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Jeremiah Portrait of the Prophet Our theme does not invite us to a new quest for the historical Jeremiah . The critical problems concerning the relation of the person of Jeremiah to the book of Jeremiah are notoriously difficult. There seems to be no great progress on that question in current scholarship. It is fair to say that current scholarship tends toward a minimalist view concerning the historical Jeremiah. That is, scholars are assigning more and more work to the redactional process, which leaves less and less material assigned to the authorship of Jeremiah and yields (according to the hypothesis) less and less reliable historical information about the prophet. On the relation of the person to the redactional process, we may identify two tendencies. On the one hand, there is a scholarly tradition that pays attention to the person of Jeremiah and generally regards the early part of the book as coming from him and credits as historically reliable much of the material in the Baruch section of the book. Prophecy and Religion, by John Skinner,1 is a powerful statement of this view, which is also the working assumption of John Bright’s commentary on Jeremiah.2 It is the inclination of William Holladay,3 who has published a series of important articles on Jeremiah, and it is indirectly the basis of Robert R. Wilson’s sociological analysis, Prophecy and Society in Ancient Israel.4 This view tends to take (in broad outline) the presentation of Jeremiah offered to us.5 The alternative view (which currently is on the increase) pays much more attention to the redactional process and assumes that the person of Jeremiah given to us is largely a reconstruction of the Deuteronomic theologians. That inclination is very much in evidence in the analysis of Ernest W. Nicholson6 and is carried to an extreme position in the work 3 chapter one 4 D Like Fire in the Bones of Robert Carroll.7 It is reflected in the title of A. H. J. Gunneweg’s study “Confession or Interpretation,”8 concerning the “confessions” of Jeremiah. Gunneweg concludes that what is given to us is an interpretation and not a direct confession of Jeremiah. The confessions are primarily “proclamations and not lyrics.” And more broadly, Siegfried Herrmann draws a like conclusion: “In this large perspective, the book of Jeremiah is incomparably more than the record of the man from Anathoth. Under the impact of numerous and different materials, the book is the settlement of the past, the call to repentance, a document of hope for Israel and the future direction of YHWH for all peoples.”9 Now these issues are most complex and cannot be resolved here, but they are not irrelevant to our subject of a portrait. It is clear that we do not have in any simple way a descriptive, biographical report. Indeed this portrait, like every portrait, is passed through the perceptions of the artist. The person of Jeremiah offered us in some sense (as is every such piece of literature) a construction of literary imagination.10 But it is also probable that the person, memory, and impact of Jeremiah were so powerful and enduring that that personal reality presided over and shaped the imaginative reconstruction. It is thus plausible to state this premise for our study: We have an imaginative literary construction governed by a powerful person of memory. That reconstruction is not historically precise, but it is not literarily fanciful, undisciplined, or cut loose from its referent. It is not preoccupied with psychological or sociological matters that might interest us. But it is theologically intentional. And the theological intent is to articulate11 this person of Jeremiah as a model or paradigm12 for what a prophet is, for what a believing person is, for what Israel might be. The move from personal history to theological model loses something in historical accuracy (in any case not recoverable by us), but that move gains much in generative power that can summon Israel to faith in a profound crisis. Thus the redactors are not clerks who play fast and loose and who are indifferent to their subject matter. Rather, as creative theologians, they are artists making faith possible in the midst of Israel’s deepest crisis. We deal with an identifiable man, one who is now articulated for the sake of God’s continuing way with Israel. Jeremiah is articulated for us as overwhelmingly God’s man. This is the first thing one notices about him, already articulated in...

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