Ben Witherington on praying with the Bible during Lent

When I took my comprehensive exams for my master’s degree in divinity at the former Weston Jesuit School of Theology in Cambridge, Mass. (now at Boston College), I mentioned something about Jesus’ resurrection. One professor on my comps board said, “Do you mean Jesus or Christ?” And I said, “It’s the same thing.”

One of them shook his head and said, “No, not all.” Then they proceeded to quiz me about the differences.

What I wanted to say was what my professor, Stanley Marrow, S.J., said about the resurrection, which is the clearest way I’ve ever encountered to connect what is usually called the “Jesus of history” (the person who walked the dusty roads of first-century Galilee and Judea) and the “Christ of faith” (the Second Person of the Trinity who has been raised from the dead and is now present to us through the Holy Spirit). In his commentary on the Gospel of John, Father Marrow writes:

The Risen Lord had to be recognizably and identifiably Jesus of Nazareth, the man whom the disciples knew and followed, whom they saw and heard, with whom they ate and because of whom they now cowered behind closed doors. For him to have risen as any other than the Jesus of Nazareth that they knew would void the resurrection of all its meaning. The one they had confessed as their risen Lord is the same Jesus of Nazareth that they had known and followed. Showing them “his hands and his side,” which bore the marks of the crucifixion and the pierce of the lance, was not a theatrical gesture, but the necessary credentials of the identity of the risen Lord, who stood before them, with the crucified Jesus of Nazareth whom they knew.

In other words, the Christ of faith is the Jesus of history. 

That is one of many reasons it is important to know as much as we can about the historical Jesus. The more that we know about Jesus’ life and times—Jewish religious practices, Roman laws and Hellenistic culture and so on—the more we can understand him. That is one reason that I rely so heavily on the writings of Ben Witherington III, the esteemed Protestant biblical scholar and author of many books.

For many years, I had read Professor Witherington’s books and essays (and followed his appearances on television as a world-class explainer of the Bible), but I came to know his work in depth when I was writing my own book on Lazarus, Come Forth. Witherington is perhaps the strongest proponent of the idea that Lazarus is the mysterious “beloved disciple” in John’s Gospel.

More broadly, though, Witherington, especially in his book What Have They Done with Jesus?, has consistently shown how some parts of the Bible that are occasionally dismissed as ahistorical or later additions by the Evangelists (or copyists) or even made up from whole cloth can be shown to have a basis in history, if we only pay attention to real history and what the Bible actually says (and doesn’t say). The book’s subtitle is a tipoff: Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History—Why We Can Trust the Bible.

You don’t have to be an archeologist, philologist, historian or biblical scholar to appreciate the need to understand the historical milieu in which Jesus lived. The more we understand Jesus’ life and times, the more we can understand what Jesus said and did, and therefore the more we can understand the one present to us now through the Spirit: the Christ of faith.