In this series of reminiscences, I wish to pay a debt of gratitude to those who have gone before, and took the time to form me on my life’s way.
I had great preparation for biblical exegesis at Concordia Senior College in Fort Wayne. We were required to take several units each of Hebrew and Greek. The school had a system of “80%-ers,” step-by-step tests through the grammar and vocabulary. To proceed forward you had to retake the tests until you achieved an 80% score. Consequently, we knew more than a little when we began our seminary courses in exegesis.
We had fantastic exegesis courses at Concordia Seminary in Exile (Seminex). I remember a particular labor of love: an elective translating the biblical prophets Amos and Hosea from the Hebrew, especially the amazing Chapter 11 of Hosea. But the exegetical work that most profoundly influenced me for the future I took with the late Edgar Krentz on Philippians, especially his analysis of the Christ hymn in chapter 2. I learned from Krentz about the German New Testament theologian, Ernst Käsemann, which would connect me to J. Louis Martyn, though little did I know it at the time.
A brief aside: several years before his death, Krentz and I had reconnected on Facebook. I was able to send him a copy of my Brazos Theological Commentary on the proto-apocalyptic book of Joshua. His daughter told me she was able to show it to him just before he passed away. On the inside cover I thanked Krentz for his mentorship. The book was then given to the LSTC library.
All this background is introduction to the New Testament theologian who had the most enduring impact upon me at Union Theological Seminary. I can’t recall exactly how I got to know Martyn, because I was enrolled in systematic theology, not biblical studies. I believe it came about through an invitation from my excellent professor in systematic theology, Christopher Morse, to join what was called the informal “Paul Study Group.” This was a gathering of New York City theologians who were interested in new currents in Pauline studies, especially the impact being made by Käsemann and his thesis that “apocalyptic is the mother of Christian theology.” Lou Martyn was the leading light in this gathering as he had just recently shifted from his path breaking work in the Gospel of John (more on that below) to concentrate on Paul, especially the letter to the Galatians, for which eventually he produced his significant Anchor Bible Commentary.
Early on I had written a paper – for whom, I no longer remember! – focused on the righteousness of God in Paul. I had no idea what a contested minefield I was engaging, but I think it was here that the recommendation to read Käsemann was made and received. And Käsemann captured me! I remember how we several graduate students (including the future New Testament scholars Joel Marcus and Martinus de Boer, who also were invited to participate in the Paul Study Group) waited eagerly for the arrival of the English translation of Käsemann’s commentary on Romans. I was honored with an invitation to present my paper on the righteousness of God to this group of mostly senior scholars.
I tried in it to reconcile Käsemann’s thesis of God’s righteousness as “salvation-bearing,” i.e. as the divine fidelity which saves, to the classical Lutheran die Gerechtigkeit die vor Gott gilt ("the righteousness which counts before God"). Attending was the brilliant Reformed theologian Paul Lehmann, who decided that this upstart Lutheran graduate student needed a little humbling. I can’t remember what German language term I had employed in the paper, but he made the somewhat nerdy complaint that I had gotten the nuance of it wrong and then asked me to defend my usage, which left me tongue-tied. Such were the hazing rituals we had to endure in those days! I learned a lot from Lehmann later on, and will reminisce about him in a future post.
So that command performance was how I got to know Lou Martyn. From that point onward I would visit him in his office up in the tower at Union to discuss theology, and also – Union Seminary. At this moment in history, Union was transitioning in its self-understanding from a highly regarded academic program in the footsteps of Tillich and Niebuhr to a program defined by liberation theology commitments. Union was becoming “woke” ahead of its time! I learned from Fleming Rutledge some years later that Martyn described these two programs as Union A and Union B – a polite way of describing a dramatic decline in academic expectations based on merit to what we call today “identity politics.” As a student, I felt caught in the middle of this, especially as a straight white male, despite a strongly felt commitment to greater racial and economic justice. The conversations with Lou in his tower office were for me an island of sanity to which I frequently swam.
I took two doctoral seminars with him. The first introduced me to his groundbreaking research into the Gospel of John. Until this time, the study of John was dominated by Bultmann’s hypothesis of a Gnostic-Mandean “signs source,” which supposedly then suffered layer after layer of recensions by an “ecclesiastical editor” to make it more “orthodox.” This hypothesis led scholars on a wild goose chase for decades to uncover the “signs source.” For Bultmann, however, the theological payoff was that while the “orthodox” revisions made John acceptable to the early Catholic Church, in the process they smothered the original, radical witness to the “word alone” for “faith alone.”
As Bultmann famously put it in his reconstruction of the Gospel of John, the relentless message of the original is that Jesus reveals that he is the revealer – and that’s that! Take it or leave it! Don’t ask for any other reasons to believe than the sheerly improbable announcement of the obviously human Jesus that he is the revealer of God. Like it or lump it – and liking it means giving up all demands for, and reliance upon, the false security of good reasons, warrants or proof. John demands naked faith in a naked word, Kierkegaard’s leap into the dark night on the strength of a perceived voice calling, “Jump!”
Martyn’s critique of Bultmann’s historical critical reconstruction had as its background the still (at that time) dominant interpretation of Gnosticism as, in Harnack’s words, “extreme Hellenism.” Superimposing such Hellenistic “mysticism” on the Gospel of John, however, obscures the thoroughly Second Temple Judaic milieu of the Gospel of John: its narrative is organized by three trips to the temple in Jerusalem on the occasions of three major Jewish festivals and culminates in Jesus’s death in Jerusalem at Passover, with his resurrection appearances where the temple had stood, to found the apostolic community and mission in its place. Of course, it may well be that early Gnosticism actually had its origins in disillusioned Judaic circles whose apocalyptic hopes for supernatural intervention in support of the rebellion against Rome had been crushed by defeat and sealed in the destruction of the temple.
Martyn showed that John’s narrative was organized as a “drama on two levels”: the ostensible historical report about Jesus’ sojourns to and from Jerusalem on one level, and the contemporary Johannine Jewish-Christian community’s painful debates with and eventual expulsion as heretics from the synagogue during the consolidation of early rabbinic Judaism following the Roman defeat of the rebellion. Theologically, the gospel of John is a “martyrology:” paradigmatically in Jesus’s testimony before Pilate, yet transparent to the suffering witness of the community of his disciples in the post-war situation. (I put this insight of Martyn’s to good use in my 2011 book, Divine Complexity.) For this rediscovery of Second Temple Judaism (and liberation from Bultmann’s existentialism, the spell of which had been cast upon me in reaction against the Missouri Synod’s turn to fundamentalism), I remain forever indebted to Lou Martyn.
The second seminar I took with Lou Martyn on the Gospel of Mark was even more important for me. I was impressed at the first meeting that the only homework Lou expected was that we read the Gospel of Mark in Greek weekly and keep track of our insights to share with the seminar. This made for tremendous scholarly discussion. Of course we all had to make presentations and submit a final paper, but this worked in me another liberation: away from the atomization of the text produced by source and form criticism and towards the new accents arising from redaction criticism. In time this led me to a literary critical approach on the way to renewed theological reading, as in my aforementioned Joshua commentary.
I was so taken by the seminar that I wrote a doctoral dissertation on it: “St. Mark’s theologia crucis.” I was not satisfied with it, however, and decided not to publish it, even though I recall with gratitude the congratulations from Lou, my thesis advisor Christopher Morse, and Cornel West in particular (James Cone didn’t like it much). Aside from the apocalyptic framing of the Gospel of Mark (which years later Joel Marcus would forcefully demonstrate in his great two-volume Anchor Bible Commentary), my chief takeaway was the solution I found to the mysterious ending in Mark 15:8, which breaks off abruptly with the women fleeing in fear at the angelic announcement of Jesus’ resurrection. This conclusion is possible, I argued, because Easter occurs in the middle of Mark’s gospel at the Transfiguration. So readers know from this point forward that the One about to be crucified is already the Risen One. But can they, will they, then, be faithful to death now in impending persecution, as those first followers of Jesus had proved not to be?
Lou was a classic historical critic devoted to knowing the particularity of a given biblical text without artificial attempts to harmonize with others. He insisted upon the difference, for example, between Galatians and Romans on the issue of the divine status of the law: in Galatians “mediated by angels” but in Romans the particular gift of God to the people of Israel. He left it to us theologians to worry about the discrepancy. But that did not mean he avoided theology. His historical-critical work on biblical texts was in service of theology in an approach akin to his friends, Ernest Käsemann, and at Yale, Leander Keck.
He was a man of faith. At the end of the John seminar he spoke movingly to the question of the evangelist’s inventiveness vis-à-vis the memories of the Jesus of history. What an impression Jesus must have had upon this community, he said, to evoke creative but faithful re-presentation into their present hour! But the real heart of his own passionate theological concern was the cruciform modification of the apocalyptic theology of Second Temple Judaism. This was articulated in a classic essay, “Epistemology at the Turn of the Ages.” Here I began to recognize my own reading of Luther’s Heidelberg disputation and his “theology of the cross.” The connection is not a stretch, since both Luther and Martyn were dealing with the same text, namely 1 Corinthians 1. In his Galatians commentary, moreover, Martyn explicitly referenced the happy precedent to his own work of Luther’s treatment of Galatians. In the end, I didn’t fully agree theologically with his interpretation of “Christ made a curse for us” in Galatians, and actually staged a literary debate on this topic between Lou and N. T. Wright.
As to his character we have the fondest memories. I say we, because he invited Ellen and me to his apartment for wine and cheese with him and his wife, Dorothy. She was a counselor/therapist, a career that Ellen was interested in. What was memorable about that interaction was a lengthy discussion about the uselessness and deceptiveness of feelings of guilt. Guilt does not free one from the self-obsession which is the real offense to God and neighbor, but actually perpetuates it. The theological issue and the matter for pastoral counseling is what liberates from self-obsession for a new selfhood, oriented to God and the neighbor in need. This discussion corresponded with the observation he often made that the language of forgiveness is rare in Paul, suggesting that Paul found the concept too weak to express the powerful and liberating divine deed of righteousness in Christ.
In these connections and many others, Lou manifested makrothumia, the Greek word I dedicated to him in the acknowledgments of my dissertation, which I translate as “great-heartedness,” “magnanimity,” “generosity of spirit.” When he spoke like this to his students, not all of whom were nearly as seriously pious as he, he never failed to say, “Remember the poor.”
Lou rests in peace to rise in glory. Soli Deo Gloria!