A Critique of Liberal Scholarship - Part 9 - A critique of Beare’s interpretation of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31)

This text is from a letter written by David Gooding in 1996.

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Editor's note: This article is one part of a multi-part series which David Gooding wrote to critique in a scholarly way some of the work of a number of liberal scholars. The series comprises:

1. Can following liberal scholarship lead to a loss of faith?
2. Following liberal scholarship can lead to biased research
3. Observations on Herman Hendrickx's 'The Accounts of the Resurrection'
4. Observations on the interpretation of parables given by liberal scholars
5. A critique of Jeremias's interpretation of the parable of the Pounds (Luke 19:11–27)
6. A critique of Joachim Jeremias's interpretation of Mark 4
7. A critique of Haenchen's attempt to use Acts 1:9–11 as support for the theory of the delayed Parousia
8. A critique of Jeremias's interpretation of the parable of the Widow and the Unjust Judge (Luke 18:1–8)
9. A critique of Beare's interpretation of the story of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Luke 16:19–31)

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The story of the Rich Man and Lazarus is well known; but the form critics apparently find it difficult. Professor Beare, in his general work for students, The Earliest Records of Jesus (Oxford, Blackwell, 1964, pp. 182–3), gives the findings of the form critics as follows. They say the story is made up of two originally distinct parts:

1. A story of reversal of fortunes in the life to come: the rich man is there tormented and the poor man is comforted (Luke 16:19–26).

2. An attempt to produce conviction about personal immortality and rewards and punishments after death by claiming—quite wrongly—that the Old Testament taught these things; so that, in answer to the rich man's plea for Lazarus to be sent to warn his brothers, the rich man can be told that, if they hear not Moses and the prophets, neither will they be persuaded though one rose from the dead (Luke 16:27–31).

Following this diagnosis, Beare:

1. suggests that the story was probably directed at the Sadducees who notoriously did not believe in life after death;

2. claims that, actually, the second part has no bearing on the first part; and

3. deduces that the story as we now have it was not spoken by Christ but is the construction of some early Christian teacher.

Clearly, if the above is a correct description of the purpose of the second part, the second part does not fit the first part very well. But here a number of questions arise. Did Luke not realise that part 2 did not fit part 1? Was he that dull? Or did he take the story over because some unknown early Christian teacher had put it together in this bodged form and Luke had no option but to record it as he found it? Was he thus helplessly bound to second-rate tradition? On the other hand, are we absolutely sure that Luke understood part 2 in the way that the form critics say he did? Is it possible that he understood it differently, in a way that made good sense in itself and fitted well with part 1?

Let us look at the larger context.

In the paragraph that immediately precedes our story, Christ is being criticized. We should carefully notice by whom and what for. Here is what Luke says: 'The Pharisees, who were lovers of money . . . scoffed at him' (Luke 16:14). Our story then follows with its opening words: 'Now there was a certain rich man . . .'. What could be clearer than that, in our story, Christ is answering the scoffing of the money-loving Pharisees of the previous paragraph?

But if the story of the Rich Man is meant to be Christ's answer to the money-loving Pharisees and not to Sadducees, as some people have thought, an important point emerges. The Pharisees believed in resurrection; Luke himself tells us that in Acts 23:8. Moreover, they also believed in an afterlife between death and resurrection. As G. F. Moore reminds us, Josephus says of the Pharisees:

Their belief is that souls have a deathless vigour, and that beneath the earth there are rewards and punishments according as they have been devoted in life to virtue or to vice. For the latter everlasting imprisonment is prescribed: for the former capability of coming to life again. (Antiquities, xviii 1, 3, 14 cited in Judaism, II, p. 317)

And since Luke knew this, it is quite incredible that Luke should ever have taken part 2 of the story of the Rich Man as an attempt by Christ to prove to the Pharisees what they already believed, namely that there was an afterlife with rewards and punishments. We can only conclude that Luke did not understand part 2 of the story in the way the form critics have understood it. How then did he understand it?

Let us look again at the context in which he has placed it.

Two paragraphs before where our story stands is the parable of the Unjust Steward (Luke 16:1–13). In it, our Lord teaches that the way we use the 'mammon of unrighteousness' will determine whether or not in the afterlife we have any friends to welcome us into the eternal tabernacles. The following paragraph (Luke 16:14–18) then tells us that, when the Pharisees heard this, they scoffed at Christ (Luke 16:14). Why? Because they did not believe in an afterlife, or in retribution in that afterlife? No. Christ himself points out why they scoffed: 'ye are they that justify yourselves in the sight of men; but God knows your hearts'. They believed all right in retribution in the afterlife—or at least they professed to believe—but their love of money was inordinately selfish and unscrupulous. And so they scoffed at Christ for affirming that such an attitude to money will seriously affect a man's reception in the world to come. Our Lord then proceeded to expose the discrepancy between what they professed to believe and how they actually behaved in other areas:

The law and the prophets were until John . . . But it is easier for heaven and earth to pass away, than for one tittle of the law to fall. Every one that puts away his wife, and marries another, commits adultery: and he that marries one that is put away from a husband commits adultery. (Luke 16:16–18)

The Pharisees, of course, professed to accept the law and the prophets as the revealed will of God and the ultimate authority on morals. But in practice, they whittled down the moral requirements of the law, and then proceeded to justify themselves before men in spite of their transgressions of the very law they professed to believe. Therefore Christ warned them that the law and the prophets are not to be so treated. Their sanctions are real and eternal.

With this we come to our story of a rich man: we are back to the topic of the Pharisees' inordinate love of money, and we are now told where it eventually landed one of their kind. Why did the rich man behave in such a callous way towards the beggar? Because he did not believe in an afterlife, or in any retribution in that after-life? Of course not. Like the rest of the Pharisees, he believed in both. But he never thought that his love of wealth would land him where it did land him, on the wrong side of the gulf. The law and the prophets said that he was to love his neighbour as himself. Why then did he make no attempt to help the beggar? Did he not believe the law?

Well, in life he would have professed to believe the law; but whatever he professed to believe when on earth, his true state of heart was revealed in his conversation with Abraham. He asked that Lazarus be sent to warn his brethren so that they should not also come to the place of torment. Abraham replied that they had Moses and the prophets. They had only to believe the law and take it seriously and they would be saved from behaviour such as would bring them to the place of torment; or if their behaviour was unworthy, the law, seriously taken, would lead them to abandon all attempts to justify themselves and induce in them humble repentance.

But the rich man pleaded that, for his brothers, the testimony of the law was not enough. He knew, of course, because it had not been enough for him. It had commanded him to love his neighbour as himself, or suffer God's curse as a penalty. But he had made no attempt to love his neighbour because, although he believed in the afterlife, he deceived himself with the charitable and liberal view that he would in the end arrive on the right side of the gulf, notwithstanding his defiance of the law. And if anyone had pointed out to him that his attitude to money grievously contravened the law of God, which he professed to believe, and that it would put him one day on the wrong side of the gulf, he doubtless would have scoffed at him, as the Pharisees did at Christ. In a word, though he professed to believe the law and accept the rightness of its sanctions, at heart he did no such thing.

Understood in this way—and we would suggest that this is how Luke understood it—part 2 of the story fits part 1 admirably. Part 2 does not, with all due respect to the form critics, cite Moses and the prophets in an attempt to maintain that 'Moses and the prophets in themselves teach a doctrine of personal immortality, with rewards and punishments after death'. Part 2 is making the point that, when men profess to believe Moses and the prophets but do not take their moral demands seriously, but unrepentantly and deliberately flout the law and then hypocritically justify themselves, their behaviour does two things: it lands them on the wrong side of the gulf, and it shows that they never really believed the law's moral demands in spite of their pretence to do so.

But we have a further check on our interpretation: look at some of the other stories that stand in the section in which the story of the Rich Man also stands; for our story is not the only story in this section to deal with people who miss salvation. There are four such stories:

1. The people who stand outside when the door is shut (Luke 13:22–30)

2. The invited guests who decline to come to the great supper (Luke 14:15–24)

3. The elder brother who refuses to go in to the welcome home feast for the prodigal (Luke 15:11–32)

4. The rich man who finds himself on the wrong side of the fixed gulf (Luke 16:19–31)

Of these four stories, 2 and 3 are very closely related because in them the people concerned deliberately refuse to go in to the feast: they deliberately reject salvation; and 1 and 4 are likewise closely related because in them those who eventually miss salvation do not do so deliberately: they obviously had no intention of missing it, and are grievously surprised when they discover what has happened. In addition, 1 and 4 have other points of marked similarity: in story 1, a door is finally and permanently shut: in story 4, a gulf is finally and permanently fixed. In story 1, pleas are made that the door should be opened to allow those on the outside to enter: the pleas are refused. In story 4, pleas are made that Lazarus should be allowed to cross the gulf; the pleas are refused.

In view of these deliberate similarities, it may be fair to compare the main point of each story. Was story 1 told in order to prove that there is an afterlife and that some will be saved and some will be lost? Of course not. The very question that elicited the story from our Lord presumes all this—'Lord, are they few that be saved?' (Luke 13:23). The main point of the story is that, when the door is finally shut, there will be people whose surprise is not that they have, against their expectation, discovered too late that there is an afterlife, but that against their expectation they find themselves outside the door when they had always presumed they would be inside. So is it in story 4. The rich man is surprised to find not that, contrary to what he had always believed, there is an after-life, but that he is on the wrong side of the gulf when he had always thought that he would somehow end up on the right side.

So let us come now to the other charge that is laid against our story: that the two parts of the story had originally nothing to do with each other, part 1 being a widely travelled Egyptian reversal-of-fortune story, and part 2 being a later Christian addition; and that neither part is attributable to Christ.

The actual fact is that all four stories contain a reversal-of-fortune element: in story 1, the contemporaries of Christ, who were near him, who ate and drank in his presence and heard him preach in their streets, are eventually shut out from him; whereas those who in life were separated from him by centuries of time—Abraham, Isaac and Jacob—or by miles of distance—'they shall come from the east and west, and from the north and south'—they will sit down with him in the kingdom of God. In story 2, the men who were originally bidden are thereafter deliberately and explicitly excluded: 'I say unto you that none of those men which were bidden shall taste of my supper'; whereas the poor and maimed and blind and lame and those of the hedges and highways, who were not originally invited, are constrained to attend the banquet. In story 3, the elder brother, who all his days served his father and never transgressed any commandment—or so he said—found himself so out of sympathy with his father's feeling that he refused to go into the banquet; whereas the younger brother, who had run away from his father originally, is welcomed to the father's heart and home. And in story 4, the rich man, who had every material advantage, is eventually tormented; whereas Lazarus, who was tormented by evil things, is comforted.

Now, if Christ told one of these reversal stories—and all form critics seem to allow that he told the one in story 3—why could he not have told the others, and particularly the one in story 4? Was he so unperceptive that he never himself surmised that the difference between rich and poor in this life might sometimes be reversed in the next? Or was he so indifferent to poverty and riches that he never thought it worth mentioning? Or was he so limited in his ability to express himself that his observations on these things had to wait for a traveller's reversal-of-fortune story to turn up from Egypt before they could find a suitable vehicle for expression?

And so we might go on asking our questions: but I have said enough to make my point. Scholars like Haenchen, Jeremias and Beare are so confident in their theories that they do not hesitate to assert that Matthew, Mark and Luke have got things wrong. Have we, on the other hand, not grounds for saying that the so-called literary criticism which they use to support their theories is bogus?