Reponse Paper No. 1

I find some of Kloppenborg’s theories interesting. On page 70 he discusses the fact that when Jesus stills the storm the disciples question, “Who is it that even the winds and seas obey him?” Kloppenborg continues, “Unknowingly paraphrasing the Psalms in which God is depicted as the one who commands the wind and sea.” Personally, I find it strange that Kloppenborg assumes that the disciples are naive enough to not know what they are saying. To my knowledge, the disciples were Jews and as Jews they would have had a rudimentary knowledge of the Torah, if this is true, the disciples would recognize their words. In our discussion in class we have spoken about the fact that the gospels were not written for at least a hundred years after Jesus’ death, that being true we can’t be sure whether these words are merely an interpretation by the author, or passed down through tradition. In writing the gospel the authors would have had to rely on either documents like Q, other firsthand narratives, or on word of mouth. In the firsthand narratives, personal judgment, opinion and personal interpretation play a large part. In a bank heist although six people could have been in the room seeing the same thing, they would tell six different stories. Word of mouth is even more precarious because stories change with each telling, an ongoing game of telephone, so that when they are written down they are drastically different than the original. In turn, a document like Q, a conglomeration of Jesus’ sayings would also have its flaws unless a scribe followed Jesus everywhere he went and wrote down his words, which is unlikely. This being the case, it is entirely possible that the authors used quotes from verses in Psalms to foreshadow Jesus’ divinity while portraying the disciples as unenlightened to that fact, as a literary device or as an interpretation of what could have happened when Jesus calmed the storm. It is possible that this is just an interpretation of the oral-scribal traditions (which Kloppenborg discusses in his Introduction) that had passed these stories down, or, a change that had occurred as the stories were passed down for a century. I find it confusing that Kloppenborg puts the disciples at fault on page 70 when so many other forces are acting upon the text. And although I realize that he is not discussing the many different sources that have affected the Bible, I still find the interpretation awkward and unmerited. He goes on to say: “If only they had listened to their own words, they would have known that Jesus must be God’s son.” But he doesn’t take into consideration the reason behind their confusion. It’s illogical to hold the fact that the disciples are naïve of Jesus’ divinity and to appear to hold it against their intelligence as Kloppenborg does, especially when, as we talked about in class, literary Jesus didn’t become completely divine until John’s gospel, more than a century after the disciples had lived. In this sense, I find the illogical assumptions that are introduced make it hard to take Kloppenborg as a scholarly writer, and easier to take his work as a man expressing his opinions of religion.