CHAPTER 1 - The Development of Jesus Scholarship
CHAPTER 1
The Development of Jesus Scholarship
Each of the next three chapters offers only the briefest summary of views, by way of introducing some of the diverse ideas about Jesus in the past few centuries of academic discussion. Although outsiders sometimes think of scholarship as monolithic (depending on how many books on the subject they have read), “historical Jesus” research has proved to be anything but monolithic. The “assured results” of one generation or school are usually challenged in the next.
John Dominic Crossan put the matter well nearly two decades ago: “Historical Jesus research is becoming something of a scholarly bad joke,” due, he noted, to “the number of competent and even eminent scholars producing pictures of Jesus at wide variance with one another.”1 Consensus has been elusive,2 as our summary of views in these next three chapters is intended to illustrate.
Likewise, whereas outsiders often think of scholarship as dispassionate and objective, scholarship is in fact often driven by scholars’ assumptions, which are in turn often the product of the ideas dominant in their own era. Biographers and historians addressing other ancient figures might interpret their subjects sympathetically, but Jesus scholarship has developed this tendency more than most. In an era that emphasized Christian ethics, writers about Jesus often portrayed him as the epitome of such ethics. In a setting that emphasized a form of existentialism, some scholars presented him as existentialism’s greatest voice. Today, too, we have our variety of contextually packaged, readily marketable “Jesus” figures.
While such mundane contextualizations are to be preferred to the Third Reich’s “Aryan” Jesus, they still run a serious risk of distorting and malforming what we know about Jesus. Indeed, if we are interested in the Jesus who lived and died in first-century Galilee, we would do better to read him in the very context that the Reich Church most abhorred — Jesus’ Judaism.3