Abstract
This book is an account, from a distinguished scholar of the Gospels, of the myriad ways in which early Christian narrative texts explain the significance of Jesus. Most basically, the book comprises an explication of the Christologies of Q, Mark, Matthew, Luke, John, Gospel of Thomas, Infancy Gospel of Thomas, Protevangelium of James, Gospel of Mary, Gospel of Judas, and Acts of John. Robbins’s overarching claim is that all these texts are responding to the same felt compulsion to explain the religious significance of Jesus in narrative form. He further argues that, in most instances, later Gospels deliberately correct or rewrite the Christologies of earlier Gospels (hence the subtitle of the book). Robbins’s exegesis presupposes the particular model of socio-rhetoricalinterpretation that he has developed in previous studies, but he avoids technical jargon that might trip up readers who are unfamiliar with that methodological discussion.
The book is organized as a diptych, with the first panel representing canonical Christologies and the second panel noncanonical ones. In the first panel: Chapter 1, ‘Are You the One to Come?’, treats the motif of Jesus’s superiority to John the Baptist in Q. Chapter 2, ‘Who Is the Son of Man?’, argues that Q’s eschatological Son of Man becomes identified with the risen Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels. Chapter 3, ‘You Cannot Be the Suffering-Dying Son of Man!’, explicates Mark’s suffering Son of Man Christology and the failure of the Markan disciples to understand it. Chapter 4, ‘You Are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God!’ shows how Matthew expands Mark to paint Jesus as the messiah who comes to teach a gospel Torah. Chapter 5, ‘The Spirit of the Lord ‘Anointed’ Me!’, argues that Luke reinterprets ‘messiah’ or ‘anointed one’ to signify the prophetic anointing of Jesus by the holy spirit. Chapter 6, ‘Sir, Give Us This Bread Always!’, treats Johannine Christology under the rubric of the bread from heaven that gives eternal life.
In the second panel: Chapter 7, ‘My Mouth Is Utterly Unable to Say What You Are Like!’, shows how the Gospel of Thomas undermines antecedent traditions that classified Jesus as a prophet, sage, or deity. Chapter 8, ‘Can Anyone Teach Jesus to Read?’ argues that the Infancy Gospel of Thomas combines Lukan speculation about Jesus’s youth with a Johannine logos Christology. Chapter 9, ‘I’ve Seen a New Miracle!’, reads the Protevangelium of James as an analog to Tatian’s Diatessaron, a harmony of aspects of the four canonical Gospels. Chapter 10, ‘Has the Savior Spoken Secretly to a Woman?’, argues that the Gospel of Mary reworks material from Luke and John to advocate for an alternative anthropology and politics. Chapter 11, ‘You Came from the Immortal Aeon of Barbelo!’, interprets the Gospel of Judas as a witness to Sethian Gnostic Christology, but withholds judgment on the question whether it is Jesus or Judas who enters the cloud at the end of the text. Chapter 12, ‘I Saw You above the Cross of Light!’, argues that the ‘fullness of God’ Christology of the Acts of John is an effort to supersede all antecedent Christologies.
The better to facilitate popular use of the book, each chapter ends with a series of ‘learning activities’ (directed primary text readings with interpretive questions) and additional bibliography. Robbins mentions in the introduction that he has presented the material in this book to seminary classes and church groups, and one gets the sense that he has this audience especially in mind. Even so, I might use Who Do People Say I Am? as a textbook in a university course on early Christology. But I suspect that the book’s most enduring contribution will be that it preserves Vernon Robbins’s incisive commentary on all of these important early christological texts for the benefit of future researchers.