This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
David Capes Let’s talk about some of the specific things that you find in Matthew’s birth account and then let’s talk similarly about Luke as well. What’s happening in the birth narratives that we really need to payattention to.
Caleb Friedeman I think part 1 cues us up to be attentive when we come to Matthew, besides just resituating the burden of proof, it also really makes us think about sources and how an author is using them. Because sourcesare one of the historiographic features. And by the way, I don’t think that Matthew cites sources, so he doesn’t use the historiographic feature of sources in his birth material. But what he does do is usesources pretty evidently. I do a pretty close analysis of both the genealogy and the birth narrative proper.
And one of the really fascinating things is a lot of scholars agree that Matthew is using sources for his genealogy, and particularly the Old Testament. Places like First Chronicles 1-3, places like Ruth 4 are pretty evidently in view there.
So he’s using these sources and actually following them fairly closely. And where he departs from those sources, he seems to be operating within a range of flexibility that was acceptable for Jewish genealogies. So that’s interesting, and it doesn’t track very well with the idea that this is just legendary. Matthew is following sources. If all he wants to do is write a legendary genealogy, why not just take every big name, Old Testament figure that he admires. Why not put Isaiah in there, regardless of whether they were related in any way. Why not just have a random assortment of the hall of faith or something like that?
David Capes Yes, why not put Moses in there. Throw Noah in there.
Caleb Friedeman Exactly, yes. Obviously, he likes Isaiah a lot because he cites him. Why not include people like that in there if this is just legendary genealogies of sources. Though, we find, I think, sources heavily implied by the birth narrative proper. A lot of scholars tend to focus on Matthew’s use of the Old Testament as being something that counts against historiographic intent. I actually think a close analysis of that material pushes the other way.
Because when you look at Matthew’s fulfillment citations, to me it’s quite evident that those citations and the texts that he’s selected depend on the story. Why would you pull this precise group of texts together unless you already had traditions about Jesus that made you think about them. Because most of them are not things that you would just readily relate to a Davidic Messiah figure just in the abstract. You would need to have traditions about Jesus in front of you. And then you say, okay, how does Jesus fulfill this part of the Old Testament. Oh, I see a connection here. And by the way, you can also pull the citations out, and the story works pretty well without them.And I’m not the first scholar to have observed that. It seems to me that Matthew is pretty evidently working with some existing traditions, and then he is adding these fulfillment quotations into that. He’s working with some kinds of sources when he’s writing this birth material. Those are just a couple of the key points that I make about Matthew. And then for both Matthew and Luke, I talk some about the time elapsed. We can come to that in just a minute.
David Capes Well, let’s move over to Luke. What are some of the features then that we need to pay attention to in Luke historically?
Caleb Friedeman Just a few quick points here. I think it makes us take Luke 1:1-4, the preface, very seriously. And what I mean by that is, many of these ancient biographers like Luke will include a blanket note about their sources at the beginning of the biography. Prior to the birth material that seems to apply to the whole. Philo, for example, does this in his life of Moses, and Luke does a similar thing here. Because we have analogies for this kind of thing. It makes us say, wait a second. We can’t just bracket out the birth material when Luke has just made this claim about going back to those who were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.
We really need to think about how this material relates to that. Luke employs the historiographic feature of sources in Luke 1:1-4 and that applies to the birth material also. Though I argue that Luke actually presents Mary, Jesus’s mother, as a source within the birth material itself. Twice. Luke 2:19, and 2:51 where he describes Mary as preserving all the words in her heart. Based on my published dissertation. I’ve done that work there, and I reprise it here. But I make a fresh case for why we should regard that as a source marker.
And the last thing I’ll say, in terms of a historiographic feature, is I think Luke also employs what I wouldcall negative evaluation in the genealogy. When he says that Jesus was the Son as was thought, of Joseph. So that could be distancing. Where he just saying, I’m not willing to take responsibility for that claim. I think, though, when you read it in light of the rest of the account, where it’s pretty clear that Joseph is not Jesus’ biological father, then it’s suggesting a negative judgment on the idea that Joseph was Jesus’s father in a normal biological sense.
David Capes Yes, that’s said in the genealogy? Okay, that goes over into chapter 3 then as well.
Caleb Friedeman Yes, and that’s another interesting piece of it too. If we’re asking where Luke’s birth material is, he includes the genealogy later in the midst of adult material. Which again, makes It very difficult at that point if you want to hold the legendary intent hypothesis. Because what is going to cue the reader to shift from reading historically? Because the first part of Luke 3 is about Jesus’ adulthood, then you go to ahistorical in the genealogy, and then back to historically in the temptation, which comes right after the genealogy. That doesn’t really make sense.
Here’s the other really interesting thing to me, though. If that analysis is correct, and Luke employs nhistoriographic features 1,2,3.4, times. Three instances of sources and one instance of evaluation. I can’t find anywhere else in the Gospel of Luke where he does that, where he employs historiographic features. So that would actually mean he uses historiographic features more in the birth material and in relation to the birth material than he does in relation to the rest of the life. So obviously Luke 1:1-4 is going to apply to the whole life. But that gives you one use of sources, the historiographic feature for the whole life, where you actually have three other historiographic features that pertain specifically to the birth material. So if there’s any material in the Gospel of Luke, that we should be clear that it’s intended to be historical, it’s the birth material.
David Capes It’s right there because it has those markers as opposed to every other place. Well, that’s fascinating. That really is fascinating. Your next job is to parse all this out. You’ve clearly made the case that it’s the intent of Matthew and Luke to write a historical account of the birth in the origin stories of Jesus. Now we got to go into the story itself and to carefully go through and to make some judgments about individual pericope or episodes within that material.
Caleb Friedeman Yes. I think one of the interesting things about making that kind of case is the point that I make about time elapsed regarding Matthew and Luke versus other ancient biographers. I mentioned earlier that we have 360 years on average between the subject’s birth and when people like Nepos, Philo, Plutarch and Suetonius are writing about their lives. Obviously, scholars take different positions as to when the Gospels are written. But, if you just take a fairly consensus date of, let’s say somewhere in the 70s. 70 to 80 let’s say for both Matthew and Luke, well, that would mean that they’re far closer. Closer by centuries, almost three centuries closer than most ancient biographers were, most of the time to the events they’re writing about. And probably would have had access to sources that accord with that kind of distance. So potentially an eyewitness source, or at least someone who would have known an eyewitness.
David Capes Yes, and that’s part of Richard Bauckham’s case in his book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. Well, we’ve got to come back to this, and we’re going to follow what you’re going to say about it in the next few years. Because I have a feeling there’s some articles and there’s some books following up on this. It needs to be done. Dr Caleb Friedeman, thanks for being with us today.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Caleb Friedeman
Hi, I’m Dr Caleb Friedeman, and I serve as David A. Case Chair of Biblical Studies and Associate Research Professor of New Testament at Ohio Christian University.
David Capes
Dr Caleb Friedeman. Caleb, good to see you. This is your first appearance on The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Caleb Friedeman
Yes, great to be on. Thanks for having me.
David Capes
I got to know you at Wheaton College a few years back when you were there, and since then, you have finished your degree. You’ve graduated, got your PhD, and are doing great work at your university.
Caleb Friedeman
Yes! I had a great time at Wheaton and enjoyed getting to spend a little bit of time together there. And the Lord blessed me with the opportunity to come to Ohio Christian University after I graduated, I’ve been here for going on eight years now. It’s hard to believe, in some ways. It’s been a good ride. And have had a lot of opportunities to preach, to teach, to write, and just feel very blessed.
David Capes
Well, you’ve written some great things, and the book that we’re going to talk about today is no exception to that. It’s a very interesting thesis, that is cutting some new ground. But let’s give a little bit more information about you. For those who don’t know, Caleb Friedeman, who is he?
Caleb Friedeman
I grew up in Jackson, Mississippi, and the Lord led me through my education. I went to Asbury University for undergraduate, and then Wesley Biblical Seminary for an MA. Then I went to Wheaton College for PhD work, which, of course, is where you and I met. Then the Lord opened up this job at Ohio Christian University. Right after that, I am married to Isabella. She’s from Honduras, and we have one son, Paul. I’m an ordained elder in the Church of the Nazarene. So, I am both a biblical scholar, but I also have a pastoral piece to my calling as well. And I do have some interest outside of writing and teaching. In high school I was a competitive power lifter, and I play piano and guitar as well. Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 2 –
David Capes
Well, you’ve written a terrific book entitled Gospel Birth Narratives and Historiography. The subtitle is Reopening a Closed Case. It’s published by Baylor University Press. It’s a really impressive book. Congratulations on it. First of all, let’s talk a little bit about it. What’s the big idea of the book? What are you trying to do here?
Caleb Friedeman
Well, as the subtitle implies, the Gospel birth narratives have really been a closed case when it comes to historical Jesus scholarship, for quite some time, I’d say. Easily, reaching back five to six decades, and maybe even longer. Just as one sounding on that, if you do a run through major books on the historical Jesus over the last 40-50, years, you’ll be hard pressed to find a substantive discussion of Jesus’s birth and childhood, even in significant, lengthy monographs. And sometimes, if you do find any kind of discussion, it’s simply to say why they’re disregarding the material. We do have these two birth narratives in Matthew 1-2 to and Luke 1-2, but scholars typically haven’t taken them very seriously. And so I try to dig into that in the book, and I distinguish between two things, two kinds of skepticism you can have toward a source.
One is skepticism of intent, which is basically to say, I don’t think that this source is intended to be historical. For example, if someone is trying to reconstruct the historical person Don Quixote, using the novel Don Quixote, then you might protest that this source is not intended to be historical. So, you’re just off on the wrong foot from the beginning. But the other kind of skepticism would be skepticism of truth. So that basically says, I recognize that this source is intended to be historical. I just don’t think that it’s correct at a given point.
If you look at those two, they’re both valid, and they’re both very important to use at certain points if we’re trying to do historiography. But skepticism of intent is a lot more efficient if you can pull it off. Which is to say, if I can convince you that what you’re looking at is more like Don Quixote or Goldilocks or something, than it is like Thucydides or some other historian or some historical biography, then we don’t really need to discuss the historicity of individual events. Because we’re just not dealing with that kind of a source.
And what I basically suggest in the introduction to the book is that the unique skepticism the scholars have leveled at the gospel birth narratives really is unique. I don’t know of another part of the gospels that we disregard in that way. That unique skepticism really depends on the skepticism of intent, because it’s hard to produce truth-oriented reasons that would justify ignoring historical sources in that way. And interestingly, you have had a good number of scholars, who really articulated a skepticism of intent. Even people like John Meyer, for example, doesn’t think that the birth stories are intended to be historical, necessarily.
David Capes
So, you have these two kinds of skepticism. Both can be useful in their own way when you’re dealing with the right kind of material, as you articulate. Since Richard Burridge’s work on the Gospels, a lot of Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 3 –
people accept the idea the Gospels are meant to be an ancient kind of biography. That means they are intended to be taken as historical.
Caleb Friedeman
Yes, and I think Burridge and that whole trend of recognizing the Gospels are ancient biographies is really where my project starts. And interestingly, one of the things that I agree with scholars, whom I disagree overall with, is the fact that the Gospels are ancient biographies. And certainly, if not that, at least that ancient biographies give us the best comparisons for how we should be reading the gospels. One thing that’s interesting is, if you look at scholars who have made these kinds of arguments for why birth material should be regarded as legendary or, ahistorical, they’re typically appealing to ancient biographies.
You might say the argument goes something like this. From the other side, the side that I’m pushing back against scholars will say something like this: birth material, or birth stories in ancient biographies was not intended to be historical. The Gospel birth narratives are in ancient biographies, and so the gospel birth narratives also are not meant to be historical.
I basically take that argument on and say, I’ll grant you that we’re dealing with ancient biographies here and that that needs to be the backdrop. But I actually disagree on all points. I basically say, let’s start with ancient biographies and look and see how it seems like their authors intended them to be read. My argument is basically birth material in ancient biographies was intended to be historical. And as ancient biographies, then the birth material that we find in the gospels, like in Matthew 1-2 and Luke 1-2 is also intended to be historical. I spend the first part of the book dealing with a range of different ancient biographers and looking at how they write their birth material. And then I get into the gospel birth narratives in part 2.
David Capes
Let’s talk about some of those historians, or historical figures that you’re talking about. Give us a bit of a rundown.
Caleb Friedeman
I’m basically looking for biographers who wrote within a century of the Gospels on either side. And I’m also looking ideally for biographers who have written more than one biography that has birth material we can look at because a sample size of only one biography for an author isn’t the most helpful. I end up going with Cornelius Nepos, and he is actually our first Roman biographer. And then I do Philo, who only has one biography, his Life of Moses. But that has been such a major player in these discussions. Because it’s our only Jewish biography at all that it’s worth dealing with, even given that we only have the one. And then I also do Plutarch. Of course, many people are going to be familiar with Plutarch’s Lives, and those are some of our most important sources for reconstructing what ancient biography was like. And then I do Suetonius as well. I spend a chapter on each of those authors.
Just a little bit of the backstory of this book too. I mentioned earlier that there are these scholars who are making these cases about ancient biographies. When I was getting into scholarship, even preparing for PhD work, I started to read this scholarly literature about gospel birth narratives. And it wasn’t just Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 4 –
about the historical parts. I was just reading things like Raymond Brown’s Birth of the Messiah and reading a whole range of works about the gospel birth narratives. And I kept encountering this claim by various authors that this material wasn’t intended to be historical. They were citing ancient biographies to back this up. And at some point, I just said to myself, okay, I want to go read this stuff for myself and see what’s going on.
I started reading the kinds of biographies that were cited. For example, Plutarch’s Life of Alexander or Romulus or Suetonius Biography of Augustus. I just kept noticing these features that didn’t really track with the story I’d been told about what these biographies were supposed to be doing. For example, they would do things like cite sources for the information they were giving. Well, that’s an odd thing to do if you’re just writing something that’s meant to be legendary. I don’t find a lot of source citation in fairy tales. I would see something like that, or I would find a biographer mentioning differences among their sources. There are three accounts of how this happened. Here’s how the first one goes. Here’s how the second one goes. Here’s how the third one goes. And then they might even go further and say, and I’m going to evaluate these and tell you which one I think is the most accurate or truthful. Or maybe I’ll come up with my own reconstruction of what’s going on.
And then one last thing is they would sometimes distance themselves from more miraculous or supernatural kinds of claims, or just more fantastic kinds of things. What I mean by distancing is basically putting distance between their authorial reputation and the claim that’s being made. Instead of simply asserting that, a God had intercourse with the subject’s mother and then that led to this person being born. They might say it is said that and then give the tradition. Plutarch might not want to be held accountable for that material, but it allows him to pass on this information into sources without taking responsibility for it, which again, indicates a historiographic consciousness.
Those four things that I just mentioned, I call those historiographic features, and they’re the basis of the analysis in this book. Those would be sources. And by that, I mean citation of sources in some form or indication that an author has sources. And then transparency, that’s where you note differences between accounts. Then evaluation, where you evaluate the trustworthiness of those accounts, and then distancing, where you distance your reputation from a claim. I basically use those as at least one key part of my analysis when I get to these ancient biographers, and then also when I talk about the gospel birth narratives in part two.
David Capes
You have these criteria that you’ve looked at and evaluating. Now, Plutarch writes, in his Lives, I think about 50 plus different people. But he doesn’t give birth narratives to everyone right?
Caleb Friedeman
Correct!
David Capes
So, birth narratives aren’t necessarily a given feature of every biography.
Yes, that’s right. I would say some people have failed to notice that, and other folks have noticed that, but failed to consider the significance. One of the things that I talk about for Cornelius Nepos, Plutarch and Suetonius, because that’s the only place where you have the opportunity to talk about absence. Because obviously Philo has got birth material, so he’s not going to have absence because he has no other biography. When I am looking at these authors that have multiple ancient biographies, one of the things I talk about is how we make sense of the absence of birth material from their biographies.
So not only do we find historiographic features in the birth material of many of these biographies, we also find that many of their biographies don’t have any birth material at all, or that the amount varies a lot. In some cases, you might have only a line or a sentence or two on somebody, or just even a very short sentence, if they’re just spinning all this out of whole cloth, and they don’t need any sources. They’re just making stuff up. Why not just have the same amount of birth material for everyone, or have the amount of birth material scale to how much they like the figure that they’re writing about. Which, again, just doesn’t seem to be the case.
You find all kinds of places where you don’t have that kind of scaling. For example, I believe Thrasybulus is one of Cornelius Nepos favorite subjects, and he doesn’t give him birth material. Why? If all this stuff is meant to be is some sort of legendary, non-historical anticipation of what this person is going to become as an adult. It just doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense. I think that the better explanation for that absence is actually that the reason we have absence, in some cases, is either because the biographer lacks sources, which is the kind of problem a historian or a historical biographer would have for sure. Or the information in their sources just wasn’t relevant or interesting enough to include. But what that really keeps out of bounds is the idea that, they’re just making this stuff up.
David Capes
Yes. I like that. I think that’s an important part of the argument. Now, what we find too, in the New Testament is that Mark begins and has no birth narrative. And same thing is said of the Gospel of John as well. There’s not really a birth narrative. There’s a theological prologue in GJohn that talks about his pre-existence. But that seems to be of a different class than saying the things that you say in these birth narrative
Caleb Friedeman
Yes, I would say the fact that Mark and John don’t have what we might call a birth narrative proper has actually become a lot less surprising to me the more that I’ve studied ancient biographies Because you just begin to recognize this is not a requirement or even a norm necessarily that you’re going to have these. There are too many exceptions to say that this was a universal requirement, or even something that was odd to leave out.
Just for example, as you look across those four authors that I mentioned, Nepos, Philo, Plutarch and Suetonius, I analyze 95 biographies from those authors. I can only discuss so many of those in detail in the chapters, but I give tables at the end of the book in appendixes that actually give an analysis of historiographic features of things like omens and miracles if they’re there. Then something called time elapsed, which we can come back to. But I give my analysis and those tables at the back. Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 6 –
If you go through and look, I also talk about where the birth material actually is in each life. I think it’s 18 of the 95 that don’t have any birth material whatsoever. And then that’s even being very gracious, because I’m counting things like, if there’s a sentence that pertains to the person’s childhood or birth. I’m including that as birth material. So on that count, actually, if you were to grant that any kind of claim about someone’s childhood or birth counts as birth material, then you might say that Mark and John have a little bit because, you’ll find a mention about being the son of Mary or the son of Joseph.
David Capes
And it’d not necessarily in the first chapter or the first writing that you encounter, but you encounter in the story that he has brothers and sister and those types of things.
Caleb Friedeman
And by the way, if you want to say, let’s not count that kind of stuff, and you then had a harder line analysis for all these other ancient biographies that I deal with. Well, you might end up saying that a lot more than 18 don’t have birth material.
David Capes
Yes, exactly.
Caleb Friedeman
I just say that I think what we find as you cross the four Gospels and whether or not they have birth material is within the range of what we’d expect for ancient biographies. I don’t think that it’s particularly unusual that Mark and John don’t have a birth narrative, and then that Matthew and Luke do.
David Capes
I guess the bottom line is that ancient biographies, when they did talk about birth material, their intention was to say, I’m writing history here, and I’m making judgments about that history. And so when we come to the Gospels, we can say that at least the intention of Matthew and the intention of Luke is to say that I’m writing history here. Not only in the things that Jesus said and did as an adult, but also in the stories of his origins, the stories of his family. Even those that are interlaced with some dream interpretation and visions and those kinds of things.
Caleb Friedeman
I think that’s exactly right. And I guess the way that I would put it is Matthew and Luke and other ancient biographers wrote their birth material with historiographic intent. That’s to say that they didn’t have a unique approach to this material vis a vis other parts of their biographies. All I’m really saying is we need to read this material the same way we would read anything else in a nature biography. Instead of treating it as a special case, we just should approach it with the same kinds of assumptions that we approach their accounts of the person’s adulthood. And that should be self-evident, but I think it hasn’t been in scholarship, and that has generated the need for this kind of book.
In addition to historiographic features and the absence of birth material that I look at, I also look at a couple other elements. One is their use of supernatural elements. Here I include both omens, which are Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 7 –
things that today we might call coincidences, but the people in ancient times often saw significance to. You would maybe have a coincidence, and then you would interpret it in a certain way. So that would be something like an omen. Then you actually have supernatural events, which you might call miracles, where the biographer is actually affirming that something happens. One thing that’s really interesting coming out of that is that number one, you really don’t find biographers typically making miracle claims in birth material a lot.
Usually, if they’re going to relate something supernatural, I would say the vast majority of the time, they’re going to include a historiographic feature that’s going to either distance them from it or make it just an act of transparency, where I have this in my sources. But it’s actually fairly rare to find a biographer affirming that kind of stuff. The number of supernatural claims that you find in birth material and these four ancient biographers that I deal with is actually fairly minimal.
The other thing that’s interesting that I look at is the time elapsed between the subject’s birth, and when the biographer is writing the biography. And obviously it’s a little hard to analyze that, because you don’t know exactly when these things were published or and it’s even harder to say when the research began. When did Plutarch begin researching this person’s life? But I do that kind of calculus, just as a broad way of making a comparison. If you look across those four authors and their biographies, what I find is that the average time elapsed across all 95 biographies from those four biographers is over 360 years.
David Capes
Wow, that’s a long time.
Caleb Friedeman
That’s the kind of remove that they’re operating in. And. It doesn’t tell you anything about their intention, but it does tell you something about the kinds of sources they would have had available to them, or that they wouldn’t have had available to them. For example, in very, very few, if any cases, are these four biographers, outside the Gospels, going to have access to eyewitness sources, or even to family members of the person. Or people who knew eyewitnesses well. 360 years. Then you do a comparison to Matthew and Luke, and it becomes really interesting.
But I just wanted to mention those two things, because they are pretty important for part one of the book. What all that does I think, is resituates the burden of proof when you get to the gospel birth narrative. If ancient biographers tended to write their birth material intended to be historical, then that means that if we’re going to deny that for Matthew and Luke, we need to have really good reasons why. But prior to that kind of analysis, I think many people would have said, well, you need to have extraordinary reasons to think that Matthew and Luke did intend their birth material to be historical. And I’m saying actually no, it’s the other way around.
David Capes
Yes. There are certain assumptions driving scholarship very often. And I’m curious what your conclusions were about the time between the events of the birth of Jesus and then the writing of that. You’re not talking about 360 years. You’re talking about, in some cases, maybe 60 years later, or 70 Transcribed by https://otter.ai – 8 –
years later. There are some that would date Luke, and Matthew, or both into the second century. But more and more, it’s interesting to note that people are actually beginning to date the Gospels a bit earlier than they were just even a few years ago. This is really fascinating. You’ve done a fantastic job. We’re talking to Caleb Friedeman about his book, Gospel Birth Narratives in Historiography: Reopening a Closed Case. So, is it closed again, or is it still open? What do you think?
Caleb Friedeman
Well, I guess the case that I want to open is actually talking about the historical value of what Matthew and Luke are saying about Jesus’s birth and childhood. I think the reason it’s reopening a closed case is because it’s saying these are historical sources that we need to analyze as historical sources. As opposed to simply dismissing them as being legendary or non-historical. The analysis that you still need, or where the scholarship still needs to be done, is to say, if they’re intended to be historical, how well do they achieve that? I would say, by and large, scholars haven’t really even been asking that question for several decades. You might be able to find a few exceptions to that, but I would say by and large, we really haven’t been asking the question about truth. If we’re talking about intent and truth, I think I’ve done my best to answer the intent question in this book. Now the truth question remains, where I’d like to see us do more work.
David Capes
Dr Caleb Friedeman has been with us today to talk about his book, Gospel Birth Narratives in Historiography: Reopening a Closed Case. It’s a fascinating book, an important contribution to the study of the New Testament and of the life of Jesus, the historical Jesus. He is reopening a case that has been closed on many accounts. Thanks for being with us today. Dr Friedeman.
Here is a transcript of my conversation with Karl Johnson. You can hear the podcast here.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Carl Johnson
This is Carl Johnson. I’m the Executive Director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers.
David Capes
Dr Carl Johnson, good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Carl Johnson
Thank you. It’s great to be here with you, David.
David Capes
We are here face to face, and that’s always better. I like it when that happens. We’re going to talk about Christian study centers here in just a few minutes. But before that, let’s talk about you. For those who don’t know you, who is Carl Johnson.
Carl Johnson
Well, a brief way to put it is, I am an accidental Christian educator. I never, never imagined I would be doing what I’m doing now. I’m from the metro New York area. I went to Cornell University, and I had a career in outdoor adventure education. So, I was teaching rock-climbing, white-water paddling, back country travel, wilderness medicine, climbing big mountains internationally. And it was great. I mean, who doesn’t enjoy that sort of thing, right? But somewhere in my 30s, I was at the university, and I got to thinking, the university can hire somebody else to do what I’m doing here. I also have this itch to start a new kind of organization that bridges the gap between the church and the Academy and brings a Christian intellectual presence to the secular university. The university is not going to hire somebody else to do that. And so ,I need to do it.
David Capes
So you were the guy. It sounds like you sensed a call.
Carl Johnson
Yes. I sensed a call. Pulled together a group of pastors and professors. I said, here’s what’s burning in my heart. I don’t know if it’s a crazy idea or not. What do you all think? And they said, we think we should do it. This was back in the late 90s, early 2000s.
David Capes
There are a lot of people today who are concerned about what’s happening in higher ed. And particularly if they send their sons or daughters off to places like Cornell, will they come back with any faith intact at all, or will it be dashed on the rocks.
Carl Johnson
Yes, this is a question that people have been asking me for about 25 years or more. There’s not an easy answer to that. There are real challenges with secular universities. I think we want to steer a middle course between not underestimating these sorts of concerns, but also not overstating them. Probably the most important thing I can say, is that right now, I think it’s actually a better time to attend secular universities for Christian students than a generation ago.
David Capes
Really now, why do you say that?
Carl Johnson
There’s more vibrant Christian intellectual activity on many of our campuses and more resources. And I think part of the change is this. A few generations ago, the difference that it made being a Christian on a campus where there was a greater cultural consensus around certain sorts of issues, the difference wasn’t as stark. Then you get into the post 60s. That’s when those who were in graduate school in the 60s became professors say, in the 80s. That might have been a kind of peak secular moment around that time.
But then in the 90s, Christians start finding their voice, their scholarly voice. And there’s a whole renaissance of Christian scholarship and philosophy and history that began trickling over to other disciplines. Christian professors start having fellowships and organizations where they’re convening association of Christian economists and so forth, where they become more comfortable speaking in a Christian voice. Now you go to some campuses, and you have not just the traditional campus fellowship ministries that have been there for a long time, but you also have on at least three dozen campuses now, these Christian study centers. Which typically have a building that provides a physical hub for the Christian community on campus. And you’ve got students involved in all those fellowships, coming and going, coming and going with the door swinging thousands of times a week. Some of them even have residential facilities.
There’s this visible hub of Christian intellectual activity on these campuses. And there’s speaker series that are coming in monthly or more. Christian professors, some from Christian colleges, some from other secular universities, Veritas Forums and other events that are just giving students plenty of reason. A generation ago, students would go to campus and they have this crisis of faith. Oh, it looks like all the smart people here, all the professors and most of the other students are not believers. And it’s just not like that anymore. Now, there’s so much visible Christian intellectual activity on many campuses, though not on every campus. So, I say it’s actually a better time than it was a generation ago.
David Capes
That’s great to hear. When you “heard” this call was the Christian Study Center movement up and running?
Carl Johnson
Not really. When this idea started burning in my heart there were important intellectual questions that it’s hard to get an answer for either from the church or the university. Because pastors are very busy with other sorts of things or because the university is often just so secular and the faculty members, frankly, are so very specialized that they often are not very well equipped to deal with broad questions of meaning and purpose in the good life.
But these things were burning in me and I started talking to people. Finally, somebody said, you should take a look at what’s happening in Charlottesville, Virginia, because there’s this thing there. It’s called the Center for Christian study. And so, I wrote a letter to the director, and he wrote back, sent me some of their materials, and I saw what they were doing with this public speaker series. I thought, wow, that’s incredibly exciting. I want to do something like that.
And at the very same time, I drove from Ithaca down to New Haven for one of the very first Veritas Forum events. And I heard this whole lineup of speakers that included people like N. T. Wright, who at that time nobody had really heard of. He was a much younger guy at that time, as we all were, and so I got this vision of Christian scholarship. I pulled together these pastors and professors, and I said, hey, let’s do something. Let’s create a new organization and bring in visiting Christian scholars.
But at that time, we’re talking late 90s, early 2000s there was really only one very well established Christian Study Center in Charlottesville. And then there were, a few other very fledgling centers. And so, I started one at Cornell. At that time, I would say, in the early 2000s there was one big center and a handful of others. And in 2007 I invited all the folks I knew doing similar work up to Ithaca for a long weekend. We put our heads together, and we’ve resolved to form what is now the consortium of Christian Study Centers. And in our first year, we had half a dozen member centers.
2008 was when we incorporated. The first little get together that I referred to was in 2007 and in 2009 we’ve got a full-time director, Drew Trotter. Over the years, we’ve grown from that original half dozen member centers to now three dozen, and we’ve got another dozen that are in the startup phase.
David Capes
The goal is to be on secular university campuses, right?
Carl Johnson
That’s the concept, yes.
David Capes
How does your organization exist alongside of InterVarsity and maybe the Catholic Newman Centers and those kinds of things?
Carl Johnson
What we’re seeking for is a very collaborative relationship with the campus ministry ecosystem. And I’ll just use a concrete illustration of what that can look like in practice. When I was on the Cornell campus working in outdoor education back in the 90s, there were probably a dozen or more campus fellowship organizations, and they would occasionally bring in a visiting speaker, and I would sometimes go to hear the speakers. They would usually have 30 or 40 students in attendance, because it was just the students in that organization that would come to hear the speaker. I started networking with the campus minister saying, hey, let’s work together. If one of us is going to bring in a speaker, let’s all co-sponsor and make it a campus wide event. We started doing that, and the attendance increased tenfold. We started getting 300-400 people showing up at events. And it wasn’t really rocket-science. All these students were already there on campus.
David Capes
It was just a matter of using a university facility.
Carl Johnson
Yes. We’re on campus for these events. Part of the origin of the center that I started was, in fact, collaboration. That’s part of the DNA of the organization. And now that most of our centers have buildings, we try to let our buildings be a resource that helps all those other organizations advance their mission and their ministry. We have libraries that are available for them to use, whether it’s for Bible study prep or something else. We have meeting space for them to use, which is increasingly important, because some organizations are actually getting kicked off campus, and it’s harder to have access to space on campus for certain ministers. Providing a space, you know, is a value. We like to say, we gather, we serve and we unify the campus ministry organizations on a weekly basis.
David Capes
What would the ministry look like on a weekend when you don’t have a big speaker? Are students coming and going and are there other meetings going on? How does that work?
Carl Johnson
Yes, t varies a little bit from one campus and one center to another. Many of our centers now have what we call fellows programs. These are cohorts of students that commit to meeting together over the course of usually a semester or a year to go through some sort of a great books type curriculum. They are reading certain books and articles together and discussing them. So it might be every Sunday evening or every Monday evening for a semester or for the year, and some of our centers are now sufficiently built out that they’ve developed that curriculum over not just two or three years, but even four years.
It really ends up adding up to something like a Christian liberal arts education that’s getting layered on top of whatever their major is. And many, many, many students these days are in the STEM disciplines, right? And we’re at a lot of state universities. There are big engineering schools and whatnot. My own son is at Cornell, studying engineering, and he’s involved in the center there, and he’s getting a pretty good liberal arts education layered on top of his technical training. So, the Fellows program is a key aspect of what we do, because there’s sustained, ongoing, formative impact on the students.
But then there are other sorts of discussion groups and movie nights that might be one off sorts of things we do, a lot of public reading of Scripture events on some campuses. My successor at the Cornell center does this thing every fall where he gets some food trucks and they read an entire Gospel, say the Gospel of Mark out loud, out on the patio. And they’ll have over 100 students come and just sit just in silence while they listen to the entire book of Mark being read out loud.
David Capes
It’s like the way Mark wrote it, not verse by verse, but the whole thing.
Carl Johnson
Right, exactly! It’s almost like this ancient monastic practice that’s getting reincorporated into the modern secular universities, with food trucks.
David Capes
I love it. That’s exciting. You’re heading off to Singapore. Is this becoming an international thing, or is it mainly North America? What’s the geographic?
Carl Johnson
Yes, I am. It’s mainly North America. I get a fair number of calls and inquiries from folks in other countries, and there are a few fledgling Christian study centers in other countries that are modeled after what they see happening here in North America. There are challenges to getting these centers established in other countries. One aspect of that is financial, and then there’s also just networking kinds of challenges. But there’s a lot of interest out there.
I’m going to spend an entire week in Singapore, and the purpose of the visit is three-fold. There’s a lot of Christian families in a place like Singapore who are sending their children to the United States for higher education. They’re asking the same kinds of questions that you were asking earlier. What happens if I send my kids to these institutions? What are the opportunities there? How concerned should I be? I’m going over to let them know what the landscape looks like here and what the opportunities are.
But then the other part of it is to let them know more about this model and to let them figure out what if any implications it may have for their local context. For example, in Germany, there’s now several of these small Christian study centers. And one of the reasons is precisely that the theological seminaries are not flourishing. As they shrink and die, the Christians who are there are very concerned about what is the future of Christian education in our country? And where can we provide theological training for future pastors as well as lay persons? And so the question arises, well, where are the students? And in almost every country these days, the answer is, they’re at the state funded universities. That’s where the overwhelming number of students are, and so it makes sense for Christian organizations to essentially set up camp where the students already are and to provide some education and training opportunities right there.
David Capes
So a freshman student arrives on campus in the fall. How does he find you?
Carl Johnson
Well, these days, if they’re looking, it’s not hard. With all the online searches, an awful lot of the students will find these centers before they arrive.
David Capes
So they already know it exists.
Carl Johnson
Exactly. It’s not that hard. Many of the centers also run a 24- or 48-hour pre-orientation retreat, so that students can actually arrive a day or two early. They might be in a group with anywhere from a couple dozen or even more than 100 other students that they can get to know so they have some semblance of Christian community with other students in their class before orientation kicks in. But we can also mix in some upper-classmen Christian students to provide them with a little bit of here’s how life works at this university. We bring in a couple of Christian faculty members to give some brief talks. Yes, there are Christians here on the faculty, even though we don’t always speak in a Christian voice. So you might not know that, but yes, we’re here. We bring in a few pastors to give some short talks, to let them know about their local churches, and extend an invitation to join them for Sunday worship. And so by the time orientation begins, the incoming students have met other fellow first year students, upper class Christian students, Christian faculty members and local pastors.
David Capes
That’s a great strategy. This is bound to cost a lot of money. I’m thinking about the buildings right next to a place like University of Virginia or Cornell. How is all this funded?
Carl Johnson
Mostly from alumni, parents secondly, and there’s occasionally, a few foundation grants that will help with a particular project, here and there. But it’s individual donors, mostly alumni and parents. And it’s not impossible to kick things off in a very bootstrapped kind of a way. That’s certainly the way I did things, back in the day. And we would just have faculty members and parents doing talks on faith and vocation, and I would interview them, and students would come out and listen. You do what you can with the resources that you have.
But yes, it’s true, especially once you get into buildings, it requires a lot more resources, millions of dollars, to be sure. One of the reasons, among others, that I’m enthusiastic and even bullish on this movement is precisely because there’s a business model that works pretty well. One aspect of that is that, depending on the building you have, the buildings themselves can generate revenue. The ministry that I started, we purchased two large Greek houses that each have about 20 residents, so now we have 40 residents paying rent to the ministry. And we purchased the building outright with money that was donated. And we don’t pay tax, because we’re a non-profit organization, so we’re not paying property tax.
So all of that revenue is funding ministry staff who are ministering to the student residents. You know, it’s what I tell the donors. It’s like a double return on investment. Because if you put all that money in an endowment account, you put a million dollars in an endowment account. You might get $80,000 a year, or something like that. Now we get that much money in rent for every million dollars of equity in the house, and that rent is going directly to support the staff who are serving the students who are living in the asset. It’s really a remarkable model. And then some of the centers have commercial real estate. In Florida, there’s this very, very well built out coffee house, Pascal’s Coffee House as part of the Center at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Up in Minnesota, Anselm house, they’ve purchased a building that has 70,000 square feet, and the majority of it is rented out to commercial organizations that are paying rent supporting the ministry. So there’s all kinds of opportunities here, I think, even on the building front, for the ministries to become sustainable as a byproduct of getting into real estate.
David Capes
That’s an exciting kind of project that you’re helping to lead right now. You estimate that there are about three dozen centers. Do you see that growing?
Carl Johnson
Absolutely. I get more inquiries all the time. In the month of December, I think I received about 10 inquiries through our website from people saying, I would like to start a study center on such and such a campus. I received another one yesterday. I mean, these things are coming in as fast, almost faster than we can respond to them. It’s really incredible. But there are very healthy startup efforts at UCLA, in particular right now. It’s one that I’m watching. We have inquiries from some other well-known universities, and then there are some other universities that are not as well known. But that’s one of the signs of the spread of the movement, is it’s not just the campuses with 1000s of students and big resources and big recognizable names. Sometimes I get inquiries from institutions, and I have to look them up to see where they are. I’m not familiar with them, but you know, the persons inquiring have been exposed to the movement at one of the larger campuses.
David Capes
I think parents who hear this, grandparents who hear this, might be encouraged and not so discouraged from sending their sons and daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, off to a well-known university because they know that they can find Christian community, Christian Fellowship, Christian teaching, and maybe even almost like a liberal arts degree in Christian theology there. This is a great movement’
Carl Johnson
I’ll say, for the record, I want it to be known. I’m a huge fan of Christian colleges. My wife, Julie, and I have five children, we sent three of them to Christian colleges and two of them to secular universities. When people ask me, what’s the better route to go, my answer is, there is no one right answer. It depends on the child, their interests and the opportunities that are before them.
We’ve had students come to some of the universities where we have centers, and they said, well, actually, my first choice was a Christian college, but I got so much more financial aid here that I didn’t really have a choice. I had to come here. But now that I’m here, I’m happy that I’m here, because I didn’t know there were all these opportunities for Christian learning here. But the bottom line, reality is that approximately 80% of students from Christian homes and families attend secular universities. That’s just the way the numbers work, and so I think it’s important in the broadest sense of church strategy. If we want to serve the next generation, we need to be thinking about, what are we doing for the Christian students at secular universities. And of course, it’s not just the Christian students. I mean, we’re doing a lot of public events as well.
David Capes
Some non-Christian students become Christians. I’ve talked to so many people who became Christians in college.
Carl Johnson
Absolutely, it’s a very incredible time.
David Capes
And a lot of that has to do with movements like the Christian Studies Center Movement.
Carl Johnson
Yes, absolutely.
David Capes
Carl Johnson, thanks for being with us today on The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Carl Johnson
Thank you, David.
Description
TSCP 284 Staying Christian in College with Carl Johnson
Many parents (and grandparents) are concerned to send their sons and daughters off to secular colleges because they may lose their faith. But Carl Johnson, Executive Director of the Consortium of Christian Study Centers, thinks this is a good time to send them to them to certain elite universities. Why? Well keep listening and you’ll find out.
The Stone Chapel Podcast is part of the Church Leaders Podcast Network.
For more information about the Christian Study Centers see their website: https://cscmovement.org/
The Stone Chape Podcast is created and produced by the Lanier Theological Library and Learning Center in Houston, TX.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and space.
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
Hi, I’m Dr Jennifer Powell McNutt, and I’m the Franklin S Dyrness Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Wheaton College.
David Capes
Dr. Jennifer McNutt, Jennifer, good to see you. Welcome to The Stone Chapel Podcast. Your first appearance. It took two years for us to be able to, do this podcast. We kept missing each other between kids, travel and work. You’re a busy lady. In a minute, we’re going to talk about your book, The Mary We Forgot, and the subtitle is fascinating. We’re going to talk about what the “apostle to the apostles”, teaches the church today. It’s fascinating. I learned a lot just by reading the book and all the things I didn’t know about Mary Magdalene and her significance and her ongoing potential significance, in the church today.
Let’s start with you. For those who don’t know, who is Jennifer Powell McNutt?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
I’ll start with my teaching. I teach at Wheaton College in the Liftin Divinity School, and I run the master’s programs in theology and history of Christianity. You and I have worked together, so that’s delightful. And my husband and I are from California. Originally I went to Westmont College and Princeton Theological Seminary and then the University of Saint Andrews. And I’m married to David McNutt. He is the senior acquisitions editor in theology at Zondervan. And we have McNuttshell Ministries. We love to work together and to do ministry together in our Presbyterian tradition, and we wrote a book together too recently.
David Capes
You’re an author along with a lot of other things. You travel and you speak all over the place. We’ll put a link in the show notes to your McNuttshell Ministries. That’s really interesting, and I’d like to learn more about that someday.
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
Yes, we work to bridge the church and the academy.
David Capes
That’s what we do at the Lanier Theological Library. That is our mission. And that’s a little bit of a heavy lift at times, but at other times, at least these days, it’s working hand in glove. We’ like to get you down here sometime to be one of our speakers and maybe we’ll even bring David too! Okay, we’re talking about your book, The Mary We Forgot: What the Apostle to the Apostle Teaches the Church Today.
All I have is a promotional copy. So I’m asking you to send a signed copy my way. I’ll have the full version at that point. All right, let’s talk a little bit about the fact that you have done a lot of work in reformation studies, and now all of a sudden, you’re heading back to the early church, and that tradition. What was the impetus for you to move from a focus on later church history, back to the beginnings?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
For this book, it was just tracing the history of Mary Magdalene’s interpretation. And also, not only across time, but also across the different traditions and branches of the church. So, I’m looking at the Roman Catholic, the Eastern Orthodox and the Protestant. But of course, I’m writing from a Protestant perspective and experience of her. We have to go back to the beginning to see these early interpreters and how they are addressing Mary Magdalene, how they’re highlighting her role, what they’re thinking about exegetically and theologically, about her presence.
Then I was hoping to see how that eventually gets us to the point where we are today. There were surprises along the way, and there were other things that we will be familiar with, especially this idea of her as a prostitute, which is very well known in our modern popular cultural world. I’m seeing how that happened, but then also some of the complexity behind the reading of her importance and significance and role in the Christian life.
David Capes
You begin with Jesus Christ Superstar, and any book that begins with Jesus Christ Superstar is going to get my attention. I was a musician back in those days and played it a few times and had fun with it. You know, it was an interesting bit of music. I didn’t understand it completely. I just thought it was about Jesus! I was into it for that.
So, you refer to her in the subtitle as the apostle to the apostles. What do you mean by that? That’s not a phrase a lot of people have heard,
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
It is interesting to discover that in our western tradition, we do have evidence and examples, though inconsistently, of understanding her role in Jesus’s ministry as apostolic. I had always heard that that was only part of the Eastern Orthodox tradition, and that they were very clear on Mary Magdalene, not a prostitute but as apostle to the apostles. And so it was really exciting to discover in the Western tradition how she has, importantly, also been recognized as apostle to the apostles, and some of the reasons why that happens in the history of interpretation.
Part of it has to do with just the flourishing of medieval mysticism in the West and the attention that was put on the importance of preaching. And we see, the Mendicant orders, especially, really identifying with Mary Magdalene. Seeing her encounter with Jesus in the garden in John 20 as really the basis and foundation for sending her as apostolic witness. And that goes all the way back to Irenaeus of Leon, this reading of her role as bringing the good news to the other apostles, and therefore being the apostle to the apostles.
So that was my first discovery. But then the second discovery was to see that even in the Protestant tradition, even among the reformers, there is recognition of her activity in the gospels as apostolic and again, inconsistently and certainly something that we have forgotten over time, but nonetheless, there and present. One of the other things that I’m doing in the book is to say that according to Scriptures own standards for apostolicity, Mary Magdalene qualifies. It’s not just in the history of our traditions, across the traditions, but also based on what the Bible sets out for us.
David Capes
Now, one of the things that people still aren’t settled on is the idea of Magdalene itself, just the name Mary Magdalene. First of all, Mary itself is a very common name, right?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
That’s right. It’s the most popular name, as I understand it, in first century Palestine, for women. So, I really appreciated that as a “Jennifer” from the 80s.
David Capes
How many Jennifers are there in the 80s?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
About four in every class!
David Capes
We go through times when names become very familiar. Even the name Jesus, Joshua, Yeshua is a very common name at the time, so he had to be designated something other than Yeshua. So, he’s designated Yeshua of Nazareth. What about Mary? What does Magdalene mean?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
I’m using a lot of different research and biblical studies on this topic, but the reason why the name is highlighted in part, is to distinguish her from other “Marys”. But also, we would notice that she is being connected to a location rather than to a man. Instead of to a husband or to a father or to a son. We know her by her connection to this place. But also because in Luke 8 especially, she’s Mary called the Magdalene. There is a sense that there’s another meaning to her name. In Aramaic, Migdol means tower, and so she may carry this nickname of “the tower”. This is a conversation going on in biblical studies right now. But what’s interesting is to see that this is how the church has read her name in the tradition. Not just in the early church, but also in the Reformation. She was called “the tower”, and that was intended to signify her strength of faith, that she was known as a model of faith.
David Capes
She might also have been tall, you never know!
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
Yes, she could have been tall!
David Capes
And when she put on those high heels, boy, was she really up there! I’ve heard all sorts of things about that, and a lot of it is tied to Magdala, which is a location on the west shore of the Sea of Galilee. There’s been a lot of research done there in the last years, a lot of discoveries archeologically. It’s just fascinating how all these things develop. I wasn’t aware that the idea of the tower had that staying power into the tradition.
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
It’s so interesting to discover we’re having this conversation today about how we should understand it, but we should also be aware of how the church has thought about it too, but again, inconsistently.
David Capes
There’s this conflation of her and the idea of prostitution. First of all, where did that happen? How did that happened do you think from all of your research as a historian.
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
I really enjoyed this part of it, the curiosity of discovering how this story fits together. What I was able to perceive was that some of the hermeneutical approaches that were happening with reading and making sense of the Gospels was to harmonize the Gospels. We can understand and appreciate that. That is a good approach. But nonetheless, what I noted was that the various stories in the Gospel about a woman anointing Jesus became one story. There are four stories and John’s Gospel is the one that names Mary of Bethany. So they are all conflated into one story, rather than interpreting that maybe the other women are different women. The person that I see this happening with is Augustine. He makes this move. And by linking these anointing women with Mary Bethany, he also links Mary Bethany then with the Luke 7 woman, who is described as a sinner woman. That, to him, shows that Mary Bethany had this other story, this other back story to her life. First she is not looked on very well,
Then the next move that happens, that I would say, formalizes this is with Pope Gregory the Great. He then conflates Mary Bethany with Mary Magdalene. So basically, you have the conflations of the anointings, then you have the conflation of the Marys. Mary Bethany gets absorbed into the Mary Magdalene story. Mary Magdalene is known for having seven demons. Gregory then is trying to understand how that fits into the story. He will describe those as seven deadly sins and interpret the sinfulness of the woman in Luke 7 as prostitution. And actually, that is the conclusion for a lot of interpreters even into the 21st century.
It’s only been more recently that there have been some questions about the fact that Luke could have used the Greek word for prostitute, if he’d meant that. He uses it otherwise and chooses not to use it here. So maybe her sin is not prostitution. It isn’t necessarily prostitution. That’s where we get that. From the sixth century, and on from there, she really becomes this model of a penitent prostitute who is reflecting basically the epitome of sin. It is a great example of God’s graciousness to choose her and select her to proclaim the good news of Christ’s resurrection.
And that is not going to be questioned until the Reformation. In the Reformation, they will begin to untie the Mary Magdalene story from Mary of Bethany and from the Luke 7 woman. And this is called the controversy of the three Marys. So the Luke 7 woman isn’t a Mary.
David Capes
She isn’t necessarily a Mary at all. Once the Pope says something, and once Augustine says something, that’s going to be like law forever [for some].
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
For the west yes. Because it shapes then the liturgy. You think about the feast days, you think about the liturgy, which scripture passages are you reading on which days? The church is going to place the Luke 7 reading with Mary Magdalene’s feast day. And that’s not even going to be changed until the modern era.
David Capes
If we tell the truth now about Mary and we understand better her story, that’s what your book is all about. In a summary way, what can she teach us today?
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
Well, I think so much. I think the big takeaway, first of all is we have to recognize that in the Gospels, she is a woman who has been gripped by demons, by seven demons. That’s actually her backstory, and Jesus is healing her from this, and he is definitively delivering her from the grip of that demonic activity, however you interpret that. The Gospels don’t reveal to us her experience of that suffering, so we don’t know exactly what she experienced. We’re meant to remember her as healed. We’re also meant then when we see her in the garden with Jesus, to see what she comes to represent in the story, when she is witness to resurrection.
And I know you’ll love this part, because I think she is revealing to us who Jesus is. And this is: Jesus is Exorcist, who is truly King. We have really lost that reading of her, and it impacts how we understand the Easter morning. It impacts how we understand why the women are there, what it means when she points us to Jesus. In the early church, when they looked at Mary Magdalene, they read her, they were less focused on her and more focused on what she tells us about Christology. What she tells us about the Trinity. And I think we want to recapture that part of it, not to the detriment of knowing her or seeing her rightly, which I think is biblically right, reading the biblical text clearly. But then also, because her whole role is really like John the Baptist, to point us to Christ in all that he means, so his identity and what he is bringing to us through salvation. That’s one part of it.
I think the other part, though, is that we have been very focused on her being this penitent prostitute, sinner, when her story is very different. And in fact, the Gospels want us to see that as soon as Jesus heals her, she is with him. She is focused on him. She is walking with him. Everything about her life becomes centered around him as we understand it again from the Gospels. Her resources, her time, where she goes. Everything is about being with him. She becomes this witness. She’s really this creedal witness for us. Because she is there in the ministry. She is there at the cross. She sees him die, sees his body put in the tomb, and the tomb sealed. She sees the empty tomb, and then sees the risen Christ, you know? And that’s not even all of it.
There’s so much about it and the financial part is really interesting, because typically, we probably think that a woman in the New Testament is not going to give us a lot of insight into finances and how we serve faithfully with our finances. But actually, that’s also part of her story.
David Capes
So many takeaways here. I love the fact that you refer to her, and the church does as the apostle to the apostles. As the one who was this initial witness to the resurrection, who now relates this good news, who is sent to tell this good news to others, to the 12 and to others as well.
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
And we have been missing that part of it because of our reading of John 20. Some of the difficulties that we have faced for the church that have obscured that part of it. Clearing some of that away, her tears, her inability to see Jesus immediately, etc, allows us to see what it means when they interact and when he sends her. There’s many different parts to his sending of her that helps us to realize that in the true sense of the term apostle, she is messenger. She is the one who is sent.
David Capes
Indeed, indeed. We’re talking with Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt about her book, The Mary, We Forgot What the Apostle to the Apostles Teaches the Church Today. It’s a great book. I would encourage you to get it. It tells us so much about church history, our beginnings, but also about Mary. She was just a remarkable woman who was completely, totally devoted to Jesus. Dr, Jennifer Powell McNutt, thanks for being with us today.
Jennifer Powell NcNutt
Thank you so much for having me. It was delightful.
TSCP 242 She’s Not Who You Think
With Jennifer Powell McNutt
Description
TSCP 242 She’s Not Who You Think with Jennifer Power McNutt
Historian and Presbyterian church leader, Jennifer Powell McNutt, joins David Capes on The Stone Chapel Podcast to discuss her recent book, The Mary We Forgot: What the Apostle to the Apostles Teaches the Church Today(BrazosPress). Mary Magdalene is one of the earliest followers of Jesus. Through the twists and turns of history her backstory has been obscured. She’s not who you think.
Joining me today is Esau McCauley, Associate Professor of New Testament and Public Theology at Wheaton College. He worked with NT Wright, our friend from the University of St Andrews.
David Capes
Welcome. We’re so glad that you’re here.
Esau McCaulley
Oh, thank you. Happy to be here. I’m enjoying it, it’s a beautiful, beautiful space.
David Capes
Yes and you’ve had a chance to enjoy our Yarnton property.
Esau McCaulley
Yes! How many people have done both? I’ve done double duty.
David Capes
You are twice blessed.
Esau McCaulley
I have to go back once the library is finished there, so I can see it fully operational.
David Capes
We’re going to be talking about your commentary that you led. It’s a great project, and it’s called the New Testament in Color: A Multiethnic Bible Commentary. Tell us about this project.
Esau McCaulley
My first book looked at the contributions of the African American church to understanding Christianity in America, and the distinctive ways in which African Americans have read the Bible and made sense of it. And so, when I wrote that book, it was supposed to be a part one of a two part series. But a lot of people bought the first book. And then wanted to talk about it, some people attacked it, so you’ve got to defend it. So it took longer to help people understand what I did and didn’t mean by African American biblical interpretation. Maybe we’ll talk about that for a second to help everyone understand New Testament in Color.
David Capes
That was one of my questions down the way. Let’s talk a little bit about that, because you wrote a chapter on that here.
Esau McCaulley
Yes, when we think about African American biblical interpretation, we could get this idea that skin color creates interpretations of the Bible. Like there’s something in the melanin that makes you a magical Bible interpreter. That’s not what I mean at all. What I mean is the color of your skin impacts the way that you’re treated, and when you’re treated a certain way, it raises certain kinds of questions that you then go to the Bible and answer. A good example is a lot of African Americans are told that Christianity is a white man’s religion. So, we have to show from the Bible that Christianity isn’t a white man’s religion. And I doubt that most pastors in white churches have had people come and say, Christianity is the black man’s religion, prove to me that it isn’t. So the questions that are raised in an African American context aren’t the same questions that are raised in other contexts.
The other example that I use, is say it’s 1954 and Brown v. Board of Education has just passed. Now African Americans are thinking through the questions of how we’re going to be Christians in this new context. Now consider, it’s also 1954 but it’s a white pro-segregation congregation, and the pastor has to stand up and make the case from the Bible. Different context produces different questions. Now you still turn into the Bible for answers. The Bible is still the authority, but the kinds of questions that you ask are influenced by your context. Then sometimes because of your context, you ask questions that lead to insights that people might not otherwise notice.
Another example that I give is say you’re getting ready to teach a youth group, and you’re looking through the Bible. You’re thinking, what’s a good message to say to 15-year-olds. And because 15-year-olds are in your head, you see exactly how this part in Paul, will speak exactly to the experiences of a 15 or 16 year olds. Those insights are there, but you didn’t notice them, because normally you think about preaching to adults. In actuality, the people who you imagine when you read the Bible influence the kinds of things that you notice, and it influences the kinds of things that you bring out of the text. So if we only have one group of people in mind when we interpret the Bible, it leads to the possibility that we don’t see things that are there. I’m not talking about distorted meanings. I’m talking about motivated readings, the things that you notice because you’re attending to them based upon your experiences.
Maybe another example of this, not to belabor the point. Let’s say you’re a woman, and you’re told that women are intellectually inferior. You ask the question what does the Bible actually say about women. And as a woman, you might be really motivated to get this right, because this matters for who you are. Motivated readings aren’t necessarily bad, sometimes they can help us or sometimes they can hinder us. Motivated readings are a fact of reality, and African Americans in the United States have had unique experiences that have required us to answer questions that other communities haven’t. And there’s a deposit of reflections that have arisen from a community that we call the black church, that have formed habits of reading. And so that’s what we call African American biblical interpretation. Not skin color producing readings, but skin color producing experiences that we then bring to the text that influence our reading.
If that is true of African Americans, it’s also true of people from other cultures. We thought what happens if you bring different cultures together to create a commentary that itself reflects what the church is supposed to be, people from every tribe, tongue and nation, reading the Bible together to make sense of it. The New Testament in Color is black, white, Asian and Latino scholars who are together working on a commentary on the New Testament. Not that we all did each one individually, but each person wrote a commentary on a particular book. We have Native American peoples, First Nations indigenous peoples, African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos and white scholars. We wanted to focus on North American minorities. We saw things like the Asian Bible Commentary and others that were more Bible commentaries looking at evangelicalism, listening to the voice of the global church. And we said, it’s great to listen to the global church through the African Bible Commentary, the Asian Bible Commentary. These things are important, but what about the ethnic minorities in our midst? What we wanted to do was to create something that brought together the ethnic minorities in the United States along with the majority culture, because white is a culture, and bring them together to create a commentary.
David Capes
There are white scholars here, as well as black scholars. Gene Green, Michael Gorman, Amy peeler is one of the editors. Janette Oak. Tell us about Janet.
Esau McCaulley
Dr. Oak is an Asian American scholar at Fuller Seminary. She focuses on I & II Peter. She’s also working on a commentary right now on all three letters of John. She is an accomplished scholar, Associate Professor at Fuller. She’s published tons of stuff. Amy peeler is a colleague at Wheaton. We love Wheaton. Amy is a Hebrews scholar, and she also deals a lot with gender, and is helping us understand how the Bible describes women and the gifts that God has given to women and how the church needs to embrace the entire body of Christ to effective ministry. She’s a great New Testament scholar. She did a commentary on Hebrews. Her commentary on Hebrews just came out sometime recently. There’s Osvaldo Padilla. He’s a Latino scholar at Beeson Divinity School, which is in Alabama, you know, God’s country! He is working on the commentary on the Pastorals.
All of them are accomplished scholars. We wanted three things from the people who participated. One, we wanted them to affirm that Scripture is the final authority for Christians, for faith and practice. Although we agree to disagree on a lot of stuff, we wanted to say we agree on the Bible. The second thing we said was we wanted the creeds to function as the consensus around Christian belief as well. So the Nicene Creed, the Apostles Creed. We said, there’s a bunch of denominations here and we think the creeds are a good summary of what it means to be a Christian. So If you say you’re pro-creed, and you say you like the Bible, you could be in the commentary. Beyond that, we gave people freedom. We also said we didn’t want people to speak for their entire ethnicity. I’m not speaking for black people, but I’m a black person speaking from that perspective. This is not the black view on A, B and C. It’s more of a person who’s being unapologetically themselves in the interpretive process.
David Capes
Let’s talk a little bit about your own journey growing up in Alabama. Your own experiences. You were born in the 70’s I I take it.
Esau McCaulley
I like to call myself a child of the 70s. I was born in October of 1979. I’ve lived in the 70s, the 80s, the 90’s to 2000’s, the 2010’s and the 2020’s.
David Capes
Six decades. Wow. It’s you were barely in the. 70s.
Esau McCaulley
That month and a half in the 70s is a wild time.
David Capes
Talk about your journey toward faith.
Esau McCaulley
I think that a lot of the times I talk more about decisions for Jesus rather than a decision for Jesus. I feel like a significant part of my spiritual journey is, over time, giving over more and more of my life to God. Because I was raised in a Christian home. My grandparents, on both sides of my family, were Baptist ministers. My mom was a minister. She became a minister after I did so I always say she followed me into ministry. She got ordained, a couple of years ago. We were in church every Sunday. We were kind of from a rough part of town, and so we tended towards binaries. You were either in the church or in the streets. And so I was in the church, but the levels of my piety waxed and waned over the years. And so I didn’t say it out loud to the pastor, but I’ll come to church on Sunday and if you preach a good sermon, I’m going to be a Christian that week. If you don’t, you lost me. I’ve always kept that with me, because I know what it’s like to go into church and say, if I don’t hear a word from God today I don’t know what’s going happen.
That was most of my childhood, and I would say that for me, Christianity was in periods in my life, more of a survival mechanism. It was the way out of my neighborhood. And maybe I can say, to make a very long story short, I was a college football player, division three at the University of the South. And it was shocking to go from the poverty of my high school to college at the University of the South, where there’s so much money and so much wealth. They joked because in football we had “two a days”, where you practice twice a day. Tennessee was super hot, and I was the only person who actually ever gained weight during “two a days”. Because I never had that much food in my life. You could just go to cafeteria and eat whenever you want. I couldn’t believe it.
But one of the things that I realized is that after I was no longer in this place where I didn’t recognize my need for God, I said, Oh, God had done what he needed to do. He got me to college, and I was in college. It was a more theologically progressive place, where I took the religion classes. They told you that none of this stuff was true, and all of the kind of stuff you hear as a stereotype of religion and higher education. It’s really good to tell a college student that God doesn’t care what you do. It wasn’t that intellectually stimulating. There were the fraternity houses down the road and the professors telling me I can do what I want. That’s a toxic mix for a college student. And I kind of drifted away from my faith for a little bit in college. Then there came this particular moment in college.
It was Christmas break when I had a significant spiritual moment in my life. I’m home for break, and I’m back in my room, but it’s no longer mine, because when you leave our house, there’s too many people to leave an empty room. So it was my sister’s bedroom and everything’s pink now. I was listening to Etta James, like old school and Billie Holiday; this sad jazz music on this thing called Napster. If you’re a certain age, you remember when you could download illegal music before there were streaming services. I wasn’t praying or anything. I’m just listening to sad jazz music. Because I had everything that I wanted in college. I was no longer worried about what I was going to eat. I was doing well in school. I was doing well in sports. I was not praying. I was just listening to depressing jazz music because it felt like it matched my mood.
I had this idea that I think comes from God. It was like a sentence, fully formed. What happens when you receive everything you ever wanted, but it’s not sufficient to bring you joy. And I said that has summarized my college experience. And then the answer to the question that the Spirit was, maybe you should try God and take him seriously. And so that was the spiritual transformation. But because I had been in college and I had all of the intellectual stuff taken away from me, I had to go through this process of reading myself. I had to say, I know I’ve had this experience of God, but now I had to make intellectual sense of this and that. And actually, the study to make sense of what I’d experienced spiritually led me down the road to becoming, ultimately, an academic. I began to answer those questions that I received in those courses.
Jeannine asked me, what is it that I like doing the most? And I said, talking to students about the Bible and giving them the confidence to live their lives on the basis of each text. Because I know what it’s like to have a professor whose goal was to take that away from students. I want to give that back to students, to say we are not fools for trusting in the God who revealed these texts. And so that’s a little bit of my spiritual journey.
David Capes
Great story.
This is the end of part one of my interview with Esau McCaulley. Part two is coming up next week.
A Word in Edgewise 
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