7

This does not seem to be quite an adequate definition of Lonerganian epistemology, 20 given

Lonergans procedural emphasis upon the reality that is the knowing subject: a reality that can

hardly be defined as independent of the knowing subject. More to the point, on its own terms this

definition is less-than-adequate, for I find in Wright no account of how the knower can know that

the reality to be known is independent of the knower before that reality is itself known by the

knower. The supposition of a reality independent of the knower seems to be predicated more

upon metaphysical fiat than the careful reflection upon the work of knowing that characterizes

Lonergans work.

Despite the above critique, we should be grateful to N.T. Wright for his efforts to keep

the memories of both Meyer and Lonergan active, however peripherally, within historical Jesus

studies, for absent those efforts it is not clear to me that Dunn (of whom Meyer was in fact a

vociferous critic) 21 would have been so positively inclined towards building upon Meyers work.

That having been said, the fact that Dunn comes to Lonergan through Meyer and Meyer largely

through Wright, combined with the difficulties evident within Wrights own appropriation of the

Lonerganian tradition, makes attending to the work of Lonergan and Meyer all the more urgent,

as it might allow us to both further and enrich the advance initiated by Dunn whilst also

potentially correcting deficiencies stemming from inadequate apprehensions of Lonergan,

Meyer, and their thought. To such work we now turn.

20
Cf. the critique of Wrights definition in Donald L. Denton, Jr., Historiography and Hermeneutics in
Jesus Studies: An Examination of the Work of John Dominic Crossan and Ben F. Meyer (London: T&T Clark,
2004), 218-220.
21
Meyer, The Early Christians, 182-202, responding to J.D.G. Dunn, Unity and Diversity in the New
Testament: An Inquiry into the Character of Earliest Christianity (3rd ed.; London: SCM Press, 2006 [1977]). Note
that Meyer is responding to the first edition of Dunns work, as the second and third had yet to be published.
Meyers criticism might help account for Dunns surprising failure to significantly engage with Meyer, Early
Christians, in the sequel to Jesus Remembered, viz. James D.G. Dunn, Beginning From Jerusalem (Christianity in
the Making 2; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), even though this latter work was, just like Early Christians,
focused upon the development of the Jerusalem community and the Gentile mission.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 8

Ben Meyers Relation to Bernard Lonergan

That Ben Meyer was heavily influenced by Bernard Lonergan cannot seriously be contested,

given his own statements on that matter. 22 That said, it behooves us in this study to more

precisely define that influence, for that will in turn more allow us to more precisely define both

Meyers project and its ongoing potential for historical Jesus studies. Although Aims of Jesus

represents Meyers primary contribution to historical Jesus scholarship I would argue that it is in

his later monograph The Early Christians: Their World Mission and Self-Discovery, that we can

more clearly understand and situate in relation to the Lonerganian tradition his overall approach

to Christian origins, the study of the historical Jesus included.

In The Early Christians Meyer argues at length that the earliest Christian community, viz.

the one that emerged in Jerusalem immediately following Jesuss death and whose existence is

attested by Acts 1-8, was characterized by two distinct yet related horizons, the Hebraioi (or,

Hebrews) and the Hellnistai (or, Hellenists), terms that he appropriates from Acts 6:1. 23 Here

and elsewhere Meyer uses horizon in the metaphorical sense advanced by Lonergan in his

study of dialectic, namely those things about which one knows and is concerned. 24 The exact

specifics of these two horizons need not occupy us here. What is more crucial for us to note is

22
Meyers own comments on Lonergans work in Locating Lonerganian Hermeneutics and Lonergans
Breakthrough and the Aims of Jesus, in Ben F. Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament (Allison Park,
PA: Pickwick Publications, 1989), 1-16, 147-156, respectively; also, Ben F. Meyer, Reality and Illusion in New
Testament Scholarship: A Primer on Critical Realist Hermeneutics (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1994),
passim.
23
Meyer, Early Christians, 23-83. One would be remiss not to mention in this connexion Craig C. Hill,
Hellenists and Hebrews: Reappraising Division within the Earliest Church (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press,
1992), who has argued that the distinction between the Hebraoi and the Hellnistai has been over-emphasized
within the literature on Christian origins, to the point of conceptually obviating unity within early Christianity and
functionally diminishing the role of the Jerusalem church. On these matters Meyer would no doubt agree, for his aim
is precisely to show how earliest Christianity could be culturally and linguistically diverse yet striving for a unity of
institution and identity.
24
Cf. Bernard J.F. Lonergan, Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990 [1971]),
235-237; Meyer, Reality and Illusion, 49-55.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 9

Meyers development of a theory of transposition, or translation, wherein the experience of

salvation is made intelligible through disparate horizons. 25 This is much the approach to Ante-

Nicene theology taken by Lonergan in the prolegomena to his Triune God, 26 and indeed we can

profitably construe The Early Christians as in part Meyers effort to elaborate upon the

dialectical sketch laid out by Lonergan in that work. If we move forward in time from the

emergent Jerusalem community into subsequent Christian developments (and it is not for nothing

that in relation to the notion of development Meyer references the work of John Henry

Newman) 27 then new articulations of Christian faith, doctrine, and practice can be understood as

successive efforts at translating this experience of salvation into ever-new horizons. 28

Yet Meyer recognizes quite rightly that Christianity builds upon Jewish and ultimately

Israelite antecedents. The experience of salvation was a biblical commonplace, as the creeds

and other covenantal texts of the ancient Israel attest by their grateful recollection of the

experience of salvation. 29 From their experiences of liberation from bondage in Egypt to the

return from exile in Babylon under the Persians the Israelite-become-Jewish people recognized

25
Meyer, Early Christians, 190-196.
26
Bernard J.F. Lonergan The Triune God: Doctrines (ed. Robert M. Doran and H. Daniel Monsour; trans.
Michael G. Shields; Collected Works of Bernard Lonergan 11; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2009), 29-255.
Note that this section of Triune God was previously published in English translation as Bernard J.F. Lonergan, The
Way to Nicea: The Dialectical Development of Trinitarian Theology (trans. Conn ODonovan; London: Darton,
Longman and Todd, 1976), and it is to this earlier translation that Meyer, Early Christians, refers.
27
Viz. John Henry Newman, An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: James Toovey).
Meyer, Early Christians, 190, n. 27, quotes a note penned into Newmans copy of the Essay: Development equals
translation into a new language. Cf. the account of the development of the notion of doctrinal development in
Owen Chadwick, From Bousset to Newman (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987 [1957]). More
recently, Mark Edwards, Catholicity and Heresy in the Early Church (Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009), uses Newmans
general framework to great benefit in construing the relationship between the works of Patristic writers considered
to be orthodox and those considered to be heretical. Edwardss account could enrich a Lonerganian account of early
Christian development and reciprocally Lonergans work could enrich Edwardss account.
28
Cf. now the recent effort to more fully elaborate a dialectical account of development within the Catholic
Church from the apostolic generation to present in Neil Ormerod, Re-Visioning the Church: An Experiment in
Systematic-Historical Historical Ecclesiology (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014), 175-352.
29
Meyer, Early Christians, 176. Cf. now the recent efforts to build upon Meyers understanding of the
early church and its horizons by the late Sen Freyne, The Jesus Movement and its Expansion: Meaning and
Message (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 209-213.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 10

the gracious presence of God in their history. 30 More significant for the dynamic patterning of

Israelite-become-Jewish religion however is the insight that was drawn from such experiences of

liberation, viz. the recurrent conclusion that God is acting towards Israel in a loving, good, and

intelligible way. 31 The fruit of such an insight is conversion, religious, moral, and intellectual,

such that the experience of salvation drives the dialectical movement that allows for the

resolution of contraries through higher-level syntheses and the complementary resolution of

contradictories through rejecting that which ought to be rejected in favour of that which ought to

be affirmed. 32

With that latter sentence I refer to the work of Robert Doran, who in building upon

Lonergan suggests that there are dialectics of contraries and dialectics of contradictions: the

former are differences that can be resolved in a higher synthesis and the latter differences that

30
Inevitably there will be readers who bristle at the reference to Israels experience of liberation from
bondage in Egypt, objecting that such an event never happened. Against this I would point out that my argument
only requires that such accounts thematize historical experiences of salvation; that is, the account itself could be
altogether mythical yet still tell us something about how the people of Israel defined themselves, their God, and their
place in the cosmos. That said, given our contemporary knowledge about the oscillation of ancient Semites between
Egypt and Canaan, the known enslavement of Semites in the eastern delta, and the fact that such slaves would
sometimes escape and flee back to the region of Canaan, I see no reason that the Exodus account could not
thematize the experiences of actual persons of Canaanite descent (thus affirming the indubitable evidence of deep
cultural ties between Israel and its Canaanite neighbours) who escaped enslavement in the eastern delta, and
moreover that such experiences helped pattern the Israelite-become-Jewish (and later Christian and also Muslim)
tendency to understand divine salvation as something occurring within history. Cf. Norman K. Gottwald, The Tribes
of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250-1050 BCE (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press,
1999 [1979]), 35-41; James K. Hoffmeier, Israel in Egypt; The Evidence of the Authenticity of the Exodus Tradition
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); James K. Hoffmeier, Ancient Israel in Sinai: The Evidence for the
Authenticity of the Wilderness Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Meyer, Aims of Jesus, 224-241;
Meyer, Early Christians, 174-181.
31
Although Meyer does not cite this material one cannot but suspect that he has in mind the discussions of
religious experience and its consequences in Bernard J.F. Lonergan, A Third Collection (ed. Frederick E. Crowe;
New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1985), 113-165.
32
On such dialectical, upwards, movement, as well as the breakdown that occurs when conversion is
recurrently absent, cf. Lonergan, Method in Theology, 237-245. Note that for Lonergan religious conversion refers
not to conversion to a particular religion, whether Christianity or any other, but rather an orientation of the subjects
attention towards ultimate concern. As Lonergan develops the idea such conversion is articulated differently within
horizons associated with various religious traditions, and in principle there seems no reason that it could not be
present in atheist or agnostic horizons. Cf. also Frederick E. Crowe, Lonergans Universalist View of Religion, in
Frederick E. Crowe, Developing the Lonergan Legacy: Historical, Theoretical, and Existential Themes (ed. Michael
Vertin; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 112-141.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 11

cannot. 33 Such a distinction allows us to construe the history of Israelite, Jewish, and Christian

religion as the history of the occurrence of the conversions that make possible the ongoing

discernment between contraries and contradictions. Such historical incidentals as the Exodus or

the Return furnished the situations (to again borrow a term from Doran) 34 in which the

experience of salvation might precipitate the insights requisite for conversion, whilst the

institutions developed by early Judaism and Christianity, most notably synagogue and ekklesia,

constituted efforts to ensure the further recurrence of such experience, insight, and conversion. 35

This, I argue, allows us to better understand what Meyer is attempting in his earlier work,

The Aims of Jesus. In that work Meyer aims to show how Jesus aimed to articulate to his

contemporaries how the God of Israel was effecting salvation in their own time and place. 36

Jesus, a Jewish man of early-first-century Galilee, 37 had within his particular situation certain

experiences from which he derived insights and consequent conversions that were inescapably

33
Robert M. Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990),
8-9.
34
Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History, 8.
35
The last twenty-five years have witnessed a wholesale revision of our understanding of the Second
Temple synagogue, as epitomized in such works as Donald D. Binder, Into the Temple Courts: The Place of the
Synagogues in the Second Temple Period (SBL Dissertation Series 169; Atlanta, GA: Society of Biblical Literature,
1999); Lee I. Levine, The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years (2nd ed.; New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 2005), esp. pp. 21-173; Anders Runesson, The Origins of the Synagogue: A Socio-Historical Study
(Coniectanea Biblical New Testament Series 37; Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 2001); Anders Runesson,
Donald D. Binder, and Birger Olsson, eds., The Ancient Synagogue from its Origins to 200 C.E.: A Source Book
(Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 72; Leiden: Brill, 2008). Cf. my own previous effort to integrate current
synagogue research into a historiographical framework derived from Ben F. Meyer, initially written as a dissertation
under Anders Runessons supervision: Jonathan Bernier, Aposynaggos and the Historical Jesus in John:
Rethinking the Historicity of the Johannine Expulsion Passages (Biblical Interpretation Series 122; Leiden: Brill,
2013). The recent shifts in synagogue studies no doubt have implications for studying the origins of the Christian
ekklsia, although the study of such implications remains in its infancy (but cf. Runesson, Origins, 486-488; also,
one should note the very promising dissertation-in-progress under Runessons supervision in the Department of
Religious Studies at McMaster University: Jordan Ryan, The Kingdom of God and the Assembly of the People: The
Role of the Synagogue in the Aims of Jesus).
36
Meyer, Aims of Jesus, 129-173.
37
Although much ink has been spilled regarding Jesuss Jewish identity no study has yet to apprehend as
fully the significance of his specifically Galilean heritage as those of Sen Freyne, Jesus: A Jewish Galilean: A New
Reading of the Jesus-story (London: T&T Clark, 2004); Freyne, Jesus Movement, 133-186. In addition to Freyne,
Jesus Movement, for an up-to-date overview of Galilean studies with regard to the relevant period, cf. David A.
Fiensy and James Riley Strange, eds., Galilee in the Late Second Temple and Mishnaic Periods: Life, Culture, and
Society, Volume 1 (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014).
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 12

construed within his particular early-first-century Galilean Jewish horizon. He then undertook

the work of both acting upon those insights and conversions and communicating them to others,

again from within his own horizon and transposed into theirs. Such work itself constituted for

many an experience of salvation, thematized as healings and exorcisms. Jesuss work eventuated

with the crucifixion and the subsequent experience of salvation that the early Christians

thematized as Jesuss resurrection. The early Christians and their gospels were a consequence of

the cumulative impact of these experiences.

From Advance to Advance

Above I suggested that Dunns central contribution to the recent advance within historical Jesus

studies has been to effect a widespread recognition of the mutually entailed dynamic

interrelationship between the dominical, ecclesiastical, and evangelical settings of the Jesus

tradition. In thinking about how we might move forward it would be useful to consider how

Lonergan and Meyer might help us think about each of these three categories as well as their

interrelationship. In this section I aim to do precisely that.

Although the object of investigation is the dominical and the data to be investigated is the

evangelical material in what follows I will tarry longest upon the ecclesiastical. There are two

reasons for this decision. First, it is the middle term between the dominical and the evangelical,

without adequate attention to which one will slip into either the error of empiricism (thus

supposing that the gospels are a direct representation of what occurred in Jesuss life) or idealism

(thus supposing that the ecclesiastical setting in which the gospels were produced utterly

obscures any vision of the historical Jesus). 38 Second, as I will argue below, there is a need to

38
Cf. the discussion of empiricism and idealism in Lonergan, Method in Theology, 238-239.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 13

correct significant and demonstrable empirical and conceptual errors in our common accounts of

early ecclesiology that have bedeviled in myriad ways the task of historical Jesus scholarship.

That said, without further ado, let us turn to the dominical setting.

The Dominical Setting

The object of historical Jesus studies is the life, ministry, and aims of Jesus of Nazareth. This is

known through the extant data, most notably those found in the four canonical gospels: not

because they are canonical but rather because they are our earliest, fullest, accounts of Jesuss

life, ministry, and aims. No doubt other there is other textual material that can and does furnish

data for historical Jesus studies, but none of it compares in relevance to that found in the

canonical gospels. 39 Archaeological investigations too furnish important data for the study of the

historical Jesus, 40 although with the possible exception of Peters House 41 we have no artifacts

or features that can be associated directly with Jesus or his followers.

For much of the 1980s and 1990s historical Jesus studies was afflicted by a fruitless

debate between whether Jesuss teaching was best defined by the adjective eschatological or

39
Meier, Marginal Jew, 1:41-166, remains, after twenty-five years, still the best overview of the canonical
and non-canonical sources for the historical Jesus. For the under-appreciated yet still quite relevant non-evangelical,
canonical material, cf. now David M. Allen, The Historical Character of Jesus: Canonical Insights from Outside the
Gospels (London: SPCK, 2013).
40
Although somewhat dated, James H. Charlesworth, ed. Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids, MI:
Eerdmans, 2006), remains a serviceable overview of the archaeology of greatest relevance for historical Jesus
studies, especially if supplemented by more recent works such as James H. Charlesworth, ed., Jesus and the Temple:
Textual and Archaeological Explorations (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2014); Fiensey and Strange, Galilee;
Runesson, Binder, and Olsson, Ancient Synagogue, 20-118, although now seven years old this sourcebook is itself
becoming dated and in need of a second edition, especially with regard to recent Galilean discoveries. On these
latter matters Lee. I. Levine, The Synagogues of Galilee, in Fiensy and Strange, Galilee, 129-150, serves as a
supplementary stop-gap for the time being.
41
Cf. the discussion in James H. Charlesworth, Jesus Research and Archaeology: A New Perspective, in
Charlesworth, ed., Jesus and Archaeology, 11-63, pp. 49-50.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 14

wisdom. 42 The debate was fruitless for at least three reasons. First, the proponents of the

wisdom-Jesus advanced their thesis by methods that Dunns work has now shown to have always

been founded upon an inadequate understanding of the canonical gospels and other early

Christian texts, namely the strange idea that somehow one could find therein dominical material

untouched by the very Christians who produced the texts. 43 Second, it committed the fallacy of

parallelomania, a term coined by Samuel Sandmel in his 1961 presidential address to the

Society of Biblical Literature. 44 Parallelomania proceeds on the supposition that presenting

formal similarities between two entities is sufficient to demonstrate that one is an instance of the

other, a supposition the fallacy of which should be sufficiently obvious that refutation would

constitute mere pedantry. 45 Thus, yes, there is material in the gospels that looks similar to that

which is found in the Jewish wisdom tradition or the Greek Cynic tradition, and yes, one can

develop sophisticated techniques by which to eliminate from the database countervailing data,

but that does not establish that Jesus was a wisdom teacher or a Cynic.

The third reason that this debate was fruitless is even more basic: it treated as

contradictories what are in fact contraries. Eschatology and wisdom coexist quite well within the

42
For a recent overview of this debate, albeit one that is marred by a tendency to conflate the categories of
apocalyptic and eschatology, cf. Richard Horsley, The Prophet Jesus and the Renewal of Israel: Moving Beyond a
Diversionary Debate (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2012), 9-64.
43
The most elaborate example of such method is that of Crossan, Historical Jesus, of which writes Ben F.
Meyer, review of John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Peasant, Catholic
Biblical Quarterly 55/3 (1993): 575-576: [h]istorical inquiry, with its connotations of a personal wrestling with
evidence, is not to be found. There are no recalcitrant data, no agonizing reappraisals. All is aseptic, the data having
been freeze-dried, prepackaged, and labelled with literary flair. Instead of an inquiry, what we have here is simply
the proposal of a bright idea. But, as Bernard Lonergan used to say, bright ideas are a dime a dozenestablishing
which of them are true is what separates the men from the boys. The data is thus mishandled and history not to be
found because Crossan has not grasped the full reality that one cannot divorce the dominical from the ecclesiastical.
44
Samuel Sandmel, Parallelomania, Journal of Biblical Literature 81/1 (1962): 1-13.
45
If it is not, in addition to Sandmels critique, cf. David Hackett Fischer, Historians Fallacies: Towards a
Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper, 1970), 255-257. Let it suffice to observe that the fallacy consists
fundamentally of a failure to recognize that form is not identical to substance, such that two entities can look much
alike without being the same.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 15

same material. Consider Wisdom of Solomon 1-5, for instance: this is an exemplar of Jewish

eschatology, embedded within a text with wisdom in its very name. Or consider the hymn to

wisdom in 1 Enoch 42. Or the combination of eschatological and wisdom themes in Romans 1.

One could elaborate, but the above would seem sufficient to sustain the conclusion that the

eschatology-Jesus versus wisdom-Jesus debate was always already predicated upon a false

dichotomy. We might even be able to enrich this insight by suggesting that there was operative

in early Judaism and thus patterning Jesuss horizon what Doran has identified as a dialectic of

culture, the poles of which are cosmology and anthropology: 46 wisdom thematizes the

cosmological convictions about how the world operates whilst eschatology thematizes the

anthropological reality that these convictions do not always correspond to the actual operations

of the world. As a dialectic of contraries the intellectual task is not to opt for the one over the

other but rather to consider how both can and indeed must be affirmed at the same time.

As an alternative to the fruitless struggle over the wisdom-Jesus versus the

eschatological-Jesus I would suggest that we can more properly infer from the data that Jesus

had an experience of salvation. This experience led him to recognize errors of cosmology and

anthropology in his situation. A systematic theologian might shudder at the notion that the God-

man Jesus experienced salvation, although Eric Mabrys recent argument to this august body that

Jesus not only grew in knowledge but also had a perfect beatific vision of God might offer a

framework in which to construe this experience. 47 I mention Mabrys excellent work not to make

a systematic-theological claim about Jesuss nature (such would lie quite far outside my area of

functional specialty) but rather to observe that there are ways of integrating the notion that Jesus

46
Doran, Theology and the Dialectics of History, 473-558.
47
Eric Mabry, How the God-Man? Being and Becoming in the Historical Life of Jesus Christ?, presented
to the Lonergan Research Institute, Regis College, Toronto, February 27, 2015.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 16

had an experience of salvation into our historical narrative without forcing the Christian into an

untenable and unnecessary position of deciding between history and faith.

The insights derived from Jesuss experience of salvation were the source both of his

critique against the powers-that-be and his effort to construct a group that lived out the

corrections of these errors. This critique and effort were inevitably communicated using the

resources of his particular horizon. This horizon was probably not far from that of the later

Hebraioi, and was one deeply immersed in the Jewish tradition, especially the prophetic

tradition. 48 It was communicated to others, thus necessitating operations of transposition already

in Jesuss ministry. Most basically, Jesus had to find ways to communicate to those who had not

had his experience of salvation the insights that he had derived therefrom. Moreover, we cannot

take for granted that everyone among Jesuss followers operated within identical horizons, and

indeed one can well imagine that the Pharisee Nicodemus differed markedly in this regard from

the Galilean fisherman Simon Peter, and the horizons of the women in his circle from those of

the men. Regardless, Jesuss transpositional activities had demonstrable impact, effecting

followers, friends, and foes. 49 Some among the latter group eventually brought about his

48
The Jewish-ness of Jesus and his ministry has become axiomatic among practitioners of what N.T.
Wright has dubbed the Third Quest for the Historical Jesus, and it is worth noting that N.T. Wright, introduction
to Aims of Jesus, 9a-9l, here p. 9e, has stated that his very idea of a Third Quest almost certainly came from Ben
Meyers careful distinction [in Aims of Jesus] between what he was doing and what the New [or Second] Quest
had done. This is a far cry from the Second or New Quest which, dominated by the criteria of dissimilarity
(which stated that those things in the gospels that cannot be said to have derived from either Judaism or subsequent
Christianity are those that can with the greatest confidence be deemed authentic), invariably created a Jesus at home
in neither Judaism nor Christianity. Such a Jesus is many things, but historically intelligible is not one of them, and
the Third Quest in practice operates with an almost inverse supposition to the New Quest, namely that the Jesus that
can most readily account for the movement from Judaism to Christianity is to be preferred. To more fully understand
how revolutionary a thoroughly Jewish Jesus truly is, cf. Susannah Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus
(Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998) and Susannah Heschel, The Aryan Jesus: Christian Theologians
and the Bible in Nazi Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
49
Cf. Larry Hurtado and Chris Keith, eds., Jesus among Friends and Enemies (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker
Publishing, 2011); Meier, Marginal Jew, 3: passim.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 17

untimely demise, whilst some among the former two groups proceeded to bring about this thing

that we call Christianity.

The Ecclesiastical Setting

Let us return to Meyers distinction between the Hebraioi and Hellnistai, which, as noted, he

derived from Acts. It would seem that Lukes distinction 50 between the Hebraioi and Hellnistai

constitutes an effort to simplify for thematic purposes an even greater cultural and linguistic

diversity present from the founding moments of the Jerusalem community. As such we need to

achieve greater clarity on this matter, lest the distinction between the Hebraioi and the

Hellnistai be transmuted retrogressively back into the quasi-Hegelian opposition between

Petrine and Pauline Christianity developed by Ferdinand Christian Baur 51 and subsequently

appropriated in one form or another as the foundational framework of early Christian studies into

the 21st century.

Baur reduced the marked diversity of early Christianity to two opposed and functionally

uniform factions divided from one another, thus for all functional purposes obviating the very

conditions for diversity. Baurs failure in this regard was a consequence of a failure to

distinguish conceptually between on the one hand diversity and division and on the other

between unity and uniformity; Meyer however made central to his account of early Christianity

precisely such a distinction. 52 Returning to the language introduced from Doran, diversity and

unity are characteristic of contraries: diversity refers to the contrasting entities, whereas unity

50
Although not undisputed it is a scholarly commonplace to assume that the writer of Lukes Gospel is to
be identified with the writer of the Acts of the Apostles.
51
Ferdinand Christian Baur, The Church History of the First Three Centuries (2 vols.; trans. Allan
Menzies; London: Williams and Norgate, 1878-1879 [1853]).
52
Meyer, Christus Faber, 159-161.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 18

refers to the higher synthesis by which one might resolve the contrast. Division and uniformity

are characteristic of contradictions: division refers to the contradicting entities and uniformity

refers to the reality that only by obviating difference can divided entities find resolution. For

Baur Petrine and Pauline Christianity were fundamentally divided from each other. This is

evident in his account of the emergence of what a later generation would come to call early

Catholicism. 53 Lacking the conceptual distinction between unity and uniformity, Baur can

conceive of union between Petrine and Pauline Christianity only if each abandoned precisely

what made them distinctive. Neither then can Baur conceive of genuine diversity in the apostolic

generation, as for all his vaunted Hegelianism he cannot think in a robustly dialectical form. 55

By contrast, although Early Christians was written before Theology and the Dialectics of

History and thus Meyer lacked Dorans verbal distinction between contradictories and contraries,

functionally Meyer treated the distinction between the Hebraioi and the Hellnistai as a dialectic

of contraries, Christian identity being the higher synthesis upon which the resolution of

difference is achieved. For Meyer, there were in Christianity always already distinct articulations

of a diverse yet united church, such that change over time was not the dissolution of division into

uniformity but rather shifts in an ever-present diversity and an ever-present unity. This was, as

intimated above, already the case during Jesuss ministry, for his followers were hardly a

53
Cf. the discussion in Meyer, Some Consequences of Birger Gerhardssons Account.
55
This error is compounded in the quite influential yet irredeemably flawed work of Walter Bauer,
Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (trans. Philadelphia Seminar on Christian Origins; Philadelphia, PA:
Fortress Press, 1971 [1934]), who argued that the catholicity of the church was a late development, proceeded by
divided ecclesiastical communities each with their own distinctive theologies. Whilst this might conceptually
(although certainly not empirically) serve to account for the second and third centuries upon which Bauer was
focused it cannot easily serve to account for the first, as was attempted by James M. Robinson and Helmut Koester,
Trajectories through Early Christianity (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1971). An united but diverse movement
initiated by Jesus of Nazareth and leading to an united but diverse first- through fourth- century Christianity is not
only a better fit with the data but also notably more parsimonious than an united but diverse movement initiated by
Jesus of Nazareth leading to a movement divided between uniform first- through third- century Christianities leading
to an united yet diverse fourth-century Christianity. Cf. the critique of the Bauer thesis advanced by Thomas A.
Robinson, The Bauer Thesis Examined: The Geography of Heresy in the Early Christian Church (Lewiston, NY:
Edwin Mellen Press, 1988), which is based upon a doctoral dissertation completed under Ben Meyers supervision.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 19

homogenous lot. Of course Meyer recognizes that such unity was not a given but rather

something to be strived towards, and on this he has the entirety of the New Testament on his

side: recurrently we see in the Acts and the Letters (Pauline, Deutero-Pauline, and Catholic) an

active effort to negotiate diversity so as to maintain unity.

One does not want to be overly schematic, however, and insist that the Hebraioi and the

Hellnistai constituted the only horizons of note in early Christianity. Indeed, the data suggest a

diversity in notable excess of those two horizons. The Acts account of the first Christian

Pentecost signals that Luke himself was aware that early ecclesiastical diversity encompassed

also Jewish persons from Parthia, Medea, Elam, Mesopotamia, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia,

Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Cyrenaica, Rome, Crete, and Arabia (cf. 2:8-11). Indeed, it seems

hardly insignificant that Acts presents the first Christian outreach in terms of a miraculous

translation into a multitude of languages, and we should do well to interpret this as a

retrospective awareness that already the Christians of the first decade had to articulate an identity

comprehensible within a diversity of horizons; the tendency to date Acts late and view it as at

best a legendary and romanticized account of Christian origins 56 thus loses one of the most

powerful sets of evidence for early Christian diversity. By recognizing that early Christian

diversity exceeded from the beginning the Hebraioi and the Hellnistai we can move beyond the

Petrine-Pauline binary that was integral and indispensable to the Baur paradigm, and by this

recognition accomplish more fully than did Baur what he himself set out to do, namely to

describe early Christianity as a pluriform entity.

56
As seen in recent studies such as Todd C. Penner, In Praise of Christian Origins: Stephen and the
Hellenists in Lukan Apologetic Historiography (London: T&T Clark, 2004); Richard I. Pervo, Acts: A Commentary
(Hermeneia: Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2009).
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 20

Yet the Baur paradigm, in its century-long breakdown, did come to recognize that there

were from the off more than two horizons within early Christianity. It articulated this in terms of

what I have elsewhere designated as community criticism, 57 i.e. the methodical supposition

that each gospel was produced by and for a single community (a term typically left undefined),

such that, alongside a distinct Petrine and a distinct Pauline Christianity, we can think in terms of

a distinct Matthean Christianity, 58 a distinct Markan Christianity, 59 a distinct Lukan

Christianity, 60 a distinct Johannine, 61 even a Q Christianity. 62 Such supposition, once taken as a

given within gospel studies, has come under sharp attack since the 1998 publication of Richard

Bauckhams edited volume, The Gospels for All Christians. 63 Here we can add to this critique,

57
Bernier, Aposynaggos, 5-7.
58
Cf. J. Andrew Overman, Matthews Gospel and Formative Judaism: The Social World of the Matthean
Community (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 1990); Anthony Saldarini, Matthews Christian-Jewish Community
(Chicago, IL: Chicago, 1994); David C. Sim, The Gospel of Matthew and Christian Judaism: The History and
Social Setting of the Matthean Community (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1998); Graham Stanton, A Gospel for a New
People: Studies in Matthew (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1992).
59
Cf. Howard Clark Kee, Community of the New Age: Studies in Marks Gospel (Philadelphia, PA:
Westminster Press, 1977); Willi Marxsen, Mark The Evangelist: Studies on the Redaction History of the Gospel
(trans. by J. Boyce, D. Juel, W. Poehlmann and R.A. Harrisville; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1969); Ched Myers,
Binding the Strong Man: A Political Reading of Marks Story of Jesus (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1994);
Theodore J. Weeden, Sr., Mark: Traditions in Conflict (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1971).
60
Cf. Philip Francis Esler, Community and Gospel in Luke-Acts: The Social and Political Motivations of
Lucan Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
61
Raymond E. Brown, The Community of the Beloved Disciple: The Life, Loves, and Hates of an
Individual Church in New Testament Times (New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1979); Oscar Cullmann, The Johannine
Circle (trans. John Bowden; Philadelphia, PA: Westminster Press, 1976); R. Alan Culpepper, The Johannine
School: An Evaluation of the Johannine-School Hypothesis Based on an Investigation of the Nature of Ancient
Schools (Missoula, MO: Scholars Press, 1975); J. Louis Martyn, History and Theology in the Fourth Gospel (3rd ed.;
Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox, 2003 [1968]).
62
John S. Kloppenborg Verbin, Excavating Q: The History and Setting of the Sayings Gospel
(Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000), 329-408.
63
Richard Bauckham, ed., The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences (Grand Rapids,
MI: Eerdmans, 1998). For responses, positive and negative, to this critique, cf. Bernier, Aposynaggos; Philip F.
Esler, A Response to Richard Bauckhams Gospels for All Christians, Scottish Journal of Theology 51 (1998):
235-248; Tobias Hgerland, Johns Gospel: A Two-Level Drama? Journal for the Study of the New Testament
25/3 (2003): 309-322; Thomas Kazen, Sectarian Gospels for Some Christians? Intention and Mirror Reading in the
Light of Extra-Canonical Texts, New Testament Studies 51 (2005): 561-578; Edward W. Klink III, ed., The
Audience of the Gospels: The Origin and Functions of the Gospels in Early Christianity (London: T&T Clark,
2010); Edward W. Klink III, The Sheep of the Fold: The Audience and Origin of the Gospel of John (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007); Margaret M. Mitchell, Patristic Counter-Evidence to the Claim that the
Gospels Were Written for All Christians, New Testament Studies 51 (2005): 36-79; David C. Sim, The Gospels
for All Christians? A Response to Richard Bauckham, Journal for the Study of the New Testament 84 (2001): 3-27.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 21

observing that in practice community criticism obviated diversity by supposing that each

community was constituted by a single horizon and thus uniform, whilst it obviated the unity

indicated by such texts as Acts 2 by supposing that these communities were in effect

hermetically-sealed from each other such that a single document could represent its Christianity

en toto.

Community criticism had a further consequence. In conceiving of the objects of the

gospels as the uniform communities from which they putatively derived, and conceiving as these

communities as hermetically-sealed off from other such communities, the gospels can have no

common object. Yet it is precisely the supposition that each of the gospels takes as it object Jesus

of Nazareth that makes historical Jesus studies a possibility. Thus community criticism is not

only empirically and conceptually unsound but an insurmountable conceptual barrier to the study

of the historical Jesus. As an alternative I would, taking a cue from Meyers former student,

Thomas A. Robinson, advance what one might call a Great Church Model. 64

Although Robinsons account would probably be all the stronger if he employed his

Doktorvaters heuristic distinction between unity and uniformity and diversity and division, and

indeed it is somewhat surprising that he fails to cite Meyer even once in the study under

discussion, nonetheless his description of the church in Antioch should not only be affirmed but

be taken as representative of early Christianity as a whole. Rather than uniform communities

divided from one another what we find are internally-diverse churches striving towards unity

within themselves and with one another. Thus can Paul understand that the conflicts facing the

Corinthian Christians are taking place within their own community, not between themselves and

64
Thomas A. Robinson, Ignatius of Antioch and the Parting of the Ways: Early Jewish-Christian Relations
(Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishing, 2009), 76-85.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 22

another; 65 thus can Clement of Rome assume the same not much later; 66 thus can the writer(s) of

1 and 2 John write as if Docetism is a live issue in the communities to which he is (or they are)

writing (cf. 1 John 4:2; 2 John 7), most likely in Asia Minor; 67 thus can Ignatius of Antioch write

as if his docetic and Judaizing Christian opponents exist in Asia Minor not as distinct

communities on to themselves but rather as members of the very same communities as non-

docetic and non-Judaizing Christians; 68 thus can Valentinus, who later comes to be defined as a

Gnostic arch-heretic, be almost elected bishop of Rome. 69

There are of course demonstrable instances of schism. Yet as Robinson observes, those

groups that are known to have broken fellowship with the wider Christian community (the

65
Indeed, 1 Cor. 1:12 necessarily supposes that this is the case, when Paul writes that leg de touto hoti
hekastos hymn legei: eg men eimi Paulou, eg de Apoll, eg de Kphas, eg de Christou (I say this because
some of you say: I am of Paul, or I am of Apollos, or I am of Cephas [Peter], or I am of Christ). If this
provides warrant, as Baur argued, for detecting the presence of distinct Pauline and Petrine Christianities in Corinth
then it would seem that Paul writes to both factions as if they are members of a single church of God in Corinth
(cf. 1:1-2); and given his emphasis upon unity it would then follow that he is writing to negotiate the division
between these Christianities.
66
I am inclined to see the Corinthian conflict that led Clement to write to Corinth as a later stage in the
conflicts addressed by Paul; that is, having failed to heed Pauls warning the Corinthians have come to find
themselves in yet-greater disarray. Regardless, Clement seems to have no conception of there being more than one
Christian community in Corinth, and sees the power struggle that has recently ousted certain leaders and installed
new ones not as the creation of a new community but rather as dynamic (and unwelcome) transformations in an
existing and singular one. That I judge 1 Clement to date from c. 70 rather than c. 90 makes this reconstruction more
plausible, but such a date is not in fact a necessary condition for affirming the reconstruction. On the dating of 1
Clement, cf. Andrew Gregory, Disturbing Trajectories: 1 Clement, the Shepherd of Hermas and the Development
of Early Roman Christianity, 142-166, esp. 144-149; John A.T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (London:
SCM Press, 1976), 327-333.
67
Paul Trebilco, The Early Christians in Ephesus from Paul to Ignatius (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2007 [2004]), 263-273, convincingly argues that the Letters were most likely written from Ephesus to a network of
house churches located throughout Asia Minor, probably in the latter third of the first century (I find myself unable
to rule out a date somewhat earlier than Trebilcos c. 90-100 for the composition of the Letters).
68
Cf. the discussion in Robinson, Ignatius of Antioch, 76-85.
69
In his definitive study of the early development of Roman Christianity Peter Lampe, From Paul to
Valentinus: Christians at Rome in the First Two Centuries (trans. Michael Steinhauser; ed. Marshall D. Johnson;
Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003 [1989]), 385-396, argues that with the notable exception of the Marcionites
the second-century Roman church evinced a marked tolerance towards a wide range of theological diversity. Lampe,
From Paul to Valentinus, 390-391, further argues that until the latter end of Victors episcopacy (189-199 C.E.)
Justin stands alone as a Roman critic of the Valentinians. Edwards, Catholicity and Heresy, 11-78, will go a step
further and argue that the theologians now known as Gnostics, Valentinus included, were in fact integral to the
development of the Christian orthodoxy of c. 200 C.E. and later, for even as the Great Church opted against their
theologies it nonetheless assimilated that which it could from their efforts at rendering the Christian faith
intellectually intelligible.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 23

Marcionites and the Montanists in the second century, perhaps the secessionists in 1-3 John)70

nonetheless found their genesis within the Great Church. 71 Thus we are driven back towards the

Meyerian language introduced in this study, inferring from the above discussion that whilst the

early communities were diverse in their articulation of the Christian experience of salvation

nonetheless that very experience drove a concern to build and maintain a common identity. That

concern perhaps did not always bear fruit as well as it might have, but failure to accomplish an

aim is not the same as the aims absence. And among the various Christian efforts to translate the

experience of salvation in ways that were understandable within their respective horizons stand

the gospels.

The Evangelical Setting

If the early communities were internally diverse in their articulation of the Christian experience

of salvation and if that experience drove a concern to build and maintain unity then we should

consider how each gospel communicates the experience of salvation from within its writers or

writers horizon or horizons whilst evincing a cognizance of other horizons in which this same

experience might also be articulated. To this end it is not without interest that we learn from

70
It is not altogether clear that secession has in fact occurred within the churches to which 1-3 John are
addressed. Yes, people have gone out from those churches (1 John 2:18-19): but did they go out in order to set up
their own, competing, Christian communities, or have they left Christianity altogether? Yes, Diotrephes will not
acknowledge the Elders authority or welcome any of the brothers or sisters (3 John 9-10), but the very fact that the
Elder still thinks that he should have authority over Diotrephes would suggest that he does not envision Diotrephes
as belonging to a separate ekklsia. Indeed, given Johns statement in 3 John 9, intimating that he has written to the
church but Diotrephes has somehow interfered with this communication, combined with the fact that he is writing
directly to Gaius (v. 1), it might well be most judicious to read 3 John as indicative of a power struggle within a
particular community of the Johannine networkof which Diotrephes and Gaius each happen to be members
rather than a conflict between communities. Thus on this point I disagree with Brown, Beloved Disciple, 93-144, for
whom the putative evidence of schism and secession within 1-3 John was central to his highly influential history of
Johannine Christianity. Cf. the excellent discussion of these matters in Trebilco, Ephesus, 273-291.
71
Robinson, Ignatius of Antioch, 77-78.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 24

Papias of Hierapolis, writing perhaps c. 120, that Mark became Peters interpreter 72 and wrote

down accurately whatever he said, 73 a report that later second-century sources supplement with

the information that it was at Rome where Peter taught and Mark wrote. 74 From this we might

infer that Mark was engaged in the work of the inter-horizontal transmission of the Christian

experience of salvation from its initial Aramaic situation into that of the Christians in Rome.

Even without such data on the origin of Marks Gospel the frequent semitisms in that text should

suffice to suggest a situation in which he stands between on the one hand Aramaic- speaking or

Hebraic- speaking Christians (and what should we call these but Hebraioi?) and on the other

Greek-speaking ones (and what should we call these but Hellnistai?).

Papias further informs us that Matthew collected the [Lords] words in the Hebrew

language, 75 and each one interpreted 76 them as best he could. 77 Again, we find the idea of inter-

horizontal translation, from the Hebrew language or dialect to that of two or more (each one)

72
Gr. hermuts; alternatively, translator.
73
Apud Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.15. Cf. the recent discussions of this passage in Monte A. Shanks, Papias
and the New Testament (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 119-203; Francis Watson, Gospel Writing: A
Canonical Perspective (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013, 121-132. Cf. the slightly older discussion in Richard
Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans,
2006), 202-239.
74
Cf. Clement of Alexandria, apud Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 6.14.6; Irenaeus, Adv. Haer. 3.1.1. Although the
Roman origin of Marks Gospel can be disputed, with Alexandria emerging as a significant competitor (on the basis
of Egyptian Christian traditions about Marks association with the city; on this cf. Thomas C. Oden, The African
Memory of Mark: Reassessing Early Church Tradition [Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2011]), the earliest
data regarding gospel origins is unequivocal in understanding Marks Gospel as the result of the work entailed in
transposing the gospel from one cultural and linguistic milieu into another.
75
Hebraidi dialekt; alternatively, Hebrew dialect.
76
Hrmneusen; alternatively, translated.
77
Apud Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.39.16. Watson, Gospel Writing, 125-129, argues that Papias was aware that
Matthew wrote to correct defects that he detected in Marks gospel: in order words, he was aware of what we now
call Markan Priority. This requires us to construe Hebraidi dialekt not as a reference to the language of the text,
either Aramaic or Hebrew, but rather to a Hebraic manner of communication. It is tantalizing to consider the
possibility that in using the term Hebraidi dialekt Papias has in mind the Hebraioi as a distinct group; Freyne,
Jesus Movement, 225-226, observes that Hebraioi functions in early Christian literature in much this fashion, using
examples such as Phil. 3:5 and 2 Cor. 11:22, and to this one might add the traditional title of the Letter to the
Hebrews, Pros Hebraious. Hebrais and Hebraios might well in early Christianity have functioned as semi-technical
terms to refer to a distinct group associated with the Jerusalem church during the apostolic and sub-apostolic
periods. That Papias is referring to the communicative style of such a group perhaps finds confirmation in Irenaeus,
Adv. Haer. 3.1.1., the relevant Greek of which is cited in Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 5.8.2, wherein we are told that
Matthew wrote his gospel en tois Hebraiois t idia autn dialetkt, among the Hebraioi in their own dialect.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 25

other horizons; and, again, even without the Papian material the fact that Matthews Gospel is

simultaneously immersed deeply in the Judaism of the land even as it is written in Greek and

evinces awareness of a Gentile mission (cf. 28:19) would seem to suggest that we are dealing

with something that aims to negotiate between differing horizons. Lukes manifest universalism

and his concern to present Peter, Paul, and other leaders from the apostolic generation as seeking

an unity among their diverse articulations of Christianity likewise evinces an aim to negotiate

within his Doppelwerk the horizons endemic to the early church, as do Johns simultaneous

awareness of the realia of ancient Palestine and remarkable fluency with the language of Greek

thought and culure. The gospels should be seen as efforts at negotiating ecclesiastical diversity,

rather than examples of ecclesiastical division.

Such negotiation is possible because there was in early Christianity a principle of unity,

one grounded in the collective experience of salvation. Each gospel is equally an effort to

articulate the same conviction that in Jesus the God of Israel is doing something new and

salvific. Each articulation is different because the human species operates within a diversity of

horizons. This leads directly to a new way of formulating the historical-Jesus question, one to be

asked about each gospel and in theory every early Christian text that might have bearing on the

matter: who must Jesus have been to effect this experience of salvation as articulated in this

respective gospel in these terms drawn from these horizons?

From Effect to Effect

The account above progressed from the dominical setting through the ecclesiastical and then to

the evangelical. This is because it was the dominical setting that birthed the ecclesiastical and the

ecclesiastical the evangelical. Procedurally however, when we want to understand the dominical,
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 26

which is the object of historical Jesus studies, we need to begin with the evangelical setting,

which is most immediate to our most relevant data (i.e. the gospels), move to the less proximate

ecclesiastical setting, and on to the even-less-proximate dominical. Put otherwise, if the

dominical effected the ecclesiastical and the ecclesiastical the evangelical then our task is to

work our way back to the dominical by way of these sequential effects.

Within a Lonerganian framework however one should always seek to anchor an argument

in the concrete, and as such let us consider a particular case study, viz. the Sending(s) of the

Twelve and the Seventy(-two). The Sending of the Twelve appears in each of the three

Synoptics: Mt. 10:5-15, Mk. 6:6-13; Lk. 9:1-6. In these passages Jesus gathers together the

Twelve, in each gospel constituted earlier in the narrative as a group (cf. Mt. 10:1-4; Mk. 3:13-

19; Lk. 6:12-16), and commands them to go through the villages proclaiming his message. The

sending of the Seventy(-Two) appears only in Lk. 10:1-12, wherein much of the charge given by

Jesus to the Twelve in Matthew has now been relocated as a charge to seventy (or seventy-two,

depending upon textual witness) disciples. The numbers Twelve and Seventy(-Two) constitute

theological schema that represent respectively all Israel and all the nations, the former evincing

the Synoptists collective interest in situating Jesuss ministry as a movement aimed at the

restoration of Israel and the latter representing Lukes particular interest to situate Jesuss

ministry as the seedbed for the Gentile mission.

It can be inferred from the above evangelical facts that the Synoptic Gospels were as a

group produced in a situation wherein there was an active mission to the Jewish people and

Lukes Gospel in a situation wherein there was also an active mission to the Gentiles; that

Matthew was also aware of a mission to the Gentiles can be inferred from Jesuss command to

the disciples in 28:19, viz. that they should make disciples of all nations (panta ta ethn). What
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 27

we are beginning to define here are the situations in which the respective evangelists went about

their work, and what horizons and experiences of salvation were operative in said situations.

Luke is particularly elucidating, and this precisely because of what under the reign of

source criticism would be categorized as a doublet. For source criticism the existence of the

Lukan doublet would indicate a textual difficulty, to be resolved by introducing the hypothesis of

a prior source. Redaction criticism would later recognize that such a hypothesis does not in fact

resolve the problem as one must still account for why the evangelist choose to incorporate both

stories from his sources. For the exegete proper the theory of a hypothetical source redacted into

the text adds nothing, for the question Why does the Lukan gospel have two accounts? cannot

be answered with reference to prior texts, given that Luke by no means slavishly follows those of

his sources that are extant to us (which almost certainly included Marks gospel, and possibly

Matthews; despite rhetoric to the contrary, Q is not an extant text).78 More fundamentally, the

accounts do not constitute a doublet at all, for the symbolic import of each is markedly distinct. I

would suggest that in fact what is occurring here is that Luke is undertaking to transpose the

experience of salvation that effected and was effected by mission from its initial articulation

within the horizon or horizons that were characteristic of the mission to the Jewish people into a

new articulation within the horizon or horizons that were characteristic of the mission to the

Gentiles: in nuce, he is translating the idiom of the Hebraioi into the idiom of the Hellnistai.

78
This despite the illusion of solidity provided by James M. Robinson, Paul Hoffmann, and John S.
Kloppenborg, eds., The Critical Edition of Q (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2000); for a direct critique of the
methods used suppositions supposed in the production of this 600-page chimera, cf. Mark Goodacre, When is a
Text Not a Text? The Quasi Text-Critical Approach of the International Q Project, in Mark Goodacre and Nicholas
Perrin, eds., Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 115-126.
In addition to co-editing Questioning Q, Mark Goodacre, The Case Against Q (London: T&T Clark, 2003) is
responsible more than any other scholar for the recent dethronement of the Markan Priority with Q hypothesis from
its hegemony over synoptic source criticism and the ascendance of Mark Priority without Q (i.e. Mark wrote first,
Matthew used his gospel, and Luke used both Marks and Matthews) to the position of leading competitor. Cf.
further the more recent and excellent critique of Markan Priority with Q in Watson, Gospel Writing, 117-155.
Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 28

This brings us to the dominical setting, about which the question is now What did Jesus

do to effect the apostolic missions? Surely the best answer is that Jesus actively engaged in

missionary activity himself, and moreover likely instructed his disciples to do likewise, thus

establishing a pattern of practice that would lead first to the mission to the Jewish people and

subsequently to the mission to the Gentiles. If it is argued that the very idea of mission was a

wholly post-dominical development then one must ask How so the transformation from a

movement lacking any missionary impulse to one defined fundamentally by said impulse? One

might suggest that the Easter experience is sufficient to account for this transformation, but one

would want yet to ask why the Christians responded to this experience with mission and

precisely mission, especially if their Master have evinced no missionary impulse whatsoever

(and indeed wonders how, if Jesus undertook no missionary activities, they came to see him as

Master in the first place). If however mission was not just something Jesus did but moreover

something characteristic of his operations then their turn to mission becomes perfectly

intelligible; indeed, it would not necessarily even constitute a turn, as they would have already

been involved with mission through their association with Jesus, but rather a new development

within an already-existing pattern of operations.

This leads however to a yet further question: what accounts for Jesuss turn to mission?

That could constitute an extended study in its own right, but for here let it suffice to suggest that

we can best account for Jesuss turn to mission by reference to his own experience of salvation.

It was this experience that motivated him to move outside himself, to articulate what he had

learned to others. In the approach to early Christianity outlined here this experience was the

cornerstone upon which the foundation was laid.

Bernier, Ben F. Meyer and the Renewed Quest 29

Conclusion

This paper aimed to build upon the advance in historical Jesus studies represented by the recent

work of James Dunn and those who have already built upon that work. It has done so by turning

its attention to the work of Ben F. Meyer, upon which Dunn himself built, as well as that of

Bernard Lonergan, upon which Meyer built. This advance turns upon the recognition that whilst

one can speak of disparate settings for the Jesus tradition all these settings are effected by the

early Christian experience of salvation, which is in turn effected by Jesuss own experience of

salvation. By gaining insight into the experience of salvation articulated by the evangelists we

gain insight into the early Christian experience of salvation and thus into its ecclesiastical setting;

by gaining insight into the early Christian experience of salvation within its ecclesiastical setting

we gain insight into the dominical operations and experience of salvation that effected the

ecclesiastical setting in the first place. By moving from effect to effect we overcome the

deleterious consequences of the rupture hypothesis, which has too long isolated the historical

Jesus from the study of the church that came after him.