Gopnik's New Yorker Article

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The impulse of orthodoxy has always been to suppress the wrangling as a sign of weakness; the impulse of more modern theology is to embrace it as a sign of life. The deeper question is whether the uncertainty at the center mimics the plurality of possibilities essential to liberal debate, as the more open-minded theologians like to believe, or is an antique mystery in a story open only as the tomb is open, with a mystery left inside, never to be entirely explored or explained. With so many words over so long a time, perhaps passersby can still hear tones inaudible to the more passionate participants.

Adam Gopnik's New Yorker review essay on recent books dealing with the "historical Jesus" is a thought-provoking read (hat tip to Margaret for the recommendation!). Gopnik surveys the recent popular scholarship well, and gives you a good sense of the basic tensions and questions driving the books. I wish he would have devoted more time digging into the arguments of the books, but the article does give you a feel for how each author leans and contributes to the scholarship.

What's most compelling about the article is that Gopnik interweaves his own reading of the Gospel with his interpretation of the scholarship that he's reading. For Gopnik, the reason why Jesus remains such a compelling figure stems from the various ambiguities, silences, and inconsistencies found within the Gospels, as well as the long history of arguments and interpretation to try to understand this ambiguity. Was Jesus God or human; was Jesus egalitarian or vengeful? These are questions that find no clear answer within the Gospels themselves, which is what continues to generate such fruitful works.

Gopnik gestures towards future readings of the Gospel that transcend the binaries of orthodoxy (supress ambiguity) and "modern liberal theology" (uncertainty is good!). I wonder what that type of reading would look like? Would it take interpretations from people of a completely different faith background or cultural perspective, from somebody who has no bone to pick in the orthodoxy vs. modernism battle?