The Question of the “Historical” Jesus 50
The Question of the “Historical” Jesus
Christians before the eighteenth century entertained few doubts that the Gospels were to be read as historically reliable accounts of the life of Jesus. The main problem to be faced was that of harmonization: explaining how the four gospels could be combined together to produce a smooth and coherent account of Jesus’ life. Such attempts date from the earliest days of the church (e.g., Tatian in the second century) and continue to be popular in our own day. But this generally unquestioned confidence in the historical accuracy of the gospels’ portrait of Jesus changed in the eighteenth century under the onslaught of the Enlightenment. A new, critically oriented historiography was less disposed to accept ancient accounts at face value. This attitude applied especially to miracles, which did not fit well into the deistic view of a mechanical and reliable universe. The most famous early attack on the historicity of the Gospels was that of Samuel Reimarus. His "Fragments,” published by Lessing in 1774-78 after Reimarus’s death, raised serious doubts about the gospel accounts. Among other things, Reimarus suggested that the resurrection did not occur; instead, the disciples stole the body. 86
Skepticism about the miraculous element in the Gospels quickly became widespread.
H. E. G. Paulus, for example, explained away the resurrection as a revival from a coma in the cold tomb, and Jesus’ walking on the water was in reality his walking on a barely submerged sandbar. But a major break with this rationalistic approach came in the groundbreaking Life of Jesus by D. F. Strauss (1835-36). Strauss, while no more accepting of the historicity of the Gospels than were his rationalistic predecessors, insisted that the Gospels taught truth, but truth of a religious and philosophical nature. Much of the Gospels were made up of myths (stories with religious value) that were important witnesses to the "absolute spirit,” a concept taken from the then-popular philosophy of Hegel. Reaction against Strauss and other such extreme skeptics took many forms. One was the Markan hypothesis, which viewed Mark as relatively untheological and therefore a generally reliable basis for a historical Jesus. Such a view fed into the many lives of Jesus, told from a liberal perspective, in which the theological and dogmatic layers of the Greek-influenced early church (and particularly Paul) were stripped off in order to get at the real Jesus: the humble teacher of Nazareth.
Three influential works ended such efforts. The most famous was Albert Schweitzer’s Quest for the Historical Jesus, a chronicle of "lives of Jesus” from Reimarus to his own time (1906). 87Schweitzer showed how each successive "historical” Jesus was little more than the projection of the writer’s own cultural and philosophical outlook back into the plane of history. Schweitzer, building on the work of Johannes Weiss, 88saw eschatology as the key to understanding Jesus. Jesus proclaimed the impending world-ending entrance of the kingdom of God and died disappointed when it had not come. Two other books written a bit earlier called into question the possibility of a nontheological, untendentious picture of Jesus: Martin Kahler’s The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ 89and William Wrede’s The Messianic Secret in Mark. 90Thus, as E. E. Ellis puts it, "The Quest began with the supposition that history could be extracted from the Gospels like a kernel from the husk; it ended with the growing recognition that the process was more like peeling an onion with history and interpretation intermixed at every layer.” 91
Rudolf Bultmann kept peeling until there was almost nothing left. His form-critical studies of the Gospels convinced him that we could know very little for sure about Jesus himself: the accounts have simply been reinterpreted too thoroughly by the early church. But this did not concern Bultmann, for it is not what we can uncover about Jesus in history that matters for us but what we can experience of Jesus in personal encounter with him here and now. Historical facts cannot prove articles of faith: "Rather, the acknowledgment of Jesus as the one in whom God’s word decisively encounters man, whatever title be given him...is a pure act of faith independent of the answer to the historical question....Faith, being personal decision, cannot be dependent on a historian’s labor.” 92Bultmann, using existentialist philosophy as a guide, pursues a program of "demythologization” in which the modern reader penetrates through the myths of the Gospels to find real truth. A "new quest for the historical Jesus” was initiated by pupils of Bultmann who worried that so complete a casting loose of Christian faith from historical moorings would leave the church adrift and helpless to make any claims for itself at all. Ernst Kasemann opened this new quest in 1953, and he has been followed by several other influential German theologians. 93Nevertheless, what even the "new questers” decide can be reliably known about Jesus is so small a residue of the whole that little has been gained.
It would be impossible to catalog here the variety of interpetations of the life of Jesus that are current in scholarship in our own day; 94 nor have we done more than scratch the historical surface. Indeed, the picture we come away with from so cursory a survey can be seriously misleading, since it focuses on the new and the unusual at the expense of the many fine restatements of a more conservative approach. But at least it enables us to see the extent to which the Gospels have come to be considered exceedingly weak reeds for the historian’s labors.
Yet such skepticism is not warranted. The evangelists certainly claim to be writing history. True, they write as passionate exponents of a certain interpretation of that history, and they select and arrange their facts accordingly. But as we have seen when discussing redaction criticism, there is no reason to think a person must be a bad historian because he or she is a strong partisan. As Martin Hengel points out, scholars have erred in thinking they had to choose between preaching and historical narration.
"In reality the ‘theological’ contribution of the evangelist lies in the fact that he combines both these things inseparably: he preaches by narrating; he writes history and in so doing proclaims.” 95A truly open-minded approach is to listen sympathetically to the case the evangelists are arguing, trying to enter into their own world to see if it makes sense. We might find that it makes more sense than the worlds we have constructed for ourselves. 96