THE HISTORICAL JESUS QUESTS
By Rook Hawkins
1.1 History and Kerygma: An Overview of the First and Second Quests
“Since David Frederick Strauss, in his “Life of Jesus,” attempted for the first time to trace back to myths and pious fictions, doubts regarding the existence of an historical Jesus have never been lulled to rest.” – Arthur Drews
The onset of the historical Jesus quest was meant to be critical. In many ways, the quest has failed to do so, and these reasons shall be discussed below. The question of Jesus’ historic nature has been a long—and sometimes long-winded—debate for generations of scholars, and no clear objective has been drawn as to what exactly scholarship should be looking for to end the debate. Perhaps the only way to conclusively determine the nature of the historical Jesus would be to kick up a papyri fragment along the likes of which was inscribed “The Memoirs of Jesus the Christ, son of Joseph.” Foregoing that improbability, this issue seems to be coming up short on real conclusive evidence, yet seems to have an overabundance of scholars who want to write about the subject.
The history of the historical Jesus Quest has always been met with supporters, critics from both secular and religious sides, and those who firmly plant themselves in the agnostic realm. There are, in effect, three quests thus far, as scholarship seems to be winding down from the last and most recent. The quest for the historical Jesus started in
Earlier attempts had been made by scholars to put out a biography of Jesus, although as was the case with Johann Jakob Hess[4] and Ernest Renan[5] the attempt became either pure history or complete dogma. With the instance of Hess, he had to maintain a supernaturalistic approach, and Renan tended to have to cut corners to account for the internal inconsistency of the Gospels or simply relied on the forth evangelist, which made both their attempts failures. Although, despite Paine’s nature at secularizing America to be more like France, Renan’s attempts to historicize the Gospels into one complete Gospel, and Hess’s ideological, supernatural Jesus of the Gospel according to John, it was really neither secular, historical or supernatural ambitions by eighteenth and nineteenth century scholars to remove the superfluous mythology from the Gospels; rather it was a faithful attempt to redefine the doctrines of the Church; to go back before Orthodoxy and find the real, authentic Jesus and thus find the real and authentic Christianity.
It was David Strauss in 1836 who published his work Das Leben Jesu, which he put forth the idea that scholarship must look past the Gospels as historical narratives. So-called the “Straussian Controversy,”[6] there was apparently a huge outburst of excitement in the mid nineteenth century concerning Strauss’s book;
Even where the Leben Jesu was not known, and could not be read, a conviction has prevailed, that some great work had been put forth in
The issue was that Strauss and the initiation of the Jesus quest was not to disprove Jesus, but rather to change the way Christians viewed faith; in other words, the first quest was an attempt to radically alter Christianity in a means that would solidify the problems of the Gospel accounts while allowing the faithful to look at their church in a new and inspiring way. However, soon after, scholars and critics alike expanded on Strauss whether by advocating his works and writing their own versions of the life of Jesus, or by ridiculing Strauss, and unfortunately for Strauss his book caused him quite some hardships including the loss of his teaching career.[8] Remarkably, however, another position opened itself up to scholarship; the position of indifference. This position held that the current historical criticism of the New Testament was really irrelevant, and should be ignored. It was David Kähler, himself a subscriber to this position of indifference, who finally slowed the first Jesus quest down more then previous scholars in his field with his book The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ. Kähler proposed that the only Jesus that scholarship should be concerned with or even be considering is the Jesus of tradition as this is, per Kähler, the only Jesus that is important.
The significance of this book is that all previous questers were either attempting to validate or invalidate the Gospel narratives as part of the historical genre through the best—or sometimes the worst—scholarship of the time. The end result was that both sides had relatively weak positions, as it was impossible for a scholar to adequately claim the Gospels were historical, as it was growing increasingly more clear that there was, in fact, mythmaking[9] happening, however such a concept as mythmaking wouldn’t appear until decades later. It was likewise impossible to find another Jesus outside of the Gospel accounts; there simply existed only the Gospels as a means for determining the life of Christ, and if a scholar set out to invalidate the Gospels as historical narratives one couldn’t very well use them to validate a credible historical figure. The nature of Kähler’s book was a compromise which allowed both sides to settle on the point that, yes, the Gospels are not historical, but they did influence Christianity, thus making the works important and validating them in a manner which appeased the religious movements following the Enlightenment. Yet the quest simply didn’t end with Kähler in 1896, as another great work was forthcoming.
Among the list of some of the agnostics in the field following Kähler’s work, indeed one of the great reviewers of the first quest, Albert Schweitzer and his book The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1911), states, “And the greatest achievement of German theology is the critical investigation of the life of Jesus. What it has accomplished here has laid down the conditions and determined the course of religious thinking of the future.” (p. 1) But that really is an incredible understatement. Schweitzer was really the final nail in the coffin on the first Jesus quest; his book cemented Kähler’s ideas and effectively buried the remains of the first historical Jesus crusade. This can be seen in the final remarks of his book:
Modern Lives of Jesus are too general in their scope. They aim at influencing, by giving a complete impression of the life of Jesus, a whole community. But the historical Jesus, as He is depicted in the Gospels, influenced individuals by the individual word…. For that reason it is a good thing that the true historical Jesus should overthrow the modern Jesus, should rise up against the modern spirit and send upon the earth, not peace, but a sword…. He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew him not. He speaks to us the same word: ‘Follow thou me!’ and sets us to the tasks which He has to [fulfill] for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is. (p. 400-401)
In the end, the quest to find a new Christianity died leaving the same Christianity in its place. It is doubtful that Schweitzer would have envisioned the amount of times his book would be used by future questers to lay the groundwork for their own quests, and how reviewers would likewise follow in Schweitzer’s footsteps documenting every leg of the journey, only to determine that the historical Jesus was the Gospel Jesus, even if that was beyond what they intended or thought they suggested.
What Schweitzer had envisioned was that the world of historical Jesus scholarship was at an impasse and that regardless of who Jesus was—Schweitzer was a supporter of the apocalyptic Jesus[10]—that the Gospels and Christian tradition were tainted with falsehoods and myth, but whether they were historical in nature or not, Jesus was to Schweitzer the Jesus of the Gospels. As it was said by one of the later scholars of a later quest,
We hear in the church the proclamation of the word which announces Christ as the redemptive act of God. The proclamation challenges us to a groundless either/or decision. To try to prove that Jesus is the redemptive act of God is to seek false security; Or… to seek for the so-called historical Jesus was to tie faith to the shifting results of historical criticism, so that the simple believer could never know what to believe.[11]
Alas, it was eventually concluded that “the history of Jesus was irrelevant for faith,” that what Christians actually believed were the “creeds and not the historical Jesus.”[12] And so it happened that in accordance with Kähler and Schweitzer, everyone agreed. As per one of the second questers, Albert Schweitzer “has erected its memorial, but at the same time has delivered its funeral oration.”[13]
There was a lull for a period of about 35 years in the early twentieth century, one may even call it an interlude, only to have the remains of the first quest exhumed by the followers of Rudolf Bultmann’s school of thought initially following World War II, but extensively so during the 1950’s and 60’s mere decades after it seemed as if this whole ‘Jesus thing’ had been put to rest. With shovels and pickaxes in hand, the new crusaders lifted up the coffin, pried it open and released to the wind the partially decaying corpse of the first quest to resurrect—if you will—the second quest for the historical Jesus. This time the quest comprised of a new type of theology and better scholarship than their shadows a mere forty years earlier, the works of Schweitzer, Kähler and Strauss were, once more, thrown into the forefront of scholarship as much as one throws a bone to starving dogs. In Reginald H. Fuller’s book, The New Testament in Current Study (1952), Fuller lays out the case of the new quest, or as it is also known as, the second quest for the historical Jesus. He states;
Why then this renewal of concern with the historical Jesus? It has been touched off largely by the program of demythologizing. The ‘myths’ of the kerygma—pre-existence, incarnation, atonement, resurrection, ascension, etc.—are all interpretative rather than objective statements. What they interpret is precisely the history of Jesus. (p. 29-30)
The concept of entmythologisierung—or ‘demythologizing’—the New Testament had been a concept preBultmannian, however it was really after Bultmann published his work Neus Testament und Mythologie (1941) that a dialog over this subject was really reviewed thoroughly. Although Bultmann did not initiate the new search for the historical Jesus, he discussed the idea of demythologizing the Gospels further, making a distinction between the interpretative parts of the New Testament narratives, and the kerygma. He states in his book, the Theology of the New Testament (1955);
Christian faith did not exist until there was a Christian kerygma; i.e., a kerygma proclaiming Jesus Christ—specifically Jesus Christ the Crucified and Risen One—to be God’s eschatological act of salvation. He was first so proclaimed in the kerygma of the earliest Church, not in the message of the historical Jesus, even though that Church frequently introduced into its account of Jesus’ message, motifs of its own proclamation. (p. 3)
Bultmann makes it clear that his opinion on Jesus is that “Jesus Christ is certainly presented as the Son of God, a pre-existent divine being, and therefore to that extent a mythical figure…. His life is more than a mythical event; it is a human life which ended in the tragedy of crucifixion.”[14] But, as stated already, it was not Bultmann himself who initiated the second quest, instead it was his pupils. Initially, Bultmann’s position on the historical Jesus was one of hopelessness. As James M. Robinson states, “[Bultmann’s] form-critical research tended to confirm the view that such a quest is impossible, and his existential theology carried through the thesis that such a quest is illegitimate.”[15] Therefore, per Robinson, the first factor that had to be looked into for the establishment of the legitimacy of a second quest would depend on that very issue. He states, “If the rise of the keryma meant that we cannot and ought not continue the quest of the historical Jesus…we [must] first inquire as to whether we can renew the quest for the historical Jesus.”[16] He suggests this with the knowledge that the kerygma was the very heart of the destruction of the first quest. It was this Kerygma which, in effect, halted the historical search for Jesus in the nineteenth century, as Schweitzer had realized that one could not distinguish historical truth from the Kerygma itself. Indeed, in a footnote, Robinson makes the very apt point that, Kasemann’s most recent attempt to move toward the historical Jesus is made in spite of the danger of a return to the nineteenth century….” (p. 11) It is in this position that Bultmann initially held, and thus “it is not surprising that the critical restudying of his position by his pupils should begin here.” (p. 12)
Among these pupils there stood Ernst Käsemann from Tübingen, who really re-opened the quest with his lecture, ‘Das Problem des Historischen Jesus,’ or ‘The Problem of the Historical Jesus.’[17] Käsemann proposed that “something can be known about the historical Jesus, and that we must concern ourselves with working it out, if we do not wish ultimately to find ourselves committed to a mythological Lord.” (p. 13) The issue that was most crucial to this historical Jesus discovery was, for Käsemann, identifying “the question as to the continuity of the gospel in the discontinuity of the times and the variation of the kerygma.” [18] (ibid.) These positions share a common theme with the first quest, which perhaps was not noticed at the time of its initiation. Although under the guise of history, in truth Käsemann’s proposal rested on presuppositions as well as establishing many theological concerns. But this problematic theme would not be noticed for some time. In fact Käsemann’s reopening and renewal of the quest for a historical Jesus met with a “rapid and largely favorable response” from scholarship all over
Following Käsemann are some of his colleagues Günther Bornkamm[19] and Ernst Fuchs,[20] all of which attributed to the journey of trying to locate Jesus once more in the Gospel accounts. Both Bornkamm and Fuchs held specific opinions on where and by what means such historical and eschatological facts could be found in the Gospels. Where Käsemann focuses on the eschatological message of Jesus, Fuchs focuses on Jesus’ conduct—specifically during the meals—in which Fuchs concludes that this is where one finds the real Jesus. “When Fuchs comes to Jesus’ message, he presents it as dependant upon Jesus’ action. For this view Fuchs appeals to the parables, which were often spoken in the setting of eschatological meals.”[21] Bornkamm followed suit by agreeing with Käsemann on “the deeds…of Jesus” holding specific historical truth, but that these deeds were “still distinguished by a…freshness and distinctiveness not in any way effaced by the Church’s Easter faith.”[22] In one large aspect of Bultmann’s teachings, Bornkamm found fault and attempted to provide a case against it. This subject encompassed Bultmann’s position that Jesus’ eschatological and apocalyptic message was geared towards the future, “calling for a decision.” To Bornkamm, this message was directed towards the present day.[23] Accordingly, Käsemann and the other Bultmannians seized upon Bultmann’s works and locked onto his teachings with the intent of demythologizing the Jesus of the New Testament as much as they could. To Bornkamm, Fuchs and Käsemann, this distinctiveness between the first quest and the quest they initiated was the Jesus of history. Or, as Robinson puts it, “in Jesus’ public ministry a whole area of eschatological action accompanied by theological commentary” is where “both the historical and the theological point of departure for the Church’s kerygma” reside, and therefore “the crucial area of research for a new quest of the historical Jesus.”
But all of this rested on the romantic idealism held by the pupils of Bultmann and eventually Bultmann himself, who eventually was swayed by his own students.[24] The position that such a demythologizing could occur was but a fantasy that would soon be discovered in the wake of even more attempts at discerning the historical Jesus. But this was also lost, as for the Bultmannians, they entered the quest with a false sense of superiority over the previously failed one, with the false hope that the then modern methods of demythologizing along with a better understanding of historical methodologies would grant them the Jesus that was so lost to Schweitzer and Kähler. Previously, the way to accomplish demythologizing was the use of a growing and necessary trend of formgeschichte, also known as ‘form criticism.[25] What formgeschichte is, in summary, is the process of determining the background of the text within the context of culture, cult and politics around the time the text was penned. This was important to the foundation of the Bultmann school of thought, in that it allowed them to formulate a way to review the kerygma, via Conzelmann, that “distinguishes”[26] the redactor or evangelist from the so-called historical events located in the New Testament. This was in part how Conzelmann et al., were able to, in their minds, properly employ demythologizing of the New Testament. In reaction to this process, the scholarly community found what they perceived to be flaws in this method of criticism, as to the form critic the Gospels became little more than “cut and paste…pericopes,” a term coined by Martin Dibelius. Dibelius goes on to state that to a form critic, “the composers [or evangelists - Editor] are only to the smallest extent authors. They are principally collectors, vehicles of tradition, editors.”[27]—or as
This, according to Bultmann, is where the first quest failed. As Bultmann states on the eschatology, “But the fact that Jesus had appeared and the message which he had proclaimed were, of course, among its historical presuppositions; and for this reason Jesus’ message cannot be omitted from the delineation of New Testament theology…. With such a message, Jesus stands in the historical context of Jewish expectations about the end of the world and God’s new future.” (Theology of the New Testament, p. 3-4) Therefore, removing the kerygma from the text was for Bultmann and his students the loss of the historical Jesus. The full extent of Bultmann’s advancement in methods of form criticism lay in his understanding of how demythologizing should take place. Bultmann was able to work his demythologizing without actually being accused of separating the kerygma and history; he escaped this indictment just by redefining what ‘myth’ was. Myth no longer meant “an act of God” but rather such an act, to Bultmann, was not a “miraculous, supernatural occurrence” at all, but “a concrete piece of history, which is otherwise explicable within the ordinary framework of history.”[29] The concept of ‘myth,’ as Bultmann understood its role was “not to give a world-picture actually, but to illuminate man's situation and understanding of himself.”[30] To Bultmann, the manner of ‘myth’ was a calling to men not to try to figure out what it meant to antiquity alone, but rather as it meant to modern man in modern times. The only way one could interpret the ‘myth’ was by viewing the kerygma with the history, as to not Entweltliche[31] the myth as church piety or redaction, but embrace it as part of the history and as part of the present. Bultmann no longer saw the nature of myth as it had been, and thus it lost its definition as that which refers to supernaturalistic events, and instead became that which defines the subtleties of everyday life. So, the best way to remove the ‘myth’ while leaving it in tact was to interpret using a different form of deworlding—which Käsemann had done—seeking to keep the “basic sense of human existence expressed”[32] intact in the kerygmatic message without losing it to the cutting boards. According to Fuller, Bultmann sought to “demonstrate the historical continuity and the material relation”[33] between the kerygma and history of Jesus. Where Bultmann saw the first quest attempting to expose the difference, the second quest as per Käsemann was to interpret the difference without removing it. How this was accomplished was exactly the demythologizing as Bultmann would have otherwise expressed and the departure expressed by Robinson.
To Bultmann and his supporters, including Fuller, Fuchs, Bornkamm and Käsemann, Jesus was exactly what the first quest pegged him to be, an apocalyptic preacher to the Jews of antiquity, but more than that, Jesus was an “existential” philosopher.[34]
Jesus’ message is connected with the hope of other circles which is primarily documented by apocalyptic literature, a hope which awaits salvation not from a miraculous change in historical conditions, but from a cosmic catastrophe which will do away with all conditions of the present world as it is. (p. 4)
Such an idea as that only enforced Bultmann’s opinions on this matter, and cemented the foundation of the second quest: Demythologize the New Testament, while modernizing it and making Jesus more of an existentialist philosopher, without removing the kerygma around the eschatological message, and thus find the historical Jesus.
Of course, it would be impossible to go into every aspect of the methods employed by Bultmann, Conzelmann who combined the means of both Bornkamm and Fuchs research, Käsemann and the rest as that it not what this subchapter is really about, yet it is not without purpose that this digression has taken place. Indeed, it is the very point of the matter that the scholar or layperson can understand exactly the means in which the second quest for the historical Jesus opted to supplement the first. The whole reason behind Bultmann’s desires to “demonstrate the historical continuity and the material relation” (p. 46) between the kerygma and history of Jesus was to bring about a new era in how the New Testament could be viewed, and more importantly, the way Jesus could be viewed. Even without realizing it however, Bultmann’s pupils did exactly what the first quest had done and separated the two, although this was done behind a veil of redefinition and modernization. As no matter what way scholars reevaluated their methods, it is really impossible to accurately ascertain the true historical Jesus from the redactions. And eventually the second quest was exposed as futile once more, as by leaving in the kerygma, one eventually realizes the message of this historical Jesus is corrupt and lost. And, as per Bultmann, if one could not remove the kerygma, what other option was left? This was discovered too late in the quest, although it is generally ignored even today, and with that the second quest started to wane, people lost interest in attempting to accomplish the unattainable, and eventually the second quest found itself lying next to the first in the coffin they had so eagerly raised from the ground. Robinson’s fear of Käsemann’s reopening of the quest was eventually found to be an accurate prediction.
1.2 An Introduction to the Third Quest
“Debate continues at a roiling pitch, and consensus—even on such basic issues as what constitutes evidence and how to construe it—seems a distant hope.” – Paula Fredriksen
The end of the second quest was brought about by the exposure of the romanticism of the quest itself. The idealism held by Robinson and Käsemann had an impact on much of the New Testament scholarly community, including how one looked at the kerygma of the text, but additionally it brought about the realization, at least for a period of time, that by either separating the kerygma from the text, or by leaving it in, there was no way to establish with any sort of certainty the historical Jesus. But with the second quests failures, the next generation of historical Jesus scholars were ready to start the new crusade to find him; all they needed was a catalyst to ignite the flames once again. That catalyst was the former-monk-turned-New-Testament-scholar John Dominic Crossan. Crossan writes[35] that, “I was still imagining an exclusively academic reception committee when I wrote The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant in 1991, but that was when everything changed….something was happening out there that I still cannot fully understand…. Far from sputtering out like another passing fad, interest in the historical Jesus grew steadily as the 1990’s progressed.”
There had been books previously published before 1991, for example Morton Smith published his book on who he thought was the historical Jesus in 1982, entitled Jesus the Magician. E.P. Sanders had published his book Jesus and Judaism (1985). Geza Vermes also published a book similar in concept to Sanders called Jesus the Jew: A Historian’s Reading of the Gospels in 1981. These books were either floaters of the failures of the second quest, or in themselves attempts at reinitiating a quest. Their unsuccessful attempt at renewing the quest was not due to their writing or their scholarship. Instead, they lacked a push that Crossan received in 1991 from the New York Times religion reporter, who “was fascinated by two graduate students of
The Historical Jesus was more than just a singular perspective of a historical Jesus; it was a critical review of the Gospel accounts, and the first attempt to really be popularized to expose the individual theological perspectives of the various Gospel authors. Crossan[37] asks, “But why should any such research be necessary at all? Have we not, for Jesus,…four biographies, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—individuals all directly or indirectly connected with him, and all writing within, say, seventy-five years of his death?” (p. x) Perhaps only in the mind of John A.T. Robinson, but not to Crossan who writes, “It is precisely that fourfold record that constitutes the core problem. If you read…them horizontally and comparatively, focusing on this or that unit and comparing it across two, three, or four versions, it is disagreement rather than agreement that strikes you most forcibly. And those divergences stem not from the random vagaries of memory and recall but from the coherent and consistent theologies of the individual texts. The gospels are, in other words, interpretations.” (ibid.) With that last sentence, he exposed the new thinking of the new quest. Originally, the two previous quests had assumed to some degree that the gospel of Mark at the very least was written with some actual memories of Jesus, and the other gospel authors drew upon the kerygma of the church to enhance these memories.[38] Crossan, drawing from a Catholic background as opposed to Bultmann’s Protestantism, deterred from the assumption that the sayings of Jesus were the foundation of the historical Jesus, in fact makes this apparent in his autobiography.[39] Instead, Crossan put forth the idea in his Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography the foundation of some of the gospels were scripture reinterpretation and had absolutely nothing to do with kerygma at all, which he erroneously only ascribes to Matthew and Luke.[40] This is a divergence from the original quests, as there had been no way to note this usage, mostly because both quests failed to examine the time period socially and anthropologically, as the first quest had an ill-established historical methodology, while the second was engrossed in romanticism. Additionally, the New Testament scholarship of both earlier quests had not yet caught up to Old Testament scholarship established primarily by Wellhausen, which had prompted the shift in viewpoint that the Old Testament was actual history to the Old Testament being redacted reinterpretation of other ancient Near Eastern mythology and folklore.[41] At the time of the second quest, the debate on the historicity of the patriarchal narratives was still raging, with a slow but steady slide towards ahistoricity. New Testament scholarship was simply not yet ready to take the same leap at that point, and for many Bultmannians engaged in this romanticism, the concept of ahistoricity on any particular level was unthinkable.
It may have been the introduction of the Nag Hammadi Gnostic apocrypha that ultimately lead to a more critical look at the New Testament, as well as a variety of Roman period material, including some pseudepigrapha and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. With the translations of these texts, it was discovered that there were more perspectives than simply the synoptic gospels, John and the epistles on who Jesus might have been, and it is only right to give the credit of the induction of the Gnostic manuscripts to the Jesus quest to a key player in the second quest, James M. Robinson himself. But more specifically, the shift between the second quest and the third, most recent, quest is the dismissal of Bultmannian theology of this singular, universal credo or kerygma based on a historical Jesus and historical events that drove the foundations of the early church, to a more segmented kerygma, such as the development of oral tradition that third quest scholars suggest can be found in various textual verses and phrases. Many of the third quest scholars seem to defer to this early “Christology;” that this oral tradition was handed down, altered, and changed to reflect confessions related to initiation into the Christian religion, and are no longer considered as singular as Bultmann had thought.
With Crossan’s fame, more scholars started to come into the mix. But even before his book took off, Crossan had joined Robert Funk in co-Chairing the illustrious Jesus Seminar in 1985. The Seminar[42] “set out to inventory the data…produced before 325 CE. [They] then classified the data by sorting into types of sayings and types of stories.” (p. 107) At the beginning of the inception at the prestigious Westar Institute, the seminar included some thirty members, already outnumbering many other seminars in the community. Eventually, the seminar grew to some 200 Fellows—or “professionally trained specialists.” Meeting twice annually to discuss some “fifteen hundred versions of five hundred items” the seminar was a tour de force in the quest for a historical Jesus. After deliberating over the various manuscripts, the scholars voted. “Voting is a traditional method among biblical scholars to determine whether or not there is a consensus and if so, what its magnitude may be.” (p. 108) The scholars of this seminar voted on various conduct, deeds, parables and events in an attempt to divide them into four general categories: (1) Definitely Jesus, (2) Probably Jesus with some editions or corrections, (3) Probably not Jesus, but close (4) total fiction.[43] These categories were signified by colored beads: red, pink, gray and black respectively. After several years of deliberation, the seminar concluded that very little of the sayings attributed to Jesus, the deeds, the conduct and the events happened. Out of the hundreds looked out, only fifteen sayings attributed to Jesus and ten events were considered authentic, with forty-nine sayings and deeds considered “possibly” authentic, those deeds that were voted pink.
Following the induction of the seminar, many fellows of the seminar went off to write their own conclusions concerning the historical Jesus. This was the vanguard of the third quest, which has finally started to wind down. The conclusions of the seminar and the third quest itself were the most stunning to the conservative wing of scholars working to hold on to the preservation of the New Testament as historical works. Out of all three quests, the third was the most critical, and left in its wake an array of retaliatory books and quests to dismiss the quest and many fellows. The opening introduction to The Five Gospels explains some of the hardships of the fellows taking part in the seminar, where some had to step down from academic positions or suffered a loss of their jobs, others have come under personal attack by conservative Christian groups,[44] all for simply inquiring into the nature of the narratives themselves, and many of the positions of the fellows themselves were drawn from a desire to promote faith in Jesus. This third quest finalizes the summation of the quests as they stand, and where their conclusions were drawn. So what exactly is wrong with these quests, aside from what has just been covered? If this is critical history, why should there be any reason to question the validity of the historical Jesus?
1.3 Criticism of the Third Quest for a Historical Jesus
Even if there was [a historical Jesus], he is lost to us, the result being that there is no historical Jesus available to us.” – Robert M. Price
It was an honest, unified attempt at critical scholarship but even with this more critical shift with the third quest and the Jesus Seminar there are still huge flaws in this, and the other historical Jesus quests which have not yet been examined. Some of these flaws should be apparent. For example, Crossan’s two books[45] on the historical Jesus open with the words from Morton Smith’s book Jesus the Magician (1978; 1982) which paint a very grim picture of the historical Jesus movement as a cumulative whole, and the words of Crossan which follow do not seem to help the scenario. Indeed, Crossan states that the “historical Jesus research is becoming something of a scholarly bad joke.” Even still, Crossan makes no attempt, at least immediately, to give us any reason why scholarship should accept the research done in the means of finding the historical Jesus. He continues by saying, astutely, that there were historians and theologians alike that have suggested that it couldn’t—and shouldn’t—be done, giving the reader the understanding that there were those in the field of history who said that it couldn’t be done because of the historical problems, but really meant they didn’t want it to be done because of the theological problems.[46]
The errors of the quests go well beyond the concern for theological problems, however. Many of these errors are brought to light over the cumulative whole of historical Jesus scholarship. Ben Witherington III exposes one such error in his book The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (1997), where he aptly makes the point that such “…attempts to say what we could really know about the historical Jesus actually told us more about their authors than about the person they sought to describe. The authors seem to have looked into the well of history searching for Jesus and seen their own reflection.” (p. 9) This position reflects the opinion of Bornkamm when commenting on the first quest, “Why have all attempts [to find the historical Jesus] failed? Perhaps only because it became alarmingly and terrifyingly evident how inevitably each author brought the spirit of his own age into his presentation of the figure of Jesus.”[47] Crossan is not shy about this fact, and contemplates this very issue himself. He asks:[48]
I have to reconstruct my own life, reconstruct that of Jesus, and ponder the interaction between them….How does the general heritage that I carry as part of a first postcolonial generation, and indeed of a European colony within Europe, qualify my vision of the first-century Jewish homeland still under imperial control? Did I decide that Jesus disliked the
This is a powerfully honest admittance, but not everyone is so honest. And this confession is not the end of the problem. There are also deeper underlining presuppositions that exist in all three quests. As stated earlier, the historical Jesus quest was an attempt at critical scholarship. The intent was “a clarion call for ‘unbiased’ historical research to be done on the life of Jesus…that the Gospels could no longer be read…as unvarnished historical records of what Jesus actually said and did.”[49] But what they were actually doing, what every scholar in the historical Jesus quest was guilty of doing, was exactly what their detractors were doing. Every scholar out there attempting to find the Jesus of history is, even with honest intent, starting with a huge presupposition; that Jesus had to have lived historically. This is no different than asking scholarship to critically examine the life of Abraham. Peering down to the very core of the search is a foundation that is constructed in fallacy. Specifically, it rests upon two fallacies: The fallacy of begging the question[50] and the fallacy of equivocation.[51]
Every scholar suggesting any leg of truth in the Gospels, even if one just suggests that a man, Jesus, was crucified is effectively begging the question, and worse it also ignores other hypotheses of similar nature. For an example of both of these fallacies in play, E.P. Sanders states:[52]
On a spring morning in about the year 30 CE, three men were executed by the Roman authorities in
Where is the method by which he can assume any of it? He begs the question that Jesus not only lived but was crucified under Pilate, that he was executed for claiming to be ‘king of the Jews,’ that there was any trial at all. First, to counter this, there is also a claim that Jesus was killed under Alexander Jannaeus in 100 BCE,[53] not to mention the other possibility put forth that Jesus was killed by Herod Antipas at the turn of the first century CE.[54] There is yet another possibility that Jesus lived and died in the first century BCE or earlier according to those who feel Jesus is the teacher of righteousness of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So by suggesting it was Pilate, scholarship generally, and Sanders specifically in this instance, is already starting out from a single tradition which is favored over other traditions that can be shown to have existed at least at the time of two of the Gospels (Luke and John). So what basis would Sanders and the rest have for determining which tradition is more accurate? No methodology has been presented to this author’s knowledge, and that is because nobody gives them any credit specifically because the Gospels place Jesus’ death in the time of Pilate.
More disheartening is that E.P. Sanders seems to use the Gospel to support the claim that Jesus was crucified. It’s a circular argument; Jesus was crucified because the Gospels say he was. This is just another example of begging the question. Many scholars of the historical Jesus quest, including John Dominic Crossan, suggest that Jesus’ crucifixion was attested in other accounts outside the New Testament. Specifically, he uses Tacitus and Josephus to suggest that this crucifixion took place. To claim this, however, is an exercise in futility. Tacitus[55] could easily be referring to rhetoric from Christians during his day, in other words the very kerygmatic traditions that the Jesus quest is attempting to remove is the very same traditions they are falling back on to validate their claims.[56] Even if one ignored the fact that he wrote his Histories in 109 CE and his Annals c. 117 CE, it is impossible to dismiss the fact that these works would have been written during a time when Orthodoxy would have started to become established tradition. This is an ongoing problem in the quests, and with Crossan it is even more evident. Crossan, just as Robinson has done in his attempts to redate the New Testament, uses specific perspectives or texts when they suit him and then disregard them when they hurt his case.[57] As for Josephus, this is too hotly debated to be specifically cited as extrabiblical attestation, especially considering the problems with the text itself.[58]
Finally Sanders, et al, commits the fallacy of equivocation by starting out with the hypothesis that this was a historical event, but instead of offering us any sort of extrabiblical evidence which would be necessary to remove it from circular thinking, he uses the Biblical account, with the two robbers and all! So he succumbs to a bait and switch, perhaps without even realizing it. Looking for a historical Jesus? Sorry, Sanders says here, scholarship doesn’t have the historical Jesus to draw from, but in stock is this lovely Gospel Jesus at half the price and with twice the speculation. Equivocation fallacies should not be allowed to pass peer review, and yet that is exactly what any reader will see in Sanders, and in every other historical Jesus scholar.
But why does this happen? Why would these obviously intelligent, well-educated, erudite professionals succumb to these assumptions, presuppositions, and logical fallacies? This is often due to the fact that for many historical Jesus scholars, historical Jesus research is a step towards a personal goal; a historical Jesus may bring one closer to finding the supernatural one without the fluff and feeling of being dishonest.[59] It’s not a surprise that many New Testament scholars are also religious, and some would find a silver lining in the historical Jesus quests, some would consider it a validation of faith. And the reasons for this are pretty plain, especially looking at what New Testament scholarship has become amidst the use of historical-criticism. When the majority of scholarship starts to shift away from the New Testament as a selection of historical narratives into the realm of minimalism,[60] there is going to be some backlash from those who don’t wish to let their beliefs give way.
This has lead to a new revival of a very archaic type of Jesus research. There are even those who want to use the Jesus Seminar and their media attention to promote what this author considers the historical Christ hypothesis. Talk about using scholarship to promote apologetics, the historical Christ hypothesis is the position that there simply is no mythologizing or fiction in the New Testament at all. Instead there is only accurately documented history. In other words, the Gospel narratives should be accepted as testimony to actual events—including all of the supernatural events. Say what? Why not just smack two hundred years worth of scholars in face and be done with it. An example somebody fitting the criterion of this type of research, i.e. the use of apologetics in place of scholarship, jumping on the bandwagon, sensationalism, and proposing a historical Christ hypothesis, one can simply grab the book by Luke Timothy Johnson. In his book, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (1996), he starts out Poisoning the Well[61] against the new quest for the historical Jesus, in which he opens his book with the various reasons why one should not trust the Jesus Seminar. He sets out much like his nineteenth century predecessor Martin Kähler to show once and for all that the historical Jesus quest ignores the Gospel accounts, that the whole quest is nothing more than an attack on faith and the Jesus of faith, by which the faith of the followers of Christ are ignored.
He states, “More mischievous than the claim to reveal the ‘real Jesus’ is the implication that historical reconstruction provides so fundamental a critique of Christian faith that the church needs to reexamine its creeds.” (p. 141) But this is the problem with Johnson’s work and many additional evangelical scholars, that he doesn’t deal with history, but rather faith. His motives are clouded by an attempt to appear scholarly critical of the Seminar, but he rips open the veil of the sky—if you will—and exposes himself when he states, “Something more than clever is involved here…it is a process biased against the authenticity of the Gospel traditions.” He suggests that, again to the gasps of critical scholars everywhere, New Testament scholarship is somehow supposed to assume the accuracy of these traditions.[62] One has to wonder if perhaps Johnson shared a cup of coffee with Hoffmeier and Millard over the course of his career concerning this subject.[63] But more curious then his position on the Gospel traditions is the suggestion that critical science could go against something that is claimed as fact. Shouldn’t scholarship expect that science would validate the Gospel accounts had the events actually occurred in the manner they were written? In other words, if Johnson were correct, and the Bible tradition was authentic, wouldn’t any critical scholarship utilizing scientific methods validate the traditions instead of invalidating them? Should not science validate for us that a man walked on water and turned water into wine? If this scientific process—which this author is sure Johnson uses in every other aspect of his life save his scholarship[64]—contradicts his opinions on what he considers to be facts, shouldn’t he wonder if his definition of ‘fact’ is as accurate as he claims? Johnson suggests that he is simply attempting to “deflate the sometimes grandiose claims made by and for the Seminar,” but what is more grandiose than suggesting that scholarship has to accept the authenticity of Gospel tradition, when such tradition suggests a man walked on water, turned water into wine, cured illnesses on the spot, and preformed vast amounts of additional miracles including raising the dead—and from the dead. According to Johnson, it’s grandiose to question the motivations of the authors of the Gospels and the mythological traditions, so what does Johnson think all of scholarship should do? Johnson’s work is not reminiscent of history but rather apologetics, a category in which has already been established as the contrary of critical scholarship.[65]
Yet, even though the methods employed by Johnson are not the same that are employed by critical scholars and historians, the historical Jesus scholars and the historical Christ apologists hold a lot more in common then they would like to admit. Johnson was correct when he said that attempting to locate a historical personality in the Gospels is nothing but a “fragile” attempt which is “in constant need of revision.” (p. 141) But this is true not because the historical methods are less effective at establishing the real Jesus then the faith tradition, instead it is that there is no consistency in the New Testament narratives to establish an effective historical tradition.[66] Any attempt to historicize Jesus is in effect looking at one’s own reflection as Witherington put it, and at ones own individual presuppositions. Perhaps this is why there are so many differing opinions on who Jesus was, and what group or affiliation he belonged to. Consider the list of scholars who write on the historical Jesus: E. P. Sanders, Robert Funk, John Dominic Crossan, Ben Witherington, Paula Fredriksen, Geza Vermes, Burton Mack, Hyam Maccoby, Morton Smith, Bruce Chilton, John Meier, N. T. Wright, S.G.F. Brandon, G.W. Buchanan, John M. Allegro and many others; there are practically just as many claims from the community as to who Jesus was as there are scholars writing on him. Jesus, according to the questers, was one of the following: An itinerate preacher,[67] a cynical sage,[68] the Essene’s righteous rabbi,[69] a Galilean holy man,[70] a revolutionary leader,[71] an apocalyptic preacher,[72] a proto-liberation theologian,[73] a trance-inducing mental healer,[74] an eschatological prophet,[75] an occultic magician,[76] a Pharisee,[77] a rabbi who seeks religious-reformation,[78] a Galilean charismatic,[79] a Hillelite,[80] an Essene,[81] a teacher of wisdom,[82] a miracle-working-exorcist prophet[83] and yes the list goes on. Somewhere in this mess, some really believe to find the historical Jesus. Paul Rhodes Eddy sums up the conflicting dramatis personae by saying that the new quest has been “anything but uniform.”[84]
It’s just one more oddity to add to the list that scholars seem to know and recognize the fact that there is no agreement, as if it’s okay that this is the case. Some use it to their advantage, or attempt to, as by pointing out the confusion they can suggest to their readers that they are avoiding whatever methods, or lack of methods, employed by those other scholars. The just-mentioned Crossan calls to light some of the muddle, but enters the fray anyway, becoming a major player among the rest of the major players, adding one or more additional possible Jesus characters to the ensemble already. Burton Mack criticizes the historical Jesus quest, calling it “hoopla,” then goes along to present a case for his historical Jesus as a cynic. By exposing the problems of assuming a historical Jesus, we are left with only two conclusions. Either Jesus was the Jesus of the Gospel accounts or he is a literary invention. Thomas L. Thompson talks about the problems of assuming a historical Jesus in his book, The Messiah Myth (2005). He states, “The best histories of Jesus today reflect an awareness of the limits and uncertainties in reconstructing the story of his life.” (p. 3) One might say this is putting the difficulties of establishing such a history nicely, where in fact such problems are destructive to the case for historicity. As Old Testament scholarship exceeds the standards of critical methods, New Testament scholarship must rush to keep pace. Consider if we took the same problems scholarship has for Jesus and applied them to another figure of history, one would be hardpressed to establish credibly the history of this figure. Abraham, Isaac, Moses and Sarah are just a handful of characters found in the Bible which have no credible historicity behind them. They are, for all intents and purposes, simply literary creations to help along a great storyline. Is it any wonder then, that Thompson states, “Whether the gospels in fact are biographies—narratives about the life of a historical person—is doubtful.” (ibid.) In the same way that scholarship can no longer accept the Old Testament narratives as history, the New Testament must be critically examined in the same light. When it comes down to facts, it is not a history of the early Christian church, it is not a history of a discipleship, and it is not a history of a man named Jesus.