What Are They Saying About the Historical Jesus?
By David B. Gowler
Paulist Press, 2007
Chapter 1
The Modern Quest for the Historical Jesus
Hannah wrapped her daughter in a blanket and put her on her lap. “I can’t go and get him. Believe me, I just can’t. But I can tell you a story about him. Would you like that?”
Miriam nodded, and Hannah began . . . .
And then she told of blind people who saw again, of lepers who were healed, of lame men who could walk again . . . . Miriam lapped them all up. They were her stories. She was blind and could see again. She was lame and could walk again. She was sick and got better. And she drew hope from every word.
I too listened spellbound . . . . I noted that these poor people pinned all their hopes on such stories. In them I heard their rebellion against suffering and death. I felt that as long as these stories were told, people would not be content for men and women to hunger and thirst, be crippled and paralysed, be sick and helpless. As long as they had these stories they would have hope.1
People have been searching for Jesus of Nazareth
since he began his public activity of teaching and healing in
The modern scholarly quest for
Jesus, however, is significantly different. Instead of focusing on the
question, “Who is Jesus?” (the living, risen Lord whom Christians experience
and worship), it primarily investigates the question “Who was Jesus?” (the first-century
Jew from
Marcus Borg differentiates between
the “pre-Easter Jesus” (the historical Jesus) and the “post-Easter Jesus” (the risen
Jesus of Christian experience).4 John
Dominic Crossan also speaks of the “dialectic of Jesus-then as Jesus-now” but
goes on to conclude: “. . . Jesus may be experienced as risen Jesus through
divergent modes, through justice and peace, prayer and liturgy, meditation and
mysticism, but it must always be that
Jesus and no other. There is, in other words, ever and always only one Jesus.”5
There is also, of course, both
continuity and discontinuity between the pre-Easter Jesus and the post-Easter
Jesus. After Easter, however, many of Jesus’ followers began to focus on the implications
of his death and resurrection. The Apostle Paul, for example, proclaimed
“Christ crucified and risen” but wrote very little about Jesus’ life and
teachings. As James D. G. Dunn notes, there are some indications that Paul
“must have known and cared about the ministry of Jesus,” but it was “Christ’s death which gave the proclamation of
Christ its character as ‘gospel.’”6
Church creeds share this focus by omitting the details of Jesus’ life and skipping from the virgin birth to Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Apostles’ Creed, for example, confesses belief in
Jesus
Christ, God’s only Son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of
the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, and was
buried; he descended to the dead. On the third day he rose again; he ascended
into heaven, he is seated at the right hand of the Father, and he will come
again to judge the living and the dead.7
As the focus shifted from the
message of Jesus to the message about Jesus, the proclaimer
of the
The quest for the historical Jesus began during the Enlightenment, which celebrated the powers of human reason and explored the world through a scientific approach. John Locke, for example, argued that reason teaches us to understand the law that governs nature and unfolds the pattern of belief that a thoughtful person can derive from it. Locke’s successors went even further; the role of reason was magnified, and the Bible was subjected to a new intense and often unsympathetic scrutiny.9 In addition, the emphasis on reason and natural laws made some people question belief in a God who intervened in history in “supernatural” ways. David Hume, for example, declared that miracles were “the most improbable of events” and had to be explained in other ways.10 “Scientific” investigation became the basis for evaluating the “historicity” of the gospel texts.
Most analyses of
the quest for the historical Jesus begin with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768),
an ardent champion of the “religion of reason.” Although Albert Schweitzer
declared that Reimarus “had no predecessors,”12 more recent research
clearly indicates that Reimarus’s views were anticipated by Spinoza and Pierre
Bayle, and his views on Jesus in particular were indebted to English Deists,
such as Lord Edward Herbert, Thomas Woolston, and Matthew Tindal, and the Irish
Deist/Pantheist John Toland.13
Reimarus
was reticent to publicize his work in this “age of enlightenment,” because people
had been ostracized, lost their jobs, imprisoned, and even executed because of
their religious views.14 Reimarus circulated an anonymous manuscript
of over 4000 pages among some of his friends. From 1774 to 1778, seven
fragments of this manuscript were published posthumously and anonymously by one
of those friends, Gerhard Lessing.15
According
to Reimarus, Jesus’ message differed significantly from the one his followers circulated
after his death (64): Jesus, who envisioned himself the messiah, proclaimed the
imminent coming of the
Reimarus’s
historical reconstructions, such as his insistence on the apostles’ deliberate
deception, have been overwhelmingly rejected by scholars. The work’s primary
significance is that it raised key issues, such as the irreconcilable
differences between gospel accounts (e.g., in the resurrection narratives, 153–200).
Reimarus’s distinction between the historical Jesus and the (fraudulent) recasting
of his message by the apostles also assumed that it was both methodologically
possible and theologically necessary to discover the historical Jesus and his message:
Not only could the historical
Jesus be recovered but he ought to be
recovered.16
David
Friedrich Strauss’s Life of Jesus,
published in 1835/36 when the author was only twenty-seven, represents a
“turning point in the history of the Christian faith.”17 It also
represented an unexpected turning point in Strauss’s life. An assistant
lecturer in the theological college of the
Strauss
rejected the traditional view that the gospels present an accurate, historical
picture of Jesus. He also disagreed with Reimarus and other “rationalists” who rejected
the miraculous elements in the gospels. Strauss offered a “third way,” in
contrast to these “traditionalist” and “rationalist” interpretations of the
gospels, by labeling the miracle stories as myths—symbolic
narratives that speak religious truth about Jesus. These religious truths are most
evident whenever “known and universal laws which govern the course of events”
are contravened, whenever traditions contradict each other, are internally
inconsistent, or other such historical difficulties arise. These problems exist
not because of a deliberate deception (pace
Reimarus) but by a process of mythical imagination (86–92).
Strauss’s
critique devastated the traditionalists’ belief that the gospels were literal
history. His intricate analyses of such stories as the three versions of the
healing of the blind man/men while Jesus is entering/leaving
Strauss
also strongly critiqued the rationalists’ view that the miracles of Jesus had
to be explained in a naturalistic way (e.g., the “miracle” of the loaves and
fishes occurred by Jesus’ shaming people into sharing their hidden food). For
Strauss, such attempts to preserve the historicity of these accounts by removing
all miraculous elements overlooked the significance of the narrative itself and
destroyed its entire point (46–50). Strauss’s solution again was Christian myth: “the representation of an event or
of an idea in a form which is historical, but, at the same time characterized
by the rich pictorial and imaginative mode of thought and expression of the
primitive ages” (53). Strauss extends this idea of myth to encompass the entire
history of the life of Jesus, to recognize “mythic or mythical embellishments
in every portion” of the gospels (65).
The myths of the gospels come primarily from two sources: (a) the various Messianic expectations existing in first-century Judaism and (b) the “particular impression left by the personal character, actions, and fate of Jesus . . . which served to modify the Messianic idea in the minds of his followers” (86). The account of the transfiguration, for example, developed from the conception of Jesus as the New Moses. Jesus meets with his two forerunners, Moses and Elijah, fulfils the law and the prophets, and is “glorified on a mountain” in a way greater than Moses (87, 540–46). Through this myth, Jesus’ messianic dignity is thus confirmed (545).
Strauss’s
contribution is difficult to overestimate. The irreconcilable differences between
the gospels meant that scholars could no longer view them as unvarnished historical
narratives. Strauss recognized that each text should be minutely examined
before attempting to determine the historicity of the event it narrates.
Strauss’s powerful critique also forced discussions of the miracle stories to
the sidelines for many years to come.19
Yet,
as Albert Schweitzer would illustrate, in their efforts to disentangle Jesus of
Nazareth from the Christ of the church, Reimarus, Strauss, and others who
followed them did not construct “objective” portraits of Jesus; although
significantly different, their portraits of Jesus were just as ideological as
the one(s) constructed by the church.20 But others, such as Ernest
Renan, began to grapple with the implications of the questions they raised.
Ernest Renan’s The
Life of Jesus was hailed as the first biography
of Jesus.21 In just five months it went through eleven editions,
sold an unprecedented 60,000 copies, and was translated into German, Italian,
and Dutch (with a forthcoming English translation).22
Renan portrayed Jesus the human being, as his chapter on
the infancy and youth of Jesus demonstrates: “Jesus was born at
Renan’s book was extremely popular, however, and its
novelistic approach imbued it with an aesthetic power that seemingly made
first-century
The faithful band led thus a joyous and wandering life, gathering the inspirations of the master in their first bloom. An innocent doubt was sometimes raised, a question slightly skeptical; but Jesus, with a smile or a look, silenced the objection. At each step—in the passing cloud, the germinating seed, the ripening corn—they saw the sign of the Kingdom drawing nigh; they believed themselves on the eve of seeing God, of being masters of the world; tears were turned into joy; it was the advent upon earth of universal consolation (185).
Yet
appearances can be deceiving. The artistic quality of the prose was not matched
by historical accuracy; the book in many ways is, as Wright notes, a “work of
romantic fantasy”26 In addition, the book also unfortunately
reflects the anti-Semitism of much scholarship during this time period, which
results in a false caricature of first-century Judaism.27
Strauss had demonstrated that the gospels were not equally reliable historically, so scholars began to explore more fully the dates of composition, sources of, and literary relationships among the gospels.28 The usual assumption was—since the Gospel of John was not as reliable historically as the synoptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke—that once the problems of Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s interdependence and the order of their composition were solved, the “problem” of Jesus would in large part be solved. The earliest sources would offer, it was thought, the most reliable historical data to reconstruct the historical Jesus.29 But what was the earliest source?
For centuries, people assumed that the gospels’ canonical
order (i.e., Matthew, Mark, Luke, John) reflected their order of composition. Karl
Lachmann, however, argued for the priority of Mark and suggested that Matthew
utilized a (non extant) separate collection of Jesus’ sayings.30 A
few years later, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann also championed Markan priority and said
that both Matthew and Luke used a “sayings collection” (Spruchsammlung).31
This
“four source” theory envisions Mark as the earliest Gospel. Matthew was written
using Mark as a source, an independent “sayings” collection called Q (short for
Quelle, German for “source”), and a
complex of other traditions labeled “M” of special material only found in
Matthew. Similarly but independently of Matthew, Luke used Mark and Q as sources,
as well as other traditions (“L”) of material only found in Luke.
Foundational to the Liberal Quest was the belief that one
could establish through historical-critical methodology the authentic teaching
and historical person of Jesus. The “historical core” of the gospel narratives
would illumine “wie es eigentlich gewesen
ist” (what actually happened). This reconstructed historical Jesus was the
legitimate object of faith—not the traditional Jesus proclaimed by the
church—and his teaching should be learned and imitated.32
The
Gospel of Mark, which many now saw as the oldest and essentially historical gospel,
became more important for interpreting Jesus’ life and thought. Jesus’
inner development also became important, because of the influence of the
Romantic movement—which stressed the essential goodness of human beings, valued
emotion and imagination over reason, and believed that feeling afforded “an
immediate experience of reality.”33
Thus the liberal lives of Jesus included discussions about Jesus’ religious
feelings and the development of his “messianic consciousness.”
Liberal Protestant theologians in the quest for Jesus,
such as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf Harnack, sought to free the historical Jesus
from the dogma of the church. Both Ritschl and Harnack focused on how Jesus’ moral
teachings could be applied to life in the contemporary world. Ritschl, for
example, argued that “true Christianity” was the spiritual and ethical religion
based on Jesus as redeemer and founder of the
Harnack’s six lectures at the
Liberalism’s message reflects in some ways the authentic voice of Jesus, such the good news for the poor (Luke 4:16–21; 5:20). Yet, as Dunn notes, the stress on individuals and not institutions/groups was a serious flaw that made Liberalism less effective.38 In addition, Liberalism’s “Jesus” was greatly removed from Jesus’ actual first-century social and historical contexts; Liberalism instead created a Jesus in its own image. Such subjectivity should not be surprising, because, as Albert Schweitzer observed, authors in every epoch create a historical Jesus that is in part a reflection of themselves and their era: “each individual created [Jesus] in accordance with his own character. There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a Life of Jesus.”39
Many of the nineteenth century Lives of Jesus assumed that
Mark’s narrative was essentially historical. William Wrede, however, took
direct aim at this misconception in his 1901 book, The Messianic Secret: “It must be frankly said that Mark no longer
has a real view of the historical life of Jesus.”40
Scholars who relied on Mark’s historicity had made a
critical mistake: Wrede demonstrated that certain motifs in Mark were not
easily explained as simple, historical observations, such as Mark’s theme of
Jesus keeping his Messiahship a secret.41 This “Messianic Secret” was
actually a theological construction that stemmed primarily from Mark. Thus
Mark’s Gospel could not be used to reconstruct the development of Jesus’
messianic consciousness, because Mark reflects the developing christology of
the early church. After Wrede, it would no longer be possible—try as some might—for
scholars to regard the gospels as “objective” reports of the life and teachings
of Jesus. In fact, scholars could no longer take it for granted that traditions
in the gospels attributed to Jesus are authentically from Jesus, because the gospels
are the result of a complex process of oral tradition and written composition.
Wrede’s work thus heightened skepticism about the likelihood of success and
theological value of a historical reconstruction of the life of Jesus.42
The Collapse of the Liberal Quest: The Apocalyptic Prophet/Messiah43
The Jesus constructed by Liberalism was shattered around
the turn of the century by the (re)emergence of eschatology (belief about
events occurring at the end of time).44
Johannes Weiss argued that a study of Jewish apocalyptic
literature demonstrated that Jesus’ message of the kingdom was apocalyptic—the
end of the world was imminent—and could not be equated with ethical conduct or
the Christian community envisioned by Liberalism.45
For Weiss, Jesus’ concept of the
The most notable
proponent of this “apocalyptic Jesus” was Albert Schweitzer—famed biblical
scholar, brilliant organist, and winner of the 1952 Nobel Peace Prize for his
work as a medical missionary in West Africa. Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus summarized and critiqued the
disparate Lives of Jesus that had been written to that point. Yet Schweitzer
pushed the apocalyptic envelope further: Weiss emphasized the centrality of
eschatology in Jesus’ proclamation of the kingdom; Schweitzer believed that
this imminent eschatology determined “the whole course of Jesus’ life” (212).
According to
Schweitzer, Jesus’ belief that he was the messiah was a significant “factor in
his public ministry.”46 Schweitzer even argued, unlike his
contemporary Wrede, that the disciples were not aware of Jesus’ identity as the
messiah until Jesus revealed it to them at Caesarea Philippi (Kingdom,
108-109).47
Schweitzer’s Jesus
was obsessed with the apocalyptic expectation that the
Jesus, then, was
mistaken; he awaited the parousia “in vain” (331), and this delay caused an
alteration in his expectations (328). At Caesarea Philippi, Jesus’ own suffering
and death in
Jesus was mistaken
again; he died, and the kingdom did not come. In one of the most famous and
incessantly quoted sections of Quest—one
which scholars seldom note that Schweitzer omitted from his 1913
revision—Schweitzer writes:
Jesus . . . in the
knowledge that he is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world
to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history
to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself on it. Then it does turn;
and crushes Him. Instead of bringing in the eschatological conditions, He has
destroyed them. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one
immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual
ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still.
That is His victory and His reign (1968: 370–71).
Schweitzer’s work
is significant for a number of reasons, including warnings about:
The Peril of Modernizing Jesus. As Schweitzer aptly notes, “[T]he historical
Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma . . . . He passed by our
time and returned to his own” (478). The problem, for Schweitzer, not only
dwells in the difficulties of reconstructing a historical Jesus but also exists
in the fundamental question of how a deluded first-century apocalypticist could
be relevant for modern people.
The Peril of Domesticating Jesus. People often “domesticate” Jesus by ignoring his radical message and social critique. As Schweitzer writes, “[N]otice what they have made of the great imperious sayings of the Lord, how they have watered down his imperative world-denying demands on individuals . . . . Some of the greatest sayings are found lying in a corner like explosive shells from which the charges have been removed” (480). Jesus was a prophet of an oppressed people, and part of hearing his voice is rediscovering the first-century peasant artisan who proclaimed not only a message of hope for the oppressed but also an eschatological message of judgment upon the wealthy who exploited them.
The Peril of not Modernizing Jesus. The great historical, social, and cultural divides between us and first-century Mediterranean peoples are even greater than Schweitzer imagined. The challenge therefore is to modernize Jesus and his message authentically to make them more relevant, not to domesticate Jesus or anachronize his radical message.
The Difficulty of a Relevant Historical Jesus. How can a deluded and mistaken apocalypticist be relevant for twenty-first century people? Schweitzer argued that it occurs through mystical experience: “Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from him and flows through our time also” (479).51 The resulting spirit of Christ sent out into the world frees (and should impel) Christians to follow Jesus’ “religion of love” in their own lives.
Most historical Jesus studies that
appeared in the years after Schweitzer’s book were relatively chastened by his critique.
More recent studies are sometimes less chastened, but interpreters still
struggle with the issues he raised, especially whether Jesus was an apocalyptic
prophet who preached the imminent end of the world. The answer to that question
may be, in fact, the single most important historical question about Jesus,
because it is tied directly to the essential nature of his person, message, and
mission.52
The Partial Eclipse of the Historical Jesus53
After Schweitzer, many scholars believed that it was methodologically impossible to “recover” the historical Jesus and theologically unnecessary to base one’s faith on the uncertain results of historical research.
Rudolf Bultmann, for example,
argued that the historical Jesus was irrelevant for Christian faith and life.
Bultmann tried to communicate the Christian message to twentieth-century
persons, so he “demythologized” the language of the New Testament by interpreting
it as a concern for “authentic” existence. Bultmann was indebted to the
existentialist philosophy of Martin Heidegger, but whereas Heidegger saw
authentic existence as a resolute decision to live life more authentically in
light of the inescapable reality of death, Bultmann envisioned authentic
existence as a response of faith to an encounter with the Word of God. This
faith, however, is not in the historical Jesus; it is an individual’s positive
response to the church’s kerygma
(proclamation) of Jesus as the Christ.54
Bultmann distinguished the historical Jesus (the “Proclaimer”) from the historic Christ (the “Proclaimed”), who is the true object of Christian faith, because faith is independent of tendentious historical research. In addition, the gospels are products of the preaching of early Christians and cannot be used as reliable sources for a “Life of Jesus.” All we can or need to know about the historical Jesus is his understanding of existence that can be gleaned from his teachings. The self-consciousness of Jesus, however, is not a legitimate undertaking, because “. . . we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus . . . .”55 Yet Bultmann goes on to say, “Little as we know of [Jesus’] life and personality, we know enough of his message to make for ourselves a consistent picture” (12).
Since Bultmann believed that the traditions about Jesus in the gospels reflected a series of layers, he undertook the sometimes “difficult and doubtful” task of attempting to separate those layers:
We can only count on
possessing a genuine similitude of Jesus where, on the one hand, expression is
given to the contrast between Jewish morality and piety and the distinctive
eschatological temper which characterized the preaching of Jesus; and where on
the other hand we find no specifically Christian features.56
This quote
captures the essence of one of the most important criteria in post-Bultmannian
studies of the historical Jesus, what Norman Perrin called the “criterion of
dissimilarity”: For a saying of Jesus to be considered “authentic,” it must be
different in content from conceptions current in Judaism before Jesus or in the
early Christian communities after Jesus.57
Bultmann
thus seeks to examine elements derived from the Aramaic traditions of “the
oldest Palestinian community,” although even those traditions are not
necessarily from Jesus (13). He peels the layers of tradition back to a core of
approximately twenty-five sayings, or about forty-one verses; from this small
amount of tradition, Bultmann builds an “impressive sketch of the teaching of
Jesus.”58
Bultmann
concludes that Jesus did not claim to be the messiah (9, 26). Jesus took for
granted, as did his contemporaries, that the
Stratifying
historical Jesus scholarship into chronological categories is heuristically
helpful but sometimes misleading.59 Bultmann’s era, for example, is
often labeled the “no quest period,” although it actually was only a “partial
eclipse.” In many quarters, especially in British and American scholarship, the
quest for Jesus continued unabated, in an “endless procession of Lives of
Jesus.”60 Yet by the 1950’s, Bultmann’s skepticism had influenced
many scholars to abandon the quest.61
By
shifting attention from the historical Jesus to “the Word,” Bultmann hoped to
avoid many of the pitfalls that plagued the various Lives of Jesus. Yet
Bultmann was enmeshed in the same trap, because he remythologized the teachings of an ancient Jewish apocalypticist to
make them relevant for the twentieth century: Jesus calls us “to decision—decision between good and evil,
decision for God’s will or for [our] own will” (83–84). The message of Jesus offered by Bultmann
challenged twentieth-century persons who lived through the great wars of that
era, but the pitfalls outlined by Schweitzer still remained. Bultmann’s Jesus
was to a large extent a reflection of Bultmann, and the partial eclipse of the
historical Jesus lasted until Bultmann’s own students proposed a way in which
the study of Jesus could once again emerge from his shadow.
Notes to Chapter 1:
1 Gerd Theissen, The Shadow of the Galilean: The Quest of the
Historical Jesus in Narrative Form (trans. John Bowden;
2 The German comes from the
title of his book, Der sogennante
historische Jesus und der geshichtliche biblische Christus, which was first
published in 1892. The quote comes from the English translation, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the
Historic Biblical Christ (trans. C. E. Braaten;
3 See C. J. den Heyer, Jesus Matters: 150 Years of Research
(Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1997), 52.
4 Marcus Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship
(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994), 195. As Borg also notes,
these two conceptions live in a both/and dialogical relationship instead of
existing in an either/or binary choice between opposites. Borg goes on to argue
that these new terms lessen the dichotomy between the two conceptions, do not
privilege the “Christ of faith,” and suggest that the “Christ of faith” is not
immune from developments in historical scholarship.
5 John Dominic Crossan, The Birth of Christianity (San Francisco:
HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), 39. Crossan was responding to the critique of the
Jesus Seminar in general and to his work in particular made by Luke Timothy
Johnson, The Real Jesus (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998).
6 James D. G. Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 183, 188.
7 Likewise, the
Nicene Creed skips from the virgin birth to Jesus’ death and resurrection: “. . . For us and our salvation he came down
from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became
truly human. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered
death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the
Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the
Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his
kingdom will have no end . . . .” I am using the versions of the Apostles’
Creed and Nicene Creed that are found in Book
of Common Worship (Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1993), 64–65.
8 For a summary of this
“traditional” view, see Clinton Bennett, In
Search of Jesus (
9 For a brief but excellent
introduction to these issues, see Gerald R. Cragg, The Church & the Age of Reason 1648–1789 (New York: Penguin
Books, 1970).
10 Noted by Bennett, In Search of Jesus, 90–91. As Dawes
points out, however, the pioneering work of Benedict Spinoza first outlined the
program for a historical study of the Bible and argued for its importance in
his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus
(Chapter 7: “Of the Interpretation of Scripture”). See Dawes, The Historical Jesus Quest. Dawes also
provides an excerpt from the Tractatus
Theologico-Politicus (5–26).
11 In addition to the
primary texts, I am also utilizing in this chapter the summaries of the quests
found in W. Barnes Tatum, In Quest of
Jesus (revised and enlarged edition; Nashville: Abingdon, 1999); James D.
G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered (Grand
Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003); Borg, Jesus in
Contemporary Scholarship; Wright, Jesus
and the Victory of God; Mark Allan Powell Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History (Louisville: Westminster John Knox,
1998); den Heyer, Jesus Matters; and
others. It is surprising how many current commentators still depend on and
basically follow the outline of the Quest found in Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New
York: Macmillan, 1968; originally published as Von Reimarus zu Wrede, 1906). Scholars tend to ignore, however, the
significant additions made to the work in the second edition published in 1913:
Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1913). In his introduction to the 1968 translation of
the first edition, James Robinson argues that the later additions were
“laborious,” “outdated,” and in contrast to the first edition not “permanently
relevant” (Schweitzer, Quest, [1968]
xxvii). On the other hand, Dennis Nineham’s introduction to the 1913
edition—which was not translated into English until 2001—declares that “[t]he
changes added very considerably to the value of the work, and as long ago as
1931 Schweitzer himself expressed his regret that the later English editions continued
to be based on the original German one.” See Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus
(trans. Dennis Nineham;
12 Schweitzer, Quest, 24.
13 Woolston argued that the
disciples of Jesus stole his body from the tomb and lied about his
resurrection. They later, however, came to believe in the resurrection. See
Colin Brown, Jesus in European Protestant
Thought 1778–1860 (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1985), 36–55. Reimarus picks up
the theme of the disciples’ theft of Jesus’ body and subsequent deception.
14 In 1627, Woolston, a
professor at
15 See Reimarus: Fragments (ed. Charles H. Talbert;
16 Tatum, In Quest of Jesus, 94.
17 Stephen Neill and Tom
Wright, The Interpretation of the New
Testament 1861–1986 (2nd ed.;
18 David Friedrich Strauss,
The Life of Jesus Critically Examined
(ed. Peter C. Hodgson; Ramsey, NJ: Sigler, 1994). The above is found in the
editor’s preface, xvi–xxiv. Norman Perrin quite aptly called Strauss a “stormy
petrel,” or someone who brings discord. See Norman Perrin, Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (New York: Harper & Row,
1976), 211.
19 Dunn, Jesus
Remembered, 33–34.
20 Ibid, 34.
21 The idea that one could
even write a biography—in the modern
sense of the word—of Jesus would soon be disputed. In that light, it is
fascinating to compare the biography of Jesus (published in 2000) by Bruce
Chilton—which includes insights of modern scholarship from archaeology, social
customs, religious beliefs and practices, political forces, and other elements
of the first-century Mediterranean world—with Renan’s work. See Bruce Chilton, Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography (
22 Renan’s La Vie de Jésus was originally published
in 1863. I am using The Life of Jesus
(New York: Random House, 1927). Renan, a Roman Catholic, rejected (traditional)
Christian faith but was still fascinated by the historical Jesus. See Sean
Freyne, Jesus, A Jewish Galilean (
23 See John Haynes Holmes’s
introduction in Renan’s Life, 18–19.
24 His fate was thus
similar to Strauss’s, and, as Schweitzer noted (Quest, 166–67), Strauss hailed Renan as a “kindred spirit and ally”
and metaphorically “shook hands with him across the
25 Schweitzer’s description
of Renan’s work is almost as colorful: “He offered his readers a Jesus who was
alive, whom he, with his artistic imagination, had met under the blue heaven of
26 Wright, “Quest,” 797.
27 For example, Renan incorrectly
claimed: “With its solemn doctors, its insipid canonists, its hypocritical and
atrabilious devotees,
28 As Schweitzer noted
about the work of Christian Hermann Weisse; Schweitzer, Quest, 111. N. T. Wright, however, believes that the idea that
source criticism—as well as the later form and redaction criticisms—is part of
the quest for the historical Jesus is one of the six “commonly held but
erroneous views.” See N. T. Wright, “Quest for the Historical Jesus,” ABD
III 796.
29 Ernest Renan, in
contrast, often preferred the Gospel of John to the synoptics in evaluating
historicity.
30 Karl Lachmann, “De
ordine narrationum in evangeliis synopticis” ThStKr 8 (1835) 570–90. Shortly thereafter but independent of
Lachmann, both Christian Gottlob Wilke and Christian Hermann Weisse voiced
similar opinions.
31 H. J. Holtzmann, Die Synoptischen Evangelien (Leipzig:
Englemann, 1863). The most influential argument in English for the priority of
Mark came much later from B. H. Streeter, The
Four Gospels (London: Macmillan, 1924).
32 As Norman Perrin noted, “Liberal scholarship,
therefore, accepted the full burden of historical critical scholarship without
hesitation and without reserve, believing that the historical core of the
gospel narratives, when reached, would reveal Jesus as he actually was, and
that he then would be revealed as worthy of all honour, respect and imitation,
revealed as the founder of a faith which consisted in following him and his
teaching closely and purposefully.” Perrin, Rediscovering,
214.
33 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 35. The essential
goodness of human beings was supplemented by the belief—due to the influence of
Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution—that moral evolution is a natural
continuation of the biological process to “higher forms of life” (36).
34 Albert Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and
Reconciliation (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1900).
35 Adolf Harnack, What is Christianity? (trans. Thomas
Saunders;
36 “The Gospel, as Jesus
proclaimed it, has to do with the Father only and not with the Son” (144).
37 See W. R. Matthews’s
introduction in What is Christianity?,
x.
38 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 39.
39 Schweitzer, Quest, 6.
40 William Wrede, The Messianic Secret (Cambridge: James
Clarke, 1971). The quote comes from the excerpt of The Messianic Secret that is found in Dawes, The Historical Jesus Quest, 114.
41 See John K. Riches, A Century of New Testament Study (Valley
Forge: Trinity Press, 1993), 22–23.
42 Ibid, 23.
43 As Perrin notes, the
collapse of the Liberal quest for Jesus occurred in
44 Both Reimarus and
Strauss had argued that Jesus proclaimed the imminent end of the world in which
God would bring about dramatic change, but they believed that this
eschatological message was primarily political. See, for example, Reimarus, Fragments, 217–18; Strauss, Life of Jesus, 294. As Reimarus
declares: “It was then clearly not the intention or the object of Jesus to
suffer and die, but to build up a worldly kingdom, and to deliver the
Israelites from bondage [political oppression]” (150). Strauss also emphasizes the
fact that this view of Jesus was consistent with Jewish expectations of the
messiah: “Now the fact is, that the prevalent conception of the messianic reign
had a strong political bias; hence, when Jesus spoke of the Messiah’s kingdom
without a definition, the Jews could only think of an earthly dominion, and as
Jesus could not have presupposed any other interpretation of his words, he must
have wished to be so understood” (293). After further arguments to this effect,
Strauss declares, “Hence it appears a fair inference, that Jesus himself shared
the Jewish expectations which he here sanctions” (294).
Liberalism
did not share these assumptions. Ritschl, for example, argued that the
45 Johannes Weiss, Jesus Proclamation of the
46 Albert Schweitzer, The Mystery of the Kingdom of God
(trans. Walter Lowrie;
47 Schweitzer’s higher view
of the accuracy of the traditions about Jesus, for example, even extended to
the Sermon on the Mount: It was not a “composite speech” but “for the most part
delivered as [it has] been handed down to us.” Ibid.
48 Albert Schweitzer, The
49 Or as Schweitzer writes
in Kingdom: “The death of Jesus thus
brings about the coming of the
50 As Schweitzer notes (Kingdom, 128), he changed his view about
the importance of Isaiah 53 from Quest
(387–89).
51 And, in a passage changed in the 1913
edition: “But the truth is, it is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as
spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can help it.
Not the historical Jesus, but the spirit which goes forth from Him and in the
spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the
world” (1968: 401). Compare the revised text:
“Our relationship to Jesus is ultimately of a mystical kind. No
personality of the past can be transported alive into the present by means of
historical observation or by discursive thought about his authoritative
significance. We can achieve a relation only when we become united with him in
the knowledge of a shared aspiration . . . and when we rediscover ourselves
through him” (486).
A more famous
example is Schweitzer’s (unchanged) final “He comes to us as One unknown”
paragraph in Quest, which also evokes
elements of mysticism: “He comes to us as one unknown, without a name, as of
old, by the lakeside, he came to those men who did not know who he was. He says
the same words ‘Follow me!’ and sets us to those tasks which he must fulfil in
our time. He commands. And to those who hearken to him, whether wise or unwise,
he will reveal himself in the peace, the labours, the conflicts and the
sufferings that they may experience in his fellowship, and as an ineffable
mystery that they may experience in his fellowship, and as an ineffable mystery
they will learn who he is . . . ” (487).
52 See, Robert J. Miller,
ed., The Apocalyptic Jesus: A Debate
(
53 This title, which I
amended slightly, stems from the Haverford Library Lectures given by Henry J.
Cadbury in April 1963, later published as The
Eclipse of the Historical Jesus (Pendle Hill Pamphlet 133; Lebanon, PA:
Sowers Printing, 1964).
54 Noted
by Tatum, Quest, 98–99. As Bultmann
wrote, “Jesus Christ confronts men nowhere other than in the kerygma, as he had so confronted Paul
and brought him to decision. The kerygma
does not mediate historical knowledge (of Jesus) . . . and one may not
reconstruct the historical Jesus . . . . That would be the Christ according to
the flesh of the past. Not the historical Jesus, but Jesus Christ, the preached
Christ, is the Lord.” Rudolf Bultmann. Glauben
und Verstehen, Vol. I (Tübingen:
Mohr, 1933), 208. Quoted by Cadbury, Eclipse,
28.
55 Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1934; German edition, 1926), 8. See also Perrin, Rediscovering, 219–23.
56 Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition (New
York: Harper & Row, 1963). This book was originally published in 1921.
57 The problems with this
criterion are obvious—not least of all that the teachings of Jesus originate
from within Judaism, and early Christianity is based to a large extent on his
teaching.
But
the criterion of dissimilarity has diminished in importance. See, for example,
the evaluation by Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria
(Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), which includes an appendix (261–315)
with quotes from various scholars “on the general theme of the criterion,” that
begins with Martin Luther (1521) and ends with Jürgen Becker (1996).
58 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, 76.
59 Noted by Tatum, In
Quest of Jesus, 100.
60 See Dale C. Allison,
Jr., “The Secularizing of the Historical Jesus,” PRS 27 (2002) 136. He is quoting E. F. Scott, “Recent Lives of
Jesus,” Harvard Theological Review,
27 (1934) 1.
61
Allison, “The Secularizing of the Historical Jesus,”
138.