Abstract
The starting point for this study is the way in which various New Testament authors place scriptural verses on the lips of Jesus. The words of Ps 40:6–8 are said to have been spoken by Jesus ‘when he came into the world’ in the Letter to the Hebrews, for instance: ‘Sacrifices and offerings you have not desired, but a body you have prepared for me …’ (Heb 10:5). Bates offers a new solution to this important problem, which has long exercised commentators, suggesting that the first Christians employed a reading technique widespread in antiquity called prosopological or theodramatic exegesis. This interpretative method is rooted in classical Greek drama and rhetoric, in which a speaker could adopt more than one role or persona within a speech, and actors regularly put on a mask or different ‘face’ (prosopon in Greek) to differentiate between characters in performance. In a previous publication (The Hermeneutics of the Apostolic Proclamation: The Center of Paul’s Method of Scriptural Interpretation, Baylor, 2012), Bates outlines more fully what he means by ‘prosopological exegesis,’ and seeks to demonstrate how it was used both by ancient commentators on Homer and by scriptural interpreters like Philo and Paul. Here, he takes his argument further, and relates this reading method to the development of Trinitarian theology.
Bates’s main premise in this volume is that the early Christians imagined the prophets and other leading figures of Old Testament such as David and Moses as having overheard, or even participated in, real heavenly conversations between the divine beings. Their words are regarded, then, as records or anticipations of intimate, personal conversations between the Father, the pre-existent Son, and the Holy Spirit. So, for example, Bates explains the citation of Ps 68:10 at Rom 15:3 (‘For Christ did not please himself, but, as it is written, “The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me …”’) as follows: ‘… Paul reads these words as spoken in the past by David, but nonetheless as containing a real future conversation between the Father and the Son as facilitated by the Spirit that looks backward in time on the crucifixion’ (p. 6).
Bates certainly takes an innovative approach to this aspect of the use of the Old Testament in the New, and he helpfully draws attention to an early Christian tradition of this kind of prosopological exegesis: patristic writers such as Justin Martyr and Origen, for instance, clearly do assume that when the prophets spoke, they were not always voicing their own words or speaking of the present, but could well be uttering words spoken by Christ to God the Father in the past. However, I do not find his claim that this method was practiced also in the first century CE fully convincing, particularly as he does not consider the early Jewish context of the New Testament, which may provide alternative explanations for the attribution of scriptural words to a new speaker. In fact, this phenomenon is widespread in Second Temple Jewish writings like Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities and later rabbinic works such as the Mishnah, and is generally regarded as indicative of an exegetical premise that the meaning of scripture cannot be exhausted and is relevant to an infinite number of future situations.
Bates’s study has clear theological implications, since he argues that the prosopological reading of scripture contributed to the early development of a belief in the divinity of Jesus. Thus he argues, against a number of other leading contemporary scholars of early Christianity such as James Dunn and Bart Ehrman, that the very first Christians came to regard Jesus as a distinct, pre-existent divine being, and indeed, that Jesus himself may have expressed this self-understanding. He provides a useful overview of various current approaches to explaining the development of Trinitarian thought, and is right to stress the need for biblical interpreters and theologians to remain in dialogue, but I find some of Bates’s conclusions in this area rather speculative. He seems to assume without question that the historical Jesus really did say all the scriptural words which are attributed to him in the New Testament, for instance, something which is not widely accepted within critical scholarship. His discussion of the words reportedly spoken by the divine voice at Jesus’ baptism is a case in point: ‘You are my Son the beloved, with you I am well pleased …’ (Mk 1:11; Ps 2:7). For Bates, there is no suggestion that this allusion may have been added by the evangelist to make clear the significance of Jesus, as it is definitely to be taken as ‘… a speech within a speech that was originally spoken by the Son, who was reporting the words the Father had spoken to him at an earlier time …’ (p. 64). Similarly, Bates cannot accept the references to the Psalms in the passion narratives as indicative of a typological reading of scripture, in which the early Christians understood Jesus’ sufferings as following the pattern of the righteous sufferer as exemplified by David. Rather, he argues the psalmist was reporting in advance the actual words that would be spoken by Jesus in his future time of crisis as revealed to him long ago.
In short, Bates tackles an important question in an original way, bringing in relevant information from the Graeco-Roman context of the New Testament, but it seems to me that his approach will only be fully persuasive to those who share the strongly confessional stance which he outlines in his introduction.