Journal: Tyndale Bulletin
Volume: TYNBUL 19:1 (NA 1968)
Article: The Servant Of The Lord In The Teaching Of Jesus
Author: R. T. France

TynBul 19:1 (1968) p. 26

The Servant Of The Lord In The Teaching Of Jesus

R. T. France

*The Tyndale Biblical Theology Lecture) 1967

The Christian church has always prized the ‘Servant Songs’ of Isaiah, and especially chapter 53, with its picture of innocent and vicarious suffering and death, as one of the clearest foreshadowings of the redemptive work of Christ to be found in the Old Testament. It has, moreover, been generally assumed that this understanding of these passages goes back to Jesus Himself, who knew Himself to be the one there predicted, and deliberately set Himself to fulfil this vocation. When He told His disciples that He must be rejected and killed, Christian interpreters have seen here a mind steeped in Isaiah 53. Thus C. R. North could write in 1948, ‘It is almost universally admitted that Jesus saw His way by the light that Isa. liii shed upon His predestined path.’1

But those words could not have been written today. This understanding of Jesus’ view of His mission has come under strong attack, particularly on two fronts. From the school of Bultmann has come the (predictable) insistence that this developed soteriology betrays the mind of the early church not that of its Founder, and the consequent denial of the authenticity of most or all of the relevant sayings of Jesus generally as vaticinia ex eventu. This school of thought is now familiar enough to us. To answer such contentions requires more than an exegetical exercise; it demands that we lay bare the basic presuppositions on which we conduct our New Testament criticism and exegesis, and this lecture does not allow so lengthy a procedure. While some consideration will be given individually to the arguments against the authenticity of the main passages studied, our purpose here is to concentrate

TynBul 19:1 (1968) p. 27

on the second main line of attack, which is both more recent, and also of more interest to biblical theology, for here the traditional approach is rejected not on critical but on exegetical grounds. By and large, the authenticity of the relevant sayings is assumed; it is their dependence on Isaiah 53 which is called in question.

The principal manifesto of this school of thought is Morna Hooker’s book, Jesus and the Servant.2 She traces its ancestry to Jackson and Lake in 1920,3 but it has come to the fore in more recent years especially, in the work of C. F. D. Moule,