The Baptist, Benedict, and Blair

Today marks the feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist. Or, as my seminary professors liked to call him, John the Baptizer...so as not to confuse him with members of the Baptist denomination!

One of the marks of John the Baptist was his burning desire to speak the truth of God, no matter what the consequenses. John boldly told Herod and Salome that they were adulterers, even though he knew that it could, and did, cost him his life.

Another prophet of our day, Pope Benedict XVI, met yesterday with outgoing British PM Tony Blair. According to the Times, it was a meeting where Benedict reportedly had some very direct words about Blair's recent political support for, among other things, abortion, same-sex unions and embryonic stem-cell research.

This is an interesting turn of events, considering just days ago, the media was awash with reports that Blair, as soon as he leaves office, is set to formally join the Roman Catholic Church when he leaves office. His wife, Cherie, is a Catholic, and Blair regularly attends Mass with her. Blair has not swam the Tiber yet, ostensibly because Britain has never had a Catholic PM, and there is still a latent amount of Anti-Catholicism in the UK. There have even been suggestions that Blair, when and if he comes home to Rome, would be interested in ordination as a deacon.

It appears that Benedict has made things crystal-clear to Blair: Forget about ordination - if you are going to become a Catholic, let alone a cleric - you've got to hold all that the Catholic Church teaches on faith and morals. The cafeteria is closed. It's the full meal deal or no deal.

Benedict knew, as did John the Baptist, that no one, however temporally powerful they may be, is above the laws of the King of the Universe. Our Catholic leaders must boldly speak the truth to them, no matter what the cost. If anyone does convert, it must be, as Benedict said today while discussing the Baptist, in perhaps a not-so-oblique reference to Blair, a "true conversion".

(To see Benedict's excellent catechesis on the Baptist from today's Angelus at St. Peter's, go here, with the usual hat tip to Whispers in the Loggia.)

Can I Get A Witness?

One of the books I'm trying to pick my way through these days is Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitness-es.

Bauckham, New Testament Professor at St. Andrew's, argues against a popular view in New Testament Studies that the Gospels were not composed by eyewitnesses to the life of Christ, and are not necessarily about the actual life of Christ. This view posits that the Gospels were an admixture of real and invented events in Christ's life, edited and tailored to suit the particular needs of the "communities" to which they were written.

Bauckham maintains that the Gospels are actual, eyewitness accounts of the historical life of Christ, written by either the apostles themselves, or men who knew them. They are not the product of late invention.

Bauckham was recently interviewed by Christianity Today, an Evangelical website, about his book. Although I do not agree with his assessment of the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, here's part of the interview:

What is the importance of "testimony" for interpreting the New Testament?

I think it helps us to understand what sort of history we have in the Gospels. Most history rests mostly on testimony. In other words, it entails believing what witnesses say. We can assess whether we think witnesses are trustworthy, and we may be able to check parts of what they say by other evidence. But in the end we have to trust them. We can't independently verify everything they say. If we could, we wouldn't need witnesses.

It's the same with witnesses in court. Testimony asks to be trusted, and it's not irrational to do so. We do so all the time. Now in the case of the Gospels, I think we have exactly the kind of testimony that historians in the ancient world valued: the eyewitness testimony of involved participants who could speak of the meaning of events they had experienced from the inside. This kind of testimony is naturally not that of the disinterested passerby who happened to notice something. That wouldn't tell us much worth knowing about Jesus. That the witnesses were insiders, that they were deeply affected by the events, is part of the value of their witness for us.

In the book, I discuss testimonies of the Holocaust as a modern example of an event we would have no real conception of without the testimony of survivors. In a very different way, the Gospels are about exceptionally significant events, history-making events. In the testimony of those who lived through them, history and interpretation are inextricable. But this, in fact, brings us much closer to the reality of the events than any attempt to strip away the interpretation and recover some supposedly mere facts about Jesus.

You can read the rest here.