“Jesus, God and Man”
Raymond E Brown. Jesus God and Man: Modern Biblical Reflections. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1968.
Raymond Brown’s 1968 book Jesus God and Man, is a compilation of two previously published articles in which he offers a distinctly Catholic approach to critical New Testament scholarship.[1] In chapter one, Brown considers the contribution of the New Testament toward our understanding of Jesus’ divinity.[2] The question that drives this investigation is “Does the New Testament call Jesus God?” Brown takes a quite literal approach and considers texts that imply the title God (θεός) was not used for Jesus (e.g., Mk 10:18 and Mt 27:46), texts in which the use of ‘God’ for Jesus is “dubious” (e.g. Gal 2:20 and Rom 9:5), and texts that clearly refer to Jesus as God (Heb 1:8-9, Jn 1:1, Jn 20:28). Brown concludes that “in three clear instances and in five instances that have a certain probability Jesus is called God in the New Testament” (29). However, he cautions against a naive view of the development of this practice, highlighting its late arrival by dating the key texts—from Rom 9:5 in the late 50’s to the Johannine writings in the 90’s—and noting their geographical spread. Brown contends that there is a “solid biblical precedent for calling Jesus God,” but that its presence should not overly color our reading of the New Testament witness (38).[3]
Chapter two originated as a paper given at the 20th Convention of the Catholic Theological Society (1965).[4] Herein, Brown notes that it is theologians, not exegetes, that have led the way in modern discussions of Jesus’ knowledge.[5] Starting with knowledge of ordinary human affairs, Brown outlines texts indicating Jesus’ ignorance (e.g., Mk 5:30–33; Lk 2:46) and extraordinary knowledge (Jn 6:5; Mk 11:2; Mt 17:24–27). In summary, Brown finds that the Gospel tradition accepts normal human ignorance in Jesus as well as a knowledge beyond the ordinary—though the latter does not necessarily exceed what was typical of the prophets (49). The focus tightens in the subsequent section, and Brown considers Jesus’ knowledge of religious affairs, such as his use of the Scriptures (e.g., Mt 7:29; Jn 7:28; Mk 12:36), and of questionable contemporary religious concepts (e.g., Demonology in Mk 9:17-18, the afterlife in Mk 9:43, and apocalyptic in Mk 13:24-25). Brown concludes that Jesus makes use of these contemporary concepts without indicating a superior awareness of their shortcomings. Regarding Jesus’ knowledge of the future, Professor Brown finds little deciding evidence with relation to Jesus’ crucifixion, or of the events of AD 70. In both cases, Brown suggests Jesus’ cognizance of these events is not unique: these things could have been inferred by any insightful observer and do not necessarily reflect divine foreknowledge (70).
Turning to Jesus’ understanding of himself and his mission, Brown follows the—now much-maligned—approach of considering the ‘titles’ of Christ.[6] Brown argues that we cannot speak strictly of “Messianic knowledge” on Jesus part, but differentiates this from “Messianic consciousness” (“perhaps we might say that consciousness is often an intuitive awareness and this is distinct from an ability to express by formulating concepts and words” [94]). In the synoptic gospels, argues Brown, Jesus did claim a special relationship as God’s son, but did not delineate this significantly from our sonship (however, Brown notes that, were we to admit John’s gospel along with Matthew and Luke’s infancy narratives, we would find that they are unequivocal about Jesus’ unique sonship). Overall, Brown finds no indication in the Gospels of a development in Jesus’ basic vocation consciousness.[7] At the same time, he argues in favor of a much more limited knowledge on the part of Christ (contra ‘the theologians’), and ends with a quote from Cyril of Alexandria: “We have admired his [Jesus’] goodness in that for love of us he has not refused to descend to such a low position as to bear all that belongs to our nature, INCLUDED IN WHICH IS IGNORANCE” (102, emphasis original).
Seventeen years after publishing Jesus God and Man, Dr. Brown wrote a review article of François Dreyfus's 1984 book Jésus savait-il quail état Dieu?[8] The title of Dreyfus’s work comes from Brown’s argument that “Often theologians prefer to study the problem of Jesus’ knowledge of his divinity in terms of the question: ‘Did Jesus know he was God?’ From a biblical viewpoint, this question is so badly phrased that it cannot be answered and should not be posed” (Jesus God and Man, 86). Evidently, Dreyfus disagrees. The point of contention, for Brown, is not that Jesus was God (both believe he was), or that Jesus was aware of his divine identity (again, both affirm this in some sense). Rather, Brown wishes subtly to consider the ways this identity was expressed and to note the significant difference between that and the terminology of Nicaea and Chalcedon (Brown here seizes on the distinction between term and insight) (75).[9] Brown insists that during Jesus’ lifetime, the term ‘God’ would denote God the Father, and thus would not make sense if applied to Jesus. Over time, he argues, the term God was expanded to be applied to Jesus near the end of the first century in a way that could not have been done before the crucifixion.[10]
At the end of the article, Brown takes the opportunity to clarify his own views. First, Brown contends that “Jesus knew his own identity” which involved “a unique relationship to God that we call the divinity of the Son” (77). Second, this self-identity was not formulated in terms of later Christology “such as Son of God, Lord, or God” (78). Third, this does not exclude “a development in his existential knowledge of what that identity implied for his life,” but there was no point at which Jesus ‘discovered’ his vocation or “found out that he was God” (Ibid., cf. note five above). Finally, this self-identity tells us nothing about the extent of Jesus’ knowledge of other matters. Brown agrees with von Balthasar that Jesus likely had to “discover the future, despite an intuitive self-assurance that that future would make the plan of God victorious” (79). Brown also makes clear that the Patristic thesis of Jesus’ condescension (“i.e., that he knew things, but pretended not to know them for pedagogical reasons”) is possible, but likely does more harm than good for incarnational theology (79).[11]
It is worth noting in closing, that Ben Witherington III concludes his influential work The Christology of Jesus—in which he offers the most sustained modern treatment of Jesus’ self-understanding from a historicist perspective—by saying: “I can do no better than quote Raymond Brown” and then offers an extended quotation of the last two pages of Brown’s essay. His conclusion, in line with Brown, is that Jesus possessed a clear self-understanding (“there is no evidence in the Gospel material that Jesus ever had an identity crisis”), but partook in the normal limitations of human knowing (277). Despite the dated methodology, Brown’s argument has continued to exert an important influence on the conversation of Jesus’ self-understanding and knowledge within New Testament scholarship.
[1] By this, I mean that Brown is engaged with the Christian tradition, sensitive to the ways his methodology will be perceived by orthodox Catholic readers, and concerned throughout to make clear the difference between what can be established ‘scientifically’ about the historical details of the NT (given the necessary methodological limitations, such as reliance on the synoptics) and what is (rightly) held by faith in light of later theological developments.
[2] Originally published in Theological Studies 26 (1965): 545–573.
[3] This thesis has since been established much more convincingly elsewhere. See arguments in Bauckham, God Crucified: Monotheism and Christology in the New Testament (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 26–69; David S. Yeago, “The New Testament in Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis’, in Stephen E. Fowl (ed.), The Theological Interpretation of Scripture, 88–93; C. Kavin Rowe, “The God of Israel and Jesus Christ: Luke, Marcion, and the Unity of the Canon,” NV 1 (2003): 365–78.
[4] Originally published in Catholic Biblical Quarterly 29 (1967): 315–45.
[5] On this score, Brown is evidently referring specifically to the state of Catholic scholarship, as things are (and were in 1965) much the other way around within Protestant circles.
[6] This approach is perhaps best exemplified in Cullmann’s influential work (The Christology of the New Testament [London: SCM, 1963 (1957)]), which N. T. Wright characterizes as “a remarkable monument to the wrong sort of enquiry” (Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God [Minneapolis: Fortress, 1996], 614).
[7] Brown argues in a later article that, though there is no evidence of it in the NT, he sees no reason to exclude such development. “One knows more of what it is to be human at age 20 than at 10, more at age 40 than at 20 . . . Theoretically, then, I have no problem in thinking that Jesus learned increasingly what being divine in human circumstances really implied or ‘learned obedience through suffering’ in the language of Heb 5:8.”
[8] Raymond E. Brown, “Did Jesus Know He Was God?,” Biblical Theology Bulletin 15 (April 1985): 74–9.
[9] Cf. David S. Yeago, “The New Testament and the Nicene Dogma: A Contribution to the Recovery of Theological Exegesis,” Pro Ecclesia 3 (1994), 152–64. Herein, Yeago expands Brown’s insight, explaining that it is vital to distinguish between judgments and the conceptual terms in which they are rendered and offers an insightful threefold rubric for comparing judgments.
[10] “Dreyfus’s single greatest fault is that he does not give attention to the limited connotation of language and how the language of religious belief was changed in the period between the earthly Jesus and the Gospel of John” (“Did Jesus Know He Was God?,” 77).
[11] This patristic exegetical principle is often referred to as “ignoratia de jure.” Cf. Alloys Grillmeier S.J., Christ in Christian Tradition, trans. John Bowden, vol. 1: From the Apostolic Age to Chalcedon (451) (London: Mowbrays, 1975), 327.