Father John Dear.
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Duluth, Minnesota (OpEdNews) February 18, 2024: Recently I commented on the prolific American diocesan priest and renowned peace activist Father John Dear's impressive new 2024 magnum opus The Gospel of Peace: A Commentary on Matthew, Mark, and Luke from the Perspective of Nonviolence (Orbis Books) in my OEN article titled "John Dear on the Synoptic Gospels and Bottom-Up Nonviolence" (dated January 31, 2024):
Today, I want to comment on Father John Dear's earlier book The Questions of Jesus: Challenging Ourselves to Discover Life's Great Answers (Image Books/ Doubleday/ Random House, 2004).
Disclosure: Over my years of teaching at the University of Minnesota Duluth (1987-2009), I regularly taught an introductory-level survey course on the Bible - in which I regularly lectured/commented on two of the four canonical gospels (usually Mark and John). This explains why I am interested in Father John Dear's two books about how Jesus is portrayed in the canonical gospels.
In addition, I helped arrange to have the historical Jesus expert John Dominic Crossan visit the University of Minnesota Duluth on Friday April 7, 1995, and Saturday, April 8, 1995. On Friday evening, he presented a free public lecture on "Jesus the Peasant" to an overflow crowd on campus. On Saturday, he presented a day-long workshop on "The Quest for the Historical Jesus" to about 75 people who paid to attend it. His visit to Duluth in early April coincided with the recent release in March of his then-new book Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Gospel Story of the Death of Jesus (HarperSanFrancisco).
For further discussion of the prolific Crossan, see my 9,000-word 2022 review essay "John Dominic Crossan on the Historical Jesus's 93 Original Sayings, and Walter J. Ong's Thought" that is available online through the University of Minnesota's digital conservancy: https://hdl.handle.net/11299/226607 End of disclosure.
Now, in Father John Dear's thought-provoking book The Questions of Jesus, he says, "In the end, I found 307 questions [put on the lips of Jesus by the four evangelists in their respective narrative portrayals of him]" (p. 2). Critical biblical scholars maintain that the four canonical gospels were written by anonymous evangelists decades after the death of the historical Jesus.
In addition, in Franciscan Father Richard Rohr's "Foreword" in Father John Dear's book The Questions of Jesus (pp. xxi-xxiv), he says, "I am told, for example, that Jesus only directly answers 3 of the 183 questions that he himself is asked in the four Gospels" (p. xxi): 307 + 183 = 490 questions in the four canonical gospels. Question: Why did the four anonymous evangelists feature 490 questions over their four canonical gospels?
Now, in Father John Dear's thought-provoking book The Questions of Jesus, he reprints the questions put on the lips of Jesus by the four evangelists in 230 passages from their four gospels in an "Appendix" (pp. 293-306): (1) John [50 passages; pp. 293-295]; (2) Mark [52 passages; pp. 295-298]; (3) Luke [66 passages; pp. 298-302]; (4) Matthew [62 passages; pp. 302-306]. Father John Dear does not explain the order he uses (John, Mark, Luke, and Matthew) for listing the pertinent passages. Critical biblical scholars consider John's Gospel to be the Fourth Gospel written and Mark's the first written.
In sum, the four canonical evangelists taken together portray Jesus as posing 307 questions contained in 230 passages in their canonical gospels. Critical biblical scholars maintain that the anonymous synoptic evangelists of Mark, Matthew, and Luke used certain sources in common. Consequently, certain passages in the three synoptic gospels are similar, including certain questions posed by Jesus in them.
Granted, the historical Jesus was an itinerant oral preacher and teacher. On the one hand, it is not unlikely that an itinerant oral teacher might pose questions as part of his thought-provoking oral teaching. Evidently, the historical Jesus did use thought-provoking parables as part of his oral teaching. On the other hand, it is unlikely that all four of the canonical evangelists fabricated such a pronounced pattern of Jesus posing questions without any basis in the practice of the historical Jesus.
In any event, Father John Dear surveyed the 307 questions that he had found, looking for common themes. In the end, he settled on 19 common themes for his book of meditations, each with some subdivisions featuring passages in which the evangelists put certain questions on the lips of Jesus:
(1) "Invitation" (pp. 5-10; with three subdivisions);
(2) "[Jesus's] Identity" (pp. 11-40; with fourteen subdivisions);
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