Yesterday I was listening to my weekly Misquoting Jesus Podcast (I do that each week to make sure I didn’t make any egregious mistakes in the interview) (I did make a couple, as usual, but so it goes…) and was struck by how, at the end, I described the topic for our next podcast:  why “Luke has gotten rid of the idea that ‘Jesus died for your sins.’”

I had forgotten I put it that way, and when I heard it said out loud, head-on and clear-as-day, I realized I had never heard anyone put it that way before. And that struck me as interesting – especially because it is what most of my classmates in my PhD program at Princeton Seminary also were taught and thought but they never said/say it this way.

What did/do they say instead?  The said/say what we learned from our teachers, a far more innocuous way of putting it:  “Luke doesn’t have a theology of the cross.”

What that means (as my peers and teachers knew) is that Luke does not portray the crucifixion of Jesus as the way of salvation and does not consider Jesus’ death to have brought an atonement for sin.  But they wouldn’t ever put it like that way – it sounds offensive, even if people aren’t quite sure what even that actually means.

What would happen if a (bold) preacher made a comment from the pulpit about Luke not having “a theology of the cross”?  My guess is that few people would notice, and fewer still would know what it meant, or even fewer what the implications were.  Even if they spent a minute thinking about, they still might not be sure.  That’s why a preacher, or a theologian, or a budding NT scholar studying for a PhD would put it that way.  It sounds a bit strange, but a bit theologically recondite and so not necessarily offensive.

But if they did know what it meant it would be offensive to many people:  Luke does not say that Jesus died for your sins and he changes every reference to Jesus dying for your since in his source, Mark, that refers to Jesus dying for your sins.

The one possible exception to that is the saying of Jesus at his last supper (Luke 22:19-20: “this is my body given for you”… “this cup I pour out for you”), but there is a textual variant there: the oldest and best manuscripts don’t have these statements and they appear to represent the original reading.  I’ve talked about that on the blog before but it’s been a few years and maybe I’ll repost the relevant discussions.

For now I’ve become interested in how I put it on my podcast and the reality that critical scholars often avoid saying clearly what they mean, apparently because they don’t want to cause offense, leaving their listeners in the dark about what they are actually saying.

I do know that a lot of New Testament and early Christianity scholars think that I’m too blunt in how I put things, and that some think I’m just trying to be offensive. For my part, I don’t see why we shouldn’t simply call a spade a spade or an error an error or a contradiction a contradiction or say what we really mean.

But biblical scholars can be loathe to do that, for understandable reasons.  As an example that’s been prominent in my thinking for years now (see my previous two posts!):  what would we call a book written by someone who was claiming to be a famous person (when he was someone else)?   We’d call it a forgery.  So too, if I wrote one — if I wrote a book about the Gospel of John and claimed to be Joel Osteen or a book about American foreign policy and claimed to be Bill Clinton, what would we call me?  A forger.

So — what if someone wrote a book and claimed to be Peter, knowing full well he wasn’t?  What would we call the book and what would we call the author?  The vast majority of New Testament scholars would call the book a pseudepigraphon and the writer an “anonymous author.”  Why?  Take a wild guess.

I really do get, understand, and agree that it’s a good idea not to offend people unnecessarily.  And I have to admit that I myself shudder when I call Ephesians or 1 Peter a “forgery” and its author a “forger.”  But, well, those are the words we use for such things.  Is it really better to use other words /phrases that are not familiar so as not to give offense?

The typical response from scholars is that “forgery” has negative connotations today that are not appropriate when speaking about literary activities of this sort in the ancient world.  But they say that because they’ve heard other scholars say that, not because they’ve actually done the work and looked to see what ancient authors regularly do say about “forgery.”

It’s true ancient authors didn’t use the term “forgery,” but there’s a very good reason for that: they weren’t writing English.   The Greek and Latin words for the phenomenon are equally harsh, and the phenomenon is roundly attacked on all sides in ancient writings (if you doubt that, check out my book Forged; if you want the full scoop on it, go to my academic book Forgery and Counterforgery).

My sense that it is simply better to be honest and clear: Luke appears to have “gotten rid of the idea that Jesus died for your sins.”  When you put it like that, it seems to me that people will understand almost immediately what you’re claiming, and that is better than using coded language (“Luke doesn’t have a theology of the cross”), the meaning of which – let alone the implications – most people will at best puzzle and many simply won’t understand.