Are the Gospels haggadah?

There is a recurring quest by critics to find some way to classify the historical works of the New Testament in such a way that they can be comfortably dismissed as fiction without any further consideration. One of the chief ways of doing this is to classify the Gospel as something other than what their format indicates (Greco-Roman biographies).

A reader inquired about theorists who attempt to classify the Gospels as haggadah. In searching for information on this subject, I found that the argument was devoid of support in a far greater way than most such theories. The arguments are seldom more than declarative in nature, the assumption being that the Gospels must be haggadah simply because they report events the critic happens to find unbelievable; or, because, for example, New Testament texts seem in the eyes of the critics to be "copies" of Old Testament texts (see link 1 below). In short, the argument isn't so much that the New Testament has haggadah in it, as that the haggadah provides another speculative round hole into which the critics attempt to pound the New Testament's square peg.

What exactly is haggadah? The term (with a capital H) is specifically and formally applied to a Jewish text that serves as a sort of reading accompaniment to the Passover celebration. In that respect, it is a direct parallel to church texts called lectionaries. It is a mix of historical material, along with prayers and applicational commentary. It is therefore quite obviously nothing at all like one of the New Testament Gospels, or any other New Testament text. The assumption is, however, that because the Passover Haggadah took certain historical liberties with the Old Testament for what appear to be didactic purposes, the same could also have occurred with the New Testament texts.

In one sense, we might compare haggdah to popular novels by Christian authors that use Biblical figures as characters. Such texts loosely use the Biblical account as a skeleton on which to hang the broader story. Or we might compare haggdah to Sunday School lessons that speculate (sometimes rampantly) on the lives and motives of Biblical characters in order to draw a lesson not actually found in the text.

Haggadah with a small h is also used in tandem with words like midrash ("haggadic midrash") to describe certain texts. The key meaning is the amplification or expansion of Biblical texts. To that extent, it can be applied to any text at all, not just historical texts. The gist of critics therefore would seem to be that the New Testament is an expansion on the Old Testament, or an amplification of it. Thus Bowman in The Gospel of Mark) (Brill, 1965) refers to Mark's Gospel as "haggadic midrash" (312) although he thinks the sayings of Jesus could also be starting points from which the New Testament accounts were created. Bowman also presents a standard listing of alleged problems with the trial narrative (see link 2 below) as his reason to offer haggadic midrash as an alternative genre for the account.

Not surprisingly, it is the fringe peddler Robert Price who offers a most thorough explanation for the New Testament as haggadic midrash, though he thinks the Old Testament was the seed the was the source. Typical of his practice, Price ranges as far afield as he can to wrestle out parallels, going so far as thinking that the story of Jesus' baptism may have been derived from stories of Zoroaster being bathed in a river. Price appeals to Bowman frequently for inspiration, and lists Helms as a source, as well as MacDonald (see link 3) and Brodie but doesn't really need it: As has always been the case, his arguments are exercises in parallelomania.

One notable point of difference between the New Testament and a clear haggadic text like the one about the Passover: As noted by Jewish scholars like Tabory and Cernia, the Jews rewrote the Passover haggadah frequently in order to tailor it for the culture in which they were living. As a result, the current product mixes the Old Testament, rabbinic material, and medieval material. There is nothing to show that the New Testament works were ever treated in such a cavalier fashion; such adjustments were reserved for secondary works alone.

A note of interest is that in the past, New Testament scholar Robert Gundry drew the ire of Norman Geisler by identifying the Gospel of Matthew as containing haggadic midrash. In his critique of Gundry, Douglass Moo observed some of the same flaws in Gundry's arguments that we have in Price's: There is too much done by way of assumption; there is too much read into the utility of "theological motifs" and allusions to the Old Testament, and the only objective criteria - apparent contradictions and historical errors - readily admit to other explanations. Moo further criticizes Gundry for failing to sufficiently define what constitutes midrash. He indicates that Gundry defines the criteria so broadly that "an amazingly diverse group of writings can be classified as midrash." (Moo, "Matthew and Midrash," JETS 26/1, March 1983, 31-39)

So what can be said in sum? In summary, we can say that the designation of the New Testament historical accounts as "haggadic midrash" on the Old Testament (or on any other source) is a contrivance. By the same logic, one could easily argue that the assassination of Kennedy was a "haggadic midrash" on the assassination of Lincoln. (Link 4 below.) There's no objective test used to make the designation, nor is there any consideration given to genre, or whether or not the NT was used in the same way as the Passover Haggadah - although theorists will gladly claim that the church must have used the New Testament in the same way, we just don't have any direct proof. In the end, the method is to simply force parallels or find alleged problems, and then impose the category of "haggadic midrash" as a supposedly better explanation.

Links:

  • Helms
  • Trial of Jesus
  • Homeric epics and Mark
  • Lincoln and Kennedy