De-Judaizing Jesus?
De-Judaizing Jesus?
Just as earlier Jesus scholars selected those elements of the Gospels that fit their ideal portrait of Jesus, Bultmann could do much the same. While a better historical scholar than most of his predecessors, all he actually needed for his portrait of Jesus was the “existential” core of his teaching. He wondered if Palestinian Jewish Christianity would have really preserved much information about Jesus73 (contrary to what we will observe about oral tradition in ch. 10). Although Bultmann allowed more of Jesus’ “Jewishness” than had some of his predecessors,74 his criterion of dissimilarity laid heavier emphasis on points where he thought that Jesus differed from his Jewish environment.75 Thus, for example, his Jesus attacked the law as a formal legal authority76 and is antithetical to the OT and contemporary Judaism.77
Moreover, although Bultmann had more knowledge of Judaism than some of his critics have implied,78 it appears to have been limited and either secondhand or (often) sifted through severely distorted assumptions.79 Most critically, the view of (rabbinic) Judaism he inherited from some of his teachers was excessively legalistic,80 and no more than a shadow of what can now be known about real Judaism in Jesus’ day (as many scholars would agree that Bultmann’s Jesus was only a shadow of what can be known about the historical Jesus). Worse, Bultmann often uncritically stressed non-Jewish, “gnostic” elements in Christian origins, including a gnostic redeemer myth pieced together from disparate, much later sources.81 If his minimalist historical Jesus was Jewish, nevertheless he spawned a movement the substance of which became unrecognizable to Judaism with astonishing swiftness.
When some lines of Jesus research today deemphasize Jesus’ Jewishness in favor of Greek philosophic and other background, often producing a portrait of Jesus particularly “relevant” to its modern philosophic audience, one wonders how far we have come beyond either Bultmann or his pre-Schweitzer predecessors.82 One need not agree with all of Schweitzer’s views to appreciate his historical honesty.
While Bultmann’s historical skepticism reduced interest in historical Jesus research among his followers, some of them revisited the subject. In 1953 Ernst Käsemann announced a new quest for the historical Jesus, and in 1956 another Bultmannian, Günther Bornkamm, wrote a work about Jesus.83 Such “Second Questers” did not venture as far beyond Bultmann as most of the so-called84 “Third Questers” have, but returning to interest in the Jesus of history was at least an improvement (from historians’ standpoint).
We will introduce recent views in the next two chapters, but will first turn our attention to what has usually been considered an idiosyncratic view from the 1960s. The purpose of this digression is to reinforce our larger portrait of the diversity within Jesus research.