One of the sayings of Jesus implying an exclusivistic self-percetion is Matthew 11:25-27, in which Jesus says:
All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him."
As I argued in a previous post, this saying is likely to be authentic since it passes at least 3 criteria of authenticity.
Since it is hard to refute it on historical grounds, some liberal scholars have astutely found a way to deny the exclusivism implied by such saying. They accept the historicity of the saying but reinterprets it in a way which devoids it of its straightforward exclusivistic meaning in order to make it compatible with contemporary religious pluralism.
A telling example of this is Marcus Borg. In his book Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus, religious pluralist scholar Marcus Borg accepts the historicity of such Q saying and its importance to support Jesus' self-perception of having a special relationship with God (a relationship which, Borg argues, is not exclusive of Jesus but common among "Spirit-persons". This is, by the way, Borg's standard view of a religious pluralistic reading of Jesus).
Borg writes:
A Q text reports that Jesus spoke of the intimate knowing that occurs between father and son and uses this analogy to speak of Jesus' own experience of God: "No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son". The two halves of the statement are a Semitic idiom which means simply "Only father and son really knows each other", the Semitic way of speaking of a reciprocal relationship of knowing and being known (p.242).
Before commenting of Borg's view, it is important to understand accurately what Borg is arguing. He is saying that Jesus expresses, through a family analogy about the connection between fathers and sons, his own personal experience of God, and in order to express such analogy, he uses a "Semitic idiom" (Father knowing the Son and viceversa) to convey such intimate knowing.
Critique:
1)Note that Borg says that Jesus is using an "analogy" based on a Semitic idiom. But what evidence has Borg to support such claim? Why couldn't Jesus be expressing such teaching in a straightforward manner and not in an analogical manner? Borg doesn't say. He simply assumes it.
The fact that an analogy about the connection between father and son was available in Jesus' time and hence could be used by Jesus, doesn't imply that Jesus actually is using it in that specific saying. (Such leaps in logic and hidden assumptions are common in Borg's works). We need more argument to support this contention, which Borg doesn't provide.
The reason, actually, is that the straightforward reading of the full tradition (not just of Borg's truncated citation, see point below), support an exclusivistic self-perception of Jesus' connection with "My" (=Jesus') Father, and the Son' exclusivistic function to provide special revelation about the Father.
2)Note very carefully that Borg left out the last statement of the tradition, namely "those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him". This statement is crucial to provide a full context of the tradition and hence to help us to discern what Jesus actually meant.
In order to bypass such context, and hence to make Jesus' words more ambiguous (and thereby, passible of alternative readings, including religious pluralistic ones), Borg needs to leave out such key, crucial and christologically charged statement.
Note that such omitted sentence about the Son revealing the Father has nothing to do with Semitic idioms or analogies, it has to do with Jesus' teaching about the function of the Son as the only intermediary between God and man. Only the Son can reveal the Father to others. This is straightforwardly religious exclusivism (i.e. men cannot find God bypassing the Son, or independently of the Son, or through other intermediaries). It is hard to find a clearer statement of exclusivism than this (and precisely for this reason Borg is forced to leave it out).
And who is the Son? Obviously Jesus himself, since in the same tradition, Jesus said (note that Borg ommited such statement too!): "All things have been committed to me by my Father"
Jesus is NOT saying that all things have been committed to US by my/our father (religious pluralism), but "committed to ME" by my father (religious exclusivism). No evidence exists that Jesus is including other spiritual teachers or sages in addtion to him (ME) regarding the property of having received "all things" directly from the Father. Can a personal pronoun to be more individualized, exclusive, particular and self-centered than ME?
And, and the context, it is clear that Jesus is providing a teaching about the revelation of God, which only THE Son (not a bunch of sons) can reveal. The key word here is "reveal" or "revelation" and this has nothing to do with analogies or idioms. This is a theological claim.
No Semitic idiom nor analogy tells us that only the son can reveal the father and only to whom the son "chooses" to reveal him. In its purely analogical, non-spiritual context, it would misleading and false, since it is false that we cannot know a father independently of the son, or that we have to wait until the son "chooses" us in order to know a father. Regarding this point, the Jews didn't think otherwise (see point 3).
Jesus clearly is saying that the Son (Jesus) has an special connection with the Father (because all the things have been given to the Son by the Father), and that only the people chosen by the Son (Jesus) can know the Father (therefore, people who seeks God independently of the Son are choosing a wrong way...which is precisely what religious exclusivism is all about.).
You can strongly dislike this teaching, you can hate it, you can fear it, you can feel pain in the stomach when you read it, but nothing of these subjective impressions change the technical problem about the proper exegesis of the NT material, in full context, of what Jesus meant (If Jesus' exclusivism was theologically true or not, is another question... I'm doing here an exegetical analysis, not a theological argument).
This exclusivistic interpretation is confirmed by other sayings like Mattew 7:21-23 in which Jesus's teaching imply a decisive, crucial, exclusivistic function of Jesus himself as the one who receives the claims for entering God's kingdom and who has the prerrogative of accepting such claims or rejecting them.
Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name and in your name drive out demons and in your name perform many miracles?’ 23 Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers!
In a "Son of Man" saying in Luke 12:8-9 ( in general, such "Son of Man" traditions are likely to be authentic since they are used almost exclusively by Jesus, not by his later followers, so passing the criterion of dissimilarity), Jesus says:
I tell you, whoever publicly acknowledges me before others, the Son of Man will also acknowledge before the angels of God. 9 But whoever disowns me before others will be disowned before the angels of God
Note that even if Jesus were not the Son of Man (some scholars like Bart Ehrman argue, implausibly and against the evidence, that the Son of Man is a different person than Jesus), Jesus is claiming that men will be judge before the Son of Man on the basis of their response to Jesus (which again, implies an exclusivistic self-perception, which coheres with all the relevant traditions about Jesus in the New Testament).
Trying to find religious pluralistic interpretation of Jesus in the New Testament is not based on evidence nor in serious, honest biblical exegesis, but in ideology and contemporary pro-pluralistic prejudices and strong anti-Christian animus.
3)The "analogy interpretation" of Borg is made more implausible in the light of the fact that, as argues New Testament scholar Eduard Schweizer in his work on Matthew, in Jesus' time the men were generally closer to their friends and wives than to their fathers. (See Schweizer's book The Good News According to Matthew, p. 271).
So, if Jesus wanted to use a "family analogy" to convey the sense of intimate knowledge between he and God, he chose a wrong one.
This suggests, specially in the full context of the tradition (which as argued above, Borg "innocently" ommited), that Jesus was not using an analogy: He was providing a straighforward teaching about the special, unique connection between he and God, and his own personal and exclusivistic role in providing the special revelation of God to men.
This interpretation coheres well with the other argueably authentic sayings of Jesus implying exclusivism (like Mark 13:32: "No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father", see discussion here) and all the evidence in the New Testament. On the contrary, the religious pluralist interpretation doesn't cohere well with these sayings (and in fact, religious pluralist scholars realize this and hence are forced to deny the authenticity of such sayings, despite of them passing the criteria of authenticity).
As I commented in a previous post on Borg/Crossan's another work, I'm very dissapointed by the way in which these scholars address and handle the evidence. I don't trust them In my evaluation, the works of these authors are historically and exegetically irresponsable and (if Jesus' actual teachings have any theological significance whatsoever, which is not the point of this post) such "scholarly works" by people like Borg have the potential to be spiritually dangerous and misleading, regardless of how they make us feel emotionally.
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