Earlier Modern “Historical Jesus” Studies
Earlier Modern “Historical Jesus” Studies
The current quest — today almost a market — in “Jesus” research builds on a long modern tradition. Some of that tradition bespeaks the courage of inquirers willing to suffer for their convictions (whether against the hostility of theologians or that of skeptics); some of it warns of authors pandering to their market niches in the most profitable manner.
The Renaissance emphasis on a return to the sources invited scholars to look for the “original” Jesus behind the portrayals of Medieval dogma. While this inquiry initially remained a pious quest, it was inevitably shaped by the presuppositions about the nature of history with which its scholars worked. Thus sixteenth-century English Deists4 worked with different presuppositions about what was “possible” than did those of more traditional Christian persuasion.
The radical Enlightenment’s prejudice against divine or supernatural causation eventually shaped much of Jesus research. Although the reason that Albert Schweitzer’s famous history of the Jesus quest5 starts with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) may be that Reimarus fits the trajectory Schweitzer wished to emphasize, Reimarus offers an adequate beginning for our summary. Reimarus’ work was a polemic rather than an objective historical study, and his work circulated openly only after his death.6 Today scholars regard most of Reimarus’ views as wrong, but we can appreciate at least his emphasis on Jesus’ Jewish context (introduced by others before him).7
Yet once Reimarus’ work pried open previously repressed academic possibilities, some others soon joined attempts to explain the gospel tradition without regard to the miracle claims so offensive to the radical Enlightenment understanding of “reason.” Thus Karl Friedrich Bahrdt wrote of Essenes as a secret society that offered medical and psychosomatic cures. They and Jesus accommodated superstition, Bahrdt supposed, merely to communicate rational truth.8 Likewise, Karl Heinrich Venturini opined that Jesus healed with medicaments, always carrying his medicine chest as he traveled around.9 Both Bahrdt and Venturini seem to have conveniently overestimated ancient medical capabilities.
More influentially, David Friedrich Strauss (1808-74) endeavored to “demythologize” the gospel portrait of Jesus, seeking to recover the original story behind the later descriptions by stripping or explaining away what he deemed impossible. The “Jesus” such writers produced was a modern rational Jesus amenable to their own tastes.10 Schweitzer contends that scholars in this “rational phase” of Jesus research sometimes made historically irrational choices (such as preferring John’s testimony to that of the Synoptics) to achieve their portrait.11
Shaped by Romanticism, most nineteenth-century authors of “lives of Jesus” produced a romantic Jesus, a Jesus of noble sentiment who appealed to like-minded audiences (and, coincidentally, helped sell many of the authors’ books). (Schweitzer complains that one of the most famous of these authors, Ernest Renan, was more interested in his literary public than in scientific objectivity.) 12 Although writers produced a vast number of these “lives,” their basic character remained substantially the same.13