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.
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. 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 Timesreligion reporter, With a front page review, this
article helped springboard the sales of Crossan’s book, although it
would be a falsehood to say that was completely the reason, and also
launched the new, third quest for the historical Jesus.
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. 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.”
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. 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. 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. 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.
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.
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.
