Author Interview - Tucker Ferda on Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis

Dr. Tucker Ferda takes us through the discoveries he made during the creation of one of our most recently published Library of New Testament Studies works: Jesus, The Gospels and the Galilean Crisis.

 

1. How would you describe this book in one sentence?

This book explores how Jesus, his early followers, and later interpreters, made sense of the rejection of the Gospel, and it suggests that contemporary scholarship continues to repeat the conclusions of 19^th-century and earlier research in important and overlooked ways.

2. What drew you to this subject?

I am fascinated by both the reception history of the Gospels and the attempt to reconstruct Jesus as a figure in history. I am firmly convinced that these two projects go hand in hand such that, as Ricoeur once said, we cannot talk about the past until we talk about ourselves as beings shaped by the past. I also have interests in how Christian theology works in the valleys of disappointment, despair, and trauma. So I guess this book was a melding of all these things.

3. Are there any new discoveries you made while writing your book? What was it like to make a case for a supposedly outdated historical argument?

Yes, indeed. I’ll name one important one here. Like most students, I suppose, I was first exposed to the history of Jesus research by reading what other scholars had to say about earlier research, rather than by reading the original literature on my own. So I was taught to regard the so-called “first quest” for Jesus in the 19^th-century as more qualitatively different than earlier Gospel reading, such that it merited the adjective “first.” But I quickly found in reading Gospel harmonies produced from the 16^th-century to the 19^th that this distinction was a very unfair caricature of the development of biblical criticism. And then, when I started to dig more into the 19^th-century research, I saw that many works, especially before mid-century, were very similar to Gospel harmonies, even repeating many of the same interpretive tropes that emerged from them. I think it is important to name that because it highlights a tendency still very much with us: we make our work look more original and novel by casting earlier research in a negative light. In way, I guess you could say that this project is trying out Augustine’s hermeneutic of charity on old Jesus research.

You’re right: in this book I make a case that this Galilean crisis idea, while significantly flawed, still has much to teach contemporary scholarship. Criticism of the crisis theory in here abounds, to be sure, but I do argue that many of its interpretive decisions merit revisiting. “What was it like” to do that? It might sound trite to say this, but it was really a lot of fun. I enjoyed the challenge of giving old voices a fresh hearing with the benefit of new research, new methodologies, and other insights of recent scholarship. I was also often completely surprised by what I found, since I have been so thoroughly conditioned to think that scholarship is constantly advancing up and forward.

4. What does your book focus on that hasn't been explored elsewhere?

I hope I’m not falling back onto the fetishization of novelty that I think needs critiquing, but I do believe that this book breaks some new ground in Gospel research. Three things stand out. First, I show the impact of the three centuries of Gospel reading and writing before the 19^th-century in more detail than other scholars have and in particular avenues that have not been identified before. One of these, which I hope to explore further in a future study, is the impact of print culture on how people have through and wrote about Jesus. There is much more to be done here. Secondly, I spend some time exploring what a great deal of 20^th-century scholarship has merely assumed or ignored altogether: that Jesus was consistent in message and aim throughout the course of his career. And third, I show that there is much in the Gospel tradition that appears “reactionary” to, what must have been, developments in the ministry. I don’t think we can reconstruct the what and how of those developments with the kind of precision that earlier questers thought. But recognizing some development in Jesus’ reception is important and, I argue, it makes certain legal debates and particular identity constructions (of hearers and opponents) much more intelligible.

5. Do you think the crisis theory will have any relevance in future biblical scholarship?

I do. And not because of the enduring value of my particular arguments—who knows what will become of those. I do because the type of contextualized, concretized thinking that helped produce the crisis idea, and that shaped my own arguments in this book, we are only beginning to discover in biblical studies and in theological studies more broadly. The inclusion of previously marginalized voices in theology has reminded and continues to remind that all theology comes “from somewhere.” And while advancing effort to name and explore the impact of context and setting on theological thought has not involved the historical Jesus himself in any significant way, there is no reason it shouldn’t. The efforts of European Protestants to undermine Church tradition has helped generate this influential narrative that regards the subsequent history of the Church as a gradual and ever-increasing contextualization of an original, pristine, Gospel. The timeless Gospel shapes subsequent life, it is not itself shaped by life at the outset. But the crisis theory leads us to see that Jesus’ own teaching appears forged in the fire of experience, you might say. On that we have much more to learn.

Jesus, the Gospels, and the Galilean Crisis is available to purchase now!