The Quest for the Historical Jesus
The Quest for the Historical Jesus
Earlier, we considered some debates about Christology from the patristic and medieval periods. Interestingly, Christology was not a major topic of controversy during the great debates of the Reformation era. Catholics and mainstream Protestants saw no reason to disagree with the Chalcedonian definition of the identity and significance of Jesus Christ, which both regarded as firmly rooted in the Bible and Christian tradition. The next major debate about Christology arose in the “Age of Reason.” The rationalist assumptions of this era gave rise to suspicion of any idea of a specific human being having privileged insights or status. Rationalist writers argued that Jesus of Nazareth had been misunderstood by the early church. It was necessary to go behind both Christian tradition and the New Testament, and uncover a simpler, more plausible view of Jesus Christ, consistent with the values of the “Age of Reason.” As a result, the movement that we now know as the “Quest for the Historical Jesus” got under way in the late eighteenth century.
In this section, we shall consider the history and theological significance of this “Quest for the Historical Jesus.” Although this topic is of particular importance for New Testament scholarship, it clearly has relevance for theological debates about the identity and significance of Jesus Christ. We begin by considering the origins of the quest.
The Original Quest for the Historical Jesus
The original quest for the historical Jesus was based upon the presupposition that there was a radical gulf between the historical figure of Jesus and the interpretation which the Christian church had placed upon him. The “historical Jesus” who lies behind the New Testament was a simple religious teacher; the “Christ of faith” was a misrepresentation of this simple figure by early church writers. By going back to the historical Jesus, a more credible version of Christianity would result, stripped of all unnecessary and inappropriate dogmatic additions (such as the idea of the resurrection or the divinity of Christ).
Such ideas, although frequently expressed by English Deists during the seventeenth century, received their classic statements in Germany in the late eighteenth century, especially through the posthumously published writings of Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768). Reimarus became increasingly convinced that both Judaism and Christianity rested upon fraudulent foundations, and conceived the idea of writing a major work which would bring this fact to public attention. Reimarus's Apology for the Rational Worshipper of God subjected the entire biblical canon to rationalist criticism. However, reluctant to cause any controversy, Reimarus did not publish the work. It remained in manuscript form until his death.
Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) came across the work and decided to publish a selection of extracts. These “fragments of an unknown writer,” published in 1774, caused a sensation. The volume contained five fragments, now generally known as the “Wolfenbüttel Fragments,” and included a sustained attack on the historicity of the resurrection.
The final fragment, entitled “On the Aims of Jesus and His Disciples,” concerned the nature of our knowledge of Jesus Christ, and raised the question of whether the gospel accounts of Jesus had been tampered with by the early Christians. Reimarus argued that there was a radical difference between the beliefs and intentions of Jesus himself and those of the apostolic church. Jesus's language and images of God were, according to Reimarus, those of a Jewish apocalyptic visionary, with a radically limited chronological and political reference and relevance. Jesus accepted the late Jewish expectation of a messiah who would deliver his people from Roman occupation, and believed that God would assist him in this task. His cry of dereliction on the cross represented his final realization that he had been deluded and mistaken.
However, Reimarus argued, the disciples were not prepared to leave things like this. They invented the idea of a “spiritual redemption” in the place of Jesus's concrete political vision of an Israel liberated from foreign occupation. They invented the idea of the resurrection of Jesus, in order to cover up the embarrassment caused by his death. As a result, the disciples invented doctrines quite unknown to Jesus, such as his death being an atonement for human sin, adding such ideas to the biblical text to make it harmonize with their beliefs. As a result, the New Testament as we now have it is riddled with fraudulent interpolations. The real Jesus of history is concealed from us by the apostolic church, which has substituted a fictitious Christ of faith, the redeemer of humanity from sin.
Although Reimarus found few, if any, followers at the time, he raised questions which would become of fundamental importance in subsequent years. In particular, his explicit distinction between the legitimate historical Jesus and the fictitious Christ of faith proved to be of enormous significance. The resulting “quest for the historical Jesus” arose as a direct result of the growing rationalist suspicion that the New Testament portrayal of Christ was a dogmatic invention. It was possible to reconstruct the real historical figure of Jesus, and disentangle him from the dogmatic ideas in which the apostles had clothed him.
The Quest for the Religious Personality of Jesus
A more subtle version of this approach is linked with the rise of liberal Protestantism in the nineteenth century, particularly the writings of Albrecht Benjamin Ritschl (see pp. 70–1). The emergence of movements such as Romanticism led to rationalism increasingly being regarded as outmoded (see pp. 139–40 A new interest developed in “the human spirit” and in the more specifically religious aspects of human life. This led to a new interest in the religious personality of Jesus. Ideas such as the “divinity” of Christ were regarded as outmoded; the idea of a “religious personality” of Jesus, which could be imitated by anyone, seemed a much more acceptable way of restating Christological issues in the modern period.
As a result, renewed attention was paid to the nature of the New Testament sources upon which the life of the historical Jesus could be constructed. It was widely believed that the new literary approach to the New Testament in general, and the synoptic gospels in particular, would permit scholars to establish a firmly drawn and lifelike portrait which would clearly bring out the personality of Jesus.
The assumption underlying this “life of Jesus” movement in the later nineteenth century was that the remarkable religious personality of Jesus, whose shape could be determined by conscientious historical inquiry, would provide a solid historical foundation for faith. The firm ground of historical truth upon which Christian faith depended was thus not supernatural or antirational (a perceived weakness of traditional Christology) but merely the religious personality of Jesus, a fact of history open to scientific investigation. The impression that he made upon his contemporaries could be reproduced in his followers of every age.
The Critique of the Quest, 1890–1910
Three main criticisms of the “religious personality” Christology of liberal Protestantism emerged in the two decades before the First World War; we shall consider them individually.
The Apocalyptic Critique
This criticism, primarily associated with Johannes Weiss (1863–1914) and Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), maintained that the strongly eschatological bias of Jesus's proclamation of the kingdom of God called the essentially Kantian liberal interpretation of the concept into question. In 1892, Weiss published Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God. In this book, he argued that the idea of the “kingdom of God” was understood by the liberal Protestants to mean the exercise of the moral life in society, or a supreme ethical ideal. In other words, it was conceived primarily as something subjective, inward, or spiritual, rather than in spatiotemporal terms. For Weiss, Albrecht Ritschl's concept of the kingdom of God was essentially continuous with that of the Enlightenment. It was a static moral concept without eschatological overtones. The rediscovery of the eschatology of the preaching of Jesus called into question not merely this understanding of the kingdom of God but also the liberal portrait of Christ in general. The kingdom of God was thus not to be seen as a settled and static realm of liberal moral values but as a devastating apocalyptic moment which overturned human values (see pp. 432–3).
Where Weiss regarded a substantial part (but not all) of the teaching of Jesus as being conditioned by his radical eschatological expectations, Schweitzer argued that every aspect of the teaching and attitudes of Jesus was determined by his eschatological outlook. The entire content of Jesus's message was consistently and thoroughly conditioned by apocalyptic ideas – ideas which were quite alien to the settled outlook of late nineteenth-century western Europe.
The result of this consistent eschatological interpretation of the person and message of Jesus of Nazareth was a portrait of Christ as a remote and strange figure, an apocalyptic and wholly unworldly person. Jesus thus appears to us as a strange figure from an alien first-century Jewish apocalyptic milieu, so that, in Schweitzer's famous words, “he comes to us as one unknown.”
The Skeptical Critique
This approach, associated particularly with William Wrede, called into question the historical status of our knowledge of Jesus in the first place. History and theology were closely intermingled in the synoptic narratives, and could not be disentangled. According to Wrede, Mark was painting a theological picture in the guise of history, imposing his theology upon the material which he had at his disposal. The second gospel was not objectively historical but was actually a creative theological reinterpretation of history.
It was thus impossible to go behind Mark's narrative and reconstruct the history of Jesus, for the reason that – if Wrede is right – this narrative is itself a theological construction, beyond which one cannot go. The “quest for the historical Jesus” thus comes to an end since it proves impossible to establish an historical foundation for the “real” Jesus of history.
The Dogmatic Critique
This line of criticism, expressed by the dogmatic theologian Martin Kähler (1835–1912), challenged the theological significance of the reconstruction of the historical Jesus. The “historical Jesus” was an irrelevance to faith, which was based upon the “Christ of faith.” Kähler rightly saw that the dispassionate and provisional Jesus of the academic historian cannot become the object of faith. Yet how can Jesus Christ be the authentic basis and content of Christian faith, when historical science can never establish certain knowledge concerning the historical Jesus? How can faith be based upon an historical event without being vulnerable to the charge of historical relativism? Kähler addressed these questions in his The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ (1892).
For Kähler, Christ must be regarded as a “suprahistorical” rather than an “historical” figure, so that the critical–historical method cannot be applied in his case. The critical–historical method could not deal with the suprahistorical (and hence suprahuman) characteristics of Jesus, and hence was obliged to ignore or deny them. In effect, the critical–historical method could only lead to an Arian or Ebionite Christology, on account of its latent dogmatic presuppositions.
Many historians of Christian thought argue that the demolition of the original “quest” was so effective that an extended period of “no quest” set in, lasting until the end of the Second World War. Historically, it was generally believed that it was impossible to disentangle the Jesus of the gospels from the historical Jesus. Theologically, many felt the quest was theologically illegitimate because Christianity is based upon faith in Christ rather than the historical person of Jesus. This inevitably reduces the perceived importance of the historical Jesus.
Considerations such as these gradually came to dominate the theological scene and may be regarded as reaching their climax in the writings of Rudolf Bultmann, to which we now turn.
The Quest Suspended: Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976)
Bultmann regarded the entire enterprise of the historical reconstruction of Jesus as something of a dead end. History was not of fundamental importance to Christology; it was merely necessary that Jesus existed, and that the Christian proclamation (which Bultmann terms the kerygma; Greek: “proclamation” or “message”) is somehow grounded in his person. Bultmann thus famously reduced the entire historical aspect of Christology to a single word – “that.” It is necessary only to believe that Jesus Christ lies behind the gospel proclamation (or kerygma). With such slogans, the grand generation-long retreat of Christology from historical engagement began.
For Bultmann, it was not possible to go behind the kerygma, using it as a “source” in order to reconstruct an “historical Jesus” with his “messianic consciousness,” his “inner life,” or his “heroism.” That would merely be “Christ according to the flesh,” who no longer exists. It is not the historical Jesus but Jesus Christ the one who is preached who is the Lord.
This radical move away from history alarmed many. How could anyone rest assured that Christology was properly grounded in the person and work of Jesus Christ? How could anyone begin to check out Christology, if the history of Jesus was an irrelevance? It seemed to an increasing number of writers, within the fields of both New Testament and dogmatic studies, that Bultmann had merely cut a Gordian knot without resolving theserious historical issues at stake. For Bultmann, all that could be, and could be required to be, known about the historical Jesus was the fact that (das Dass) he existed.
The New Quest for the Historical Jesus
A “new quest for the historical Jesus” is generally regarded as having been inaugurated with a lecture in October 1953 by Ernst Käsemann (1906–98) on the problem of the historical Jesus. Despite their obviously theological concerns, Käsemann argued that the evangelists had access to historical information concerning Jesus of Nazareth, and that this historical information was expressed and embodied in the text of the synoptic gospels. The gospels include both the kerygma and historical narrative.
Käsemann thus points to the need to explore the continuity between the preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus. There is an obvious discontinuity between the earthly Jesus and the exalted and proclaimed Christ; yet a thread of continuity links them, in that the proclaimed Christ is already present, in some sense, in the historical Jesus. It must be stressed that Käsemann is not suggesting that a new inquiry should be undertaken concerning the historical Jesus in order to provide historical legitimation for the kerygma; still less is he suggesting that the discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the proclaimed Christ necessitates the deconstruction of the latter in terms of the former. Rather, Käsemann is pointing to the theological assertion of the identity of the earthly Jesus and the exalted Christ being historically grounded in the actions and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
This theological affirmation is, Käsemann argues, dependent upon the historical demonstration that the kerygma concerning Jesus is already contained in a nutshell or embryonic form in the ministry of Jesus. In that the kerygma contains historical elements, it is entirely proper and necessary to inquire concerning the relationship between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith.
It will be clear that this “new quest for the historical Jesus” is qualitatively different from the discredited quest of the nineteenth century. Käsemann's argument rests upon the recognition that the discontinuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith does not imply that they are unrelated entities, with the latter having no grounding or foundation in the former. Rather, the kerygma may be discerned in the actions and preaching of Jesus of Nazareth, so that there is a continuity between the preaching of Jesus and the preaching about Jesus. Where the older quest had assumed that the discontinuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith implied that the latter was potentially a fiction, who required to be reconstructed in the light of objective historical investigation, Käsemann stressed that such reconstruction is neither necessary nor possible.
The “new quest for the historical Jesus” was thus concerned to stress the continuity between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith. Whereas the “old quest” had the aim of discrediting the New Testament portrayal of Christ, the “new quest” ended up consolidating it by stressing the continuities between the preaching of Jesus himself and the church's preaching about Jesus.
The growing realization of the importance of this point led to intensive interest developing in the question of the historical foundations of the kerygma. Four positions of interest may be noted.
Since then, there have been other developments in the field. In the 1970s and 1980s, particular attention was directed toward exploring the relationship between Jesus and his environment in first-century Judaism. This development, which is especially associated with Geza Vermes (1924–2013) and E. P. Sanders (born 1937), renewed interest in the Jewish background to Jesus and further emphasized the importance of history in relation to Christology. The Bultmann approach – which devalues the significance of history in Christology – is widely regarded as discredited, at least for the moment. This can be seen in the new interest in the “historical Jesus” associated with what has come to be known as the “third quest.”
The Third Quest for the Historical Jesus
Since the general collapse of the “new quest” during the 1960s, a series of works have appeared offering re-evaluations of the historical Jesus. The term “third quest” has often been applied to this group of works. The designation has been called into question by a number of writers who point out that the works and scholars who are gathered together under this term do not have enough in common to categorize them in this way. Despite this reservation, the term seems to be gaining acceptance, and it is therefore appropriate to include it in this survey. Whatever the differences between its proponents, the “third quest” has a number of common elements, particularly an emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus and the necessity of understanding him in the context of first-century Judaism, set against the backdrop of the social world of first-century Palestine.
The “original quest” approached the stories of Jesus in the light of a series of strongly rationalist presuppositions, inherited from the Enlightenment, and filtered out the miraculous aspects of the gospel narratives. The “new quest” tended to focus on the words of Jesus, stressing the continuity between the preaching of Jesus himself and the New Testament preaching about Jesus. The “third quest” seems to involve a focus on the relation of Jesus to his Jewish context as indicative of the distinctive character of his mission, and his understanding of his own goals. Among significant contributions to the “third quest,” the following should be noted in particular:
On the basis of this brief analysis of a few writers generally regarded as representative of the “third quest,” it will be clear that this iteration of the quest lacks a coherent theological or historical core. There is significant disagreement concerning whether Jesus is to be seen against a Jewish or Hellenistic background; about his attitude to the Jewish Law and its religious institutions; about his view of the future of Israel; and about the personal significance of Jesus in relation to that future. Nevertheless, the term “third quest” has found at least a degree of acceptance, despite its clear weaknesses, and it is likely to remain an integral part of scholarly discussion of this important issue.