THE STORY SO FAR.

A Marginal Jew
Rethinking the Historical Jesus
Volume III: Companions and Competitors
John Meier
Doubleday, $40, 669 pp.

While many of the recent combatants in the Jesus Wars have devoted themselves to lecture tours and book signings, John Meier has continued to grind away at the project to which he dedicated himself more than a decade ago. This is the third large volume in a projected series of four. For readers still in high school when A Marginal Jew made its first appearance in 1991, a brief summary of Meier's method and progress may provide a useful preface to a review of this newest volume.

From the start, Meier took pains to distinguish his approach from that of the agitators and popularizers. His Jesus was not the "real" Jesus but the best one proper historiography could provide. His aim was not the reform of the church but the intellectual consent of an imaginary "unpapal conclave" consisting of a Catholic, Protestant, Jew, and agnostic. His approach was sober and steady: rather than fit Jesus into a reconstruction of Judaism in the first century, Meier has maintained a constant back-and-forth movement between Jesus and his Jewish environment. In his first volume (The Roots of the Problem and the Person), he used the converging lines of evidence provided by the best Jewish and Christian sources (mainly Josephus and the canonical Gospels) to sketch the broad outlines of Jesus' ministry, and the basic facts concerning his origin and social status. In the second volume (Mentor, Message, and Miracles, 1994), Meier connected Jesus to the ministry of John the Baptist, and evaluated the traditions concerning Jesus as wonderworker and as prophetic announcer of God's rule.

Meier is deeply, even passionately, committed to the classic historical-critical paradigm within New Testament studies, and his method of constructing the figure of Jesus from the sources stands solidly within that framework. He takes discrete units of tradition and tests them for their probable origin in Jesus by means of the standard criteria of multiple attestation, discontinuity, embarrassment, and coherence. The expectation is that the incremental accumulation of such pieces will slowly reveal a convincingly historical person who is, Meier argues, recognizably "Jewish," yet also identifiably "marginal." At the end of the second volume, Meier summarizes his findings: (1) Jesus is seen by others and himself as an eschatological prophet who proclaims the imminent coming of God's reign; (2) unlike John the Baptist, Jesus celebrates that kingdom as already present in his ministry, above all through his open-table fellowship and his miracles; (3) the combination of prophetic persona and wonderworking casts Jesus in the role of Elijah. Such conclusions are not substantial or innovative. But in Meier's view, they have the advantage (over every other reconstruction) of being based on the meticulous examination of every bit of data and the patient adjudication of every scholarly dispute concerning the data.

This third volume (Companions and Competitors) complicates the picture by placing this hypothetical Jesus into conversation with two other hypothetical reconstructions. The basic idea is sound: historical figures are known as much from their followers and opponents as from what they said and did. Execution, however, is difficult. In search of companions, Meier sorts through every scrap of information concerning those whom the Gospels call "the crowds," determining that Jesus in fact sometimes spoke in public to groups. He dissects the material on "disciples" and concludes that there were some people who followed Jesus and had that designation. He argues that there was a group among his followers called the Twelve and that Jesus probably sent them on a symbolic tour of Israel. About the individual members of the Twelve, we have real knowledge only of Judas and Peter. Net result? Jesus had companions. Pages to accomplish this result? One hundred seventy of text and 115 of notes.

In quest of Jesus' competitors, Meier presents state-of-the-art discussions of the identifiable parties in first-century Palestine: the Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes (and Qumran), Samaritans, Scribes, Herodians, and Zealots. There is much learning here, and a helpful distinction consistently made between what good historical methods allow us to say about these people, and what irresponsible publications sometimes claim. The problem is the misalignment between historical knowledge in general and pertinence to the historical Jesus. We have much good contemporary information about the Essenes and Qumran, but no sign that Jesus had any connection with them. The Gospels show Jesus interacting with Samaritans, but our knowledge of them is slender. The Sadducees engage Jesus directly only once, and that's good, because what shows up in that story is about equal to what we can say about the Sadducees. The little that can be said about Zealots and Herodians matches perfectly their unimportance in the Gospels. Finally, in the Gospels, the Pharisees interact vigorously with Jesus, and after we adjust for a biased perspective, the Gospels also turn out to be our best source of information generally about the Pharisees in the first century (apart from Josephus, and a few lines in Paul and the Mishnah). The discussion of the Pharisees' adversarial relationship with Jesus is delayed until the next volume, since so many of their interactions involved issues of law. The overall results from 190 pages of close analysis in the text and 134 pages of intense discussion in footnotes? That the information about these groups in the Gospels fits intelligibly within all our other historical knowledge about them, and that all our other historical knowledge about the groups does not throw much additional light on what the Gospels say about them.

In his final thirty-two pages, Meier integrates these results into a summary of the portrait of Jesus emerging from the three volumes and sketches the "four great enigmas" that he will take up in the fourth volume: Jesus' relation to the law of Moses, his parabolic speech, his self-designations, and the reasons for his death. Readers who want a clear and attractive precis of the entire three volumes would do well to read this last section. What this volume adds is a sense of Jesus as a person interacting with other persons rather than with history or the divine plan in the abstract. His calling of followers and his designation of them as the Twelve suggest a certain intention in the direction of institution; his debates with all available Jewish groups suggest both a public and an idiosyncratic ministry.

In earlier reviews in Commonweal of his previous volumes (April, 24, 1992, and November, 18, 1994), I praised what should be praised in Meier's work: his thoroughness in discussing issues, his fairness and comprehensiveness in reporting alternative views, his impressive mastery of the ancient material. The same virtues continue here. I also raised a number of critical questions concerning Meier's procedures. As one might have expected from so methodical a worker, the same tendencies that I criticized earlier reappear. Meier's methods yield at best "the historically verifiable Jesus" within the gospel tradition, and that only with distinct degrees of probability. But what can be "verified" by the canons of historical criticism as going back to Jesus necessarily falls short of a comprehensive picture.

The danger lies in seeking more than the method can yield, and Meier does not always avoid that temptation, despite his frequent disparagement of "imagination" and "fantasy" in the views of others. One example: Meier does a good job establishing the high probability that Jesus named a circle of his followers "The Twelve." That is not an inconsiderable accomplishment. But Meier wants more. He struggles with the question of whether Jesus sent out the Twelve on a mission, and despite some difficulties in his argument, he makes a decent case that Jesus probably gave them a share in his own ministry, even though the passage describing their commission is problematic.

Then Meier seeks the meaning of that sending, and with that step goes well beyond what his own method allows. He concludes that Jesus sent them out, not primarily as a pragmatic campaign of propaganda, but as a "prophetic-symbolic gesture" of the "regathering the scattered people of God" that would only be complete "when he came into full power (that is, in his kingdom) and restored the twelve tribes." In a note, Meier adds, "Needless to say, I am not advocating here Albert Schweitzer's dubious hypothesis...that Jesus expected the kingdom of God to come fully before his disciples finished their mission..." But why is Schweitzer's hypothesis more "dubious" than Meier's? One could make a case that an Elijah-like prophet expecting the kingdom might well have sent out his followers with such an expectation. This is as intrinsically plausible as imagining Jesus performing an obscure "symbolic" gesture without much content. My point is simply that this kind of interpretation is invariably "imaginative" and that once it is entered into, Meier's method does not help us declare between Jesus as self-conscious symbol-maker and Jesus as deluded.

When Meier proceeds to consider the individual members of the Twelve and begins with the admission that we can say "next to nothing" about them, the reader must wonder why he then devotes eighty-three pages to hammering that nullity home. His reason for doing so, he says, is to counter the tendency to construct knowledge about the Twelve from apocryphal Gospels and Acts, works of "popular piety and bizarre imagination." But since his discussion restricts itself to the canonical sources (and therefore can add nothing to what any reader can see), and since his notes take up the theories derived from other sources only to dismiss them, and since in any case whatever we could know about the individual members of the Twelve would be at best peripheral to our knowledge of Jesus, one wonders whether the entire lengthy exercise has become less about the identity of the historical Jesus and more about testing the historicity of every bit of the Gospels.

Over the course of these three massive volumes, Meier has made the case that Jesus was a prophetic figure within Judaism who was linked to John the Baptist, who expected God's rule and performed healings as a sign of that rule, who associated with the outcast, who had a more or less definite group of followers, and who interacted with other intentional Jewish groups. Has Meier's method made these aspects of Jesus more historically probable? Yes. Has the yield been worth the effort expended by the author or demanded of the reader? Let each one judge.

Luke Timothy Johnson is the Robert R. Woodruff Professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology, Emory University. Among his more recent books is The Real Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco).