In 1906 Albert Schweitzer’s survey and devastating31 critique of previous modern Jesus scholarship32 put an end to much of the “Jesus” industry of his day. (Schweitzer was also a good marketer: he presented his own view as the natural product of the evolution of sound thinking.)33 Although Schweitzer’s survey of previous Jesus research was selective and somewhat tendentious, it was sufficient to establish his central point regarding the history of scholarship. His point was that Jesus scholars had produced a Jesus in their own image, to their own liking. Not unlike some preachers and perhaps a few scholars today,34 they had used respect for Jesus to promulgate their own ideology.
Schweitzer’s own portrait of Jesus drew from recent work by Johannes Weiss (1863-1914), who had argued, against his nineteenth-century predecessors, that Jesus proclaimed the world’s imminent end, a prediction that then failed to occur. His emphasis on the future character of the “kingdom” Jesus proclaimed, based on Jesus’ early Jewish context, offered an important challenge to his predecessors’ “liberal” lives of Jesus.35 Weiss was not ignorant of his era’s scholarship;36 rather, he addressed particular questions precisely because these questions were being answered differently in his milieu.37
Eschatology (emphasis on the impending end of the age) was central in Weiss’s reconstruction of Jesus’ teaching. For example, he notes that Jesus’ expression “Son of man” is eschatological imagery;38 this perspective coheres with Jesus’ proclamation of God’s end-time kingdom. Weiss believes that Jesus expected the kingdom to come immediately (cf. Mk 13:32)39 or in the next generation.40
Granted, Weiss sometimes overplayed eschatology. For example, he sometimes41 may play down too much the rarer texts that could emphasize the presence of the kingdom;42 for example, “entering the kingdom” in the present becomes for him merely “entering the way that leads to the kingdom.”43 Like some other “Jesus” scholars, Weiss sometimes draws the net of context too narrowly, in this case exploiting only apocalyptic background. Thus, for example, he traces Jesus’ messianic consciousness to his consciousness of his sonship44 in an apocalyptic context,45 even though God’s Fatherhood is a pervasive theme throughout Jesus’ Jewish environment.46
Like Weiss, Schweitzer drew on Jesus’ Jewish, and especially eschatological (“end-time”), environment to portray a more Jewish Jesus than the one embraced by some of his contemporaries, who were generally more interested in “relevant” theology or preaching. Similarly, Schweitzer shared many of the critical assumptions of his era’s biblical scholarship,47 though like Weiss, not always consistently.48 He regards Jesus as apocalyptic rather than as a modern rationalist,49 and observes that an eschatological outlook often suggests the authenticity of early traditions.50 Unfortunately, like Weiss, he defines ancient Jewish perspectives too narrowly in terms of apocalyptic pseudepigrapha.51 Nevertheless, scholars have often observed that, regardless of their excesses, “there is no going back behind Weiss and Schweitzer.”52
Yet Schweitzer’s own conclusions seemed disillusioning for both his own faith and that of many other liberal Christians: Jesus was a deluded (if heroic) apocalyptist dreamer.53 Of course, Schweitzer found a friendlier way to put this: Jesus’ spirit, in his useful teachings, lives on among his followers.54 Schweitzer’s emphasis on eschatology or Jesus’ Jewish context would not necessarily have the same effect today. Whereas his generation had little use for eschatology, two world wars, rampant genocide and other factors have since reinvigorated it;55 oppressed people naturally often resonate with the hopes of a better world more than content people do.56 This was not, however, Schweitzer’s milieu, and his emphasis on Jesus’ eschatological framework was for him an act of brutal academic honesty. Eschatology did not “preach” well in his circles.
