Abstract
Maurice Casey offers one of three “big books on Jesus” that hit the market in 2010. This book ably demonstrates the variety and quantity of work being done all at once on the question of the historical Jesus. Casey's proposals regarding Jesus and the Gospels are bold and boldly stated and will need to be addressed in future histories of Jesus.
The twelve chapters comprising the bulk of this book break down into two major sections. In the first, shorter section, Casey provides three chapters that present a history of Jesus research, reliable sources for pursuing the Jesus of history, and the historical method employed throughout the remainder of the book.
The second, longer section comprises nine chapters that assess the historical veracity of various and broad themes and events from the life and teaching of Jesus. Casey provides clear and careful discussions in every chapter. His conclusions, moreover, are neither naïvely credulous nor cynically skeptical. For example, he presents a clear explanation (whether or not readers find it convincing) of why Matthew and Luke (and Gentile Christianity more broadly) began telling stories of Jesus' virgin birth (pp. 145–58), but he accepts the basic thrust of numerous passages (in Mark) that portray Jesus employing written sacred texts in his confrontations with other Jews (pp. 160–62). Casey consistently avoids rejecting the Gospels' portrayal of Jesus simply because that portrayal advances later Christian interests (e.g., illustrating Jesus' rhetorical agility vis-à-vis Jewish leaders), but neither does he accept their portrayals at face value. This way of dealing with the texts (at least, with Mark, Q, Matthew, and, to a lesser extent, Luke) is carried through the entire volume.
Perhaps more importantly, especially for justifying the publication of yet another large Jesus book, Casey consistently avoids simply repeating the “assured results” of New Testament scholarship. However, this means he also advances a number of idiosyncratic theses. For example, Casey accepts Markan priority (pp. 63–64; passim), and he agrees that Matthew and Luke both revised and expanded Mark independently, which means he also accepts a source common to Matthew and Luke other than Mark (or “Q”; pp. 78–80). But in addition to a “chaotic model” of Q (i.e., the Q-material derives from multiple, disparate sources), he argues that some of the “Qs” behind Matthew and Luke were written in Aramaic and translated by or for Matthew and Luke (pp. 82–86). Much more surprisingly, Casey argues that Luke read and perhaps copied directly from Matthew (pp. 93, 99)! He also dates Mark and Matthew very early (c. 40 and 50–60
Certainly this book's most idiosyncratic and thoroughgoing theme is Casey's appeal to and use of Aramaic (and the recovery of Aramaic sources behind the synoptic Gospels and the Q-material) as part of the criterion of historical plausibility (pp. 106–20; passim). Given that he is, arguably, the leading Aramaicist currently active among New Testament scholars, Casey is well-equipped to discuss and to offer hypothetical reconstructions of the Aramaic behind our Greek texts. However, there are a number of problems with these discussions, including Casey's confidence that he has not only identified the Aramaic behind, for example, Mark 2:23 but can also explain how Mark misread and mistranslated his Aramaic source!
More problematic is Casey's easy and frequent appeal to “interference” to explain infelicities in the move from his reconstructed Aramaic source to the actual Greek text. As one example, he accepts as original the variant reading, “And being angry [orgistheis], having stretched out his hand he touched him, and says to him, ‘I am willing, be cleansed’” (Mark 1:41). Casey is confident that Mark's “Aramaic source will have read regaz” (p. 63), which often means “be angry” but also means “tremble” and “be deeply moved.” When Mark translated regaz with the Greek orgistheis, he “was suffering from interference, the influence of one of his languages on another. All bilinguals suffer from interference, especially when they are translating, because the word which causes the interference is in the text which they are translating” (p. 63). So, Casey explains, “in Mark's mind, the Greek word for being angry (orgistheis) also meant ‘tremble’ or ‘be deeply moved’, because this was the range of meaning of the normally equivalent Aramaic word in front of him” (p. 63; emphasis added).
The problems with this as an historical method are legion, but I mention only two. First, Casey nowhere offers any documentation, evidence, or research of any kind to justify and support his appeal to “interference” to explain why, from Mark's perspective but not from ours, orgistheis should seem a perfectly appropriate word to describe Jesus' reaction to the leper in Mark 1. His discussion never identifies conditions that might make interference more likely or that might safeguard against it; readers are left simply with promises that “all bilinguals” have to deal with interference without any idea of how they might do so. Second, Casey speaks too easily about what was going on “in Mark's mind,” especially since he relies on nothing more than Codex Bezae's reading of Mark 1:41 (with support from a handful of Old Latin manuscripts).
There are other problems. For example, Casey consistently speaks of Christianity as early as the late-first century
Of course, we could say much more. These criticisms should suffice, however, to demonstrate that much work remains for those of us interested in Jesus, both his historical reality and his theological significance. But none of these criticisms should obscure the fact that Casey has produced a highly original, provocative, and innovative volume. There is much to learn here, even if there is also much to challenge. Jesus of Nazareth offers exactly what it promises: one “independent historian's account” of the Jewish man, Jesus, whom later Christians sought to follow. May more volumes find their way to market that raise as many interesting questions as lucidly and forcefully as does this book.