I finished Ben Witherington III's The Christology of Jesus. In this post, I'll highlight what Witherington says on page 276:
"Material
in the Synoptics hints that Jesus had a transcendent self-image
amounting to no more than a unique awareness of the Divine. If,
however, one means by divine awareness something that suggests either
that Jesus saw himself as the whole or exclusive representation of the
Godhead or that he considered himself in a way that amounted to the
rejection of the central tenet of Judaism, (i.e., monotheism), then the
answer must be no. Jesus clearly prayed to a God he called abba, which excludes the idea that Jesus thought he was abba. Jesus' affirmation of monotheism seems clear (e.g., Mark 10:17-18; Matt. 23:9)."
What
I expected when I picked up this book was for Witherington to argue via
scholarly argumentation that Jesus viewed himself as God. That would
give strength to C.S. Lewis' Lord-liar-lunatic trilemma, which states
that Jesus either was God as he claimed, or he was a liar or a madman,
and, since the latter two were not the case (since Jesus said and did
things that were good and that made a degree of sense), we must conclude
that he was God. But Witherington did not argue that Jesus saw himself
as God. He contended that Jesus may have regarded himself as a shaliach,
a person with divine authority; that Jesus viewed himself as a special
son of God in the sense that he was the Messiah (for the Davidic kings
were considered sons of God); that Jesus believed his death would atone
for sins; and that Jesus thought he was wisdom incarnate. But those
were different from Jesus viewing himself as God.
But would the
Lord-liar-lunatic trilemma still work, since, even in Witherington's
scenario, Jesus had an exalted conception of himself? That depends on
how unusual such a conception was in ancient Judaism. Jesus was not the
only one who was regarded as a shaliach, nor was he the
only person who thought he was the Messiah. Jesus also may not have been unique
in believing that his death would atone for people's sins, for there was
a belief in ancient Judaism that the death of the righteous could bring
vicarious atonement. Witherington does argue that Jesus was unique in
seeing himself as wisdom incarnate, but I don't see why that would be an
unthinkable leap from Jesus' other exalted conceptions of himself.
Jesus could have easily gone from viewing himself as the shaliach
and as the Messiah, to seeing himself as wisdom itself. And, just
because Jesus saw himself in such terms, that doesn't mean he was
accurate, for others in ancient Judaism made exalted claims about
themselves. Were they right?
(UPDATE: I wrote this post a while back, and I've already turned
Witherington's book back into the library. As I think back, I don't
remember if Witherington talked much about people who had an exalted
SELF-conception in ancient Judaism. Rather, if my memory is correct, he
discussed exalted conceptions that people had about others----that
another person could be a shaliach, or could die for others' sins.
My impression is that Witherington still felt that these conceptions
were relevant to how Jesus saw himself, however, and that Jesus' exalted
self-conception was not unusual in light of these conceptions that were
floating around in his day.)
In my posts on The Christology of Jesus,
I have mentioned Witherington's conclusions, without really going into
how Witherington arrived at them. Witherington does attempt to
establish through scholarly argumentation that Jesus said and did
certain things that are recorded in the synoptic Gospels. My impression
is that, most of the time, he does this by relying on a criterion of
embarrassment, which states that the early church would not have
invented embarrassing things about Jesus, and thus those things were
authentic to Jesus himself. For example, Witherington regards Jesus'
claim to have authority over the Sabbath in Mark 2 to be historical, for
the early church would not invent Jesus making the blooper that
Abiathar was the high priest during David's flight, when Ahimelech was
the priest. That means that Jesus historically believed that he had (an
unprecedented?) authority over the Torah. Witherington believes that
Jesus historically saw himself as the eschatological Son of Man, for
Jesus tells Jewish authorities in Mark 14:62 that they will see the Son
of Man sitting on the right hand of power and coming in the clouds of
heaven (I draw here from the KJV's language). According to
Witherington, the early church would not have invented this, for those
Jewish authorities technically did not see Jesus on the right
hand of power coming in the clouds of heaven. For Witherington, there
is good reason to conclude that Jesus historically had an exalted
self-conception, or Christology.