Section I - Disparate Views About Jesus
SECTION I
DISPARATE VIEWS ABOUT JESUS
“Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can find their account here. There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus.”
ALBERT SCHWEITZER1
“Even under the discipline of attempting to envision Jesus against his own most proper Jewish background, it seems we can have as many pictures as there are exegetes. . . . [Their] stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.”
JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN2
In this section I will merely summarize and evaluate some sample proposals in Jesus research. It is not my intention to engage all authors who have written important works on the subject;3 others have provided more detailed, book-length surveys of the historical and present “quests” for Jesus.4 For me to repeat their work, except as at most a thumbnail sketch, would digress too long from this book’s primary purpose. I offer this survey of several views primarily to show the diversity of scholarly opinion, hence to demonstrate why one’s choice of sources and methodology is extremely important.
Despite the limits of my survey, however, we can learn from history, including the history of scholarship, and this history in turn includes its record of failures. Academic history has passed a negative verdict on most of the past two centuries of “historical Jesus” research, which has more often than not replaced earlier conclusions with newer ones, only to find the newer ones themselves displaced.5 While quests for the historical Jesus start with the reasonable assumption that later orthodox christology should not be read into our earliest accounts about Jesus, they have too often read Jesus in light of too narrow a background (e.g., only a revolutionary, solely a teacher, just a prophet, or exclusively some other category, but often not more than one at a time) or as a reflection of their own values.6
More recent scholarship has sometimes (though as we shall see, not always) avoided the pitfall of narrow reconstructions.7 In our own partial reconstruction later in the book, we shall endeavor to avoid the forced category-choices and welcome whatever aspects of Jesus’ activity the evidence of our best sources yields. Nevertheless, even such attempts to synthesize earlier insights inevitably inherit and make use of the categories of previous scholarship. Most helpfully, recent scholarship has increasingly (though not always) focused on the Galilean Jewish setting of Jesus, a perspective invaluable for reconstructing Jesus’ true message and activity.