The New Testament In Its World – Chapter 8 – The Study of the Historical Jesus

All of the quotes below are taken from The New Testament In Its World, NT Wright and Mike Bird, Zondervan, 2019.

The Study of the Historical Jesus
The quest for the historical Jesus, in fact, clearly began soon after Jesus’ death and is reflected in the writings of the early church. –

IMAGINING AN HISTORICAL JESUS

Our churches have settled on reductionistic readings of the gospels whereby the texts are used as moralizing vignettes or as extra padding for a theological picture constructed from elsewhere. Jesus’ message of the kingdom of God is reduced to private piety, his victory on the cross is turned into comfort for an anxious conscience, and Easter itself is made out to be a happy, escapist ending after a sad, dark tale. Sadly, there is no greater window into the shallowness of the minds of Christians than looking at what they think Jesus was up to during his career in Galilee, Judea, and Jerusalem.

But what if we imagine Jesus’ life without the halo, without the cute descriptions of him telling earthly stories with heavenly meanings, and without projecting all the paraphernalia of later Christian tradition onto him? What if Jesus was (among other things) a prophetic figure, acting out a script from Israel’s sacred writings, declaring a time of urgent national crisis, announcing that God was becoming king, that Israel’s new exodus was at hand, dropping cryptic yet provocative hints about his own identity, engaging in symbolic actions to remind his audience of long-cherished hopes about a new Temple and a new covenant coming true at last? What if he was telling his fellow-Israelites that there was a new way of being Israel—beyond zealous nationalism, without a purity-centred piety, apart from political quietism, and without resorting to monastic escapism—challenging the boundaries about who was in or out with God, showing what covenant righteousness truly meant, and not only believing in but even embodying the long-awaited return of YHWH to Zion? This Jesus would be very different from populist or sentimental caricatures that can be found both within and outside the church. The way to avoid such superficiality is to embark on a fresh encounter with Jesus by a detailed reading (what some would call a ‘thick description’) of Jesus’ life, with all of the sources at our disposal, and in the context of the Jewish people in the greco-roman world.{page 172-173}

WHY STUDY THE HISTORICAL JESUS?

Without historical study, any picture of Jesus risks becoming ephemeral, malleable to other agendas, or cartoonish. A study about Jesus should be one that does not simply rehearse what the church believed about Jesus, or how Jesus has been interpreted over the centuries, or even why Jesus might be relevant to us now. {page 173}

 It is central to the Christian belief about who the one God really is that he has revealed himself in decisive action within the world of space, time, matter, and events. If this is true, we are compelled to engage in a history of Jesus; in that study we will begin the journey to grasp the mode and message of God’s definitive revelation of himself. Orthodox Christianity has always held firm to the basic belief that it is by looking at Jesus himself that we discover who God is, so it seems indisputable that we should expect always to be continuing in the quest for Jesus precisely as part of, indeed perhaps as the sharp edge of, our exploration into God himself. {page 173-174}

First, a primary reason for a historical study of Jesus is that we are made for God: for God’s glory, to worship God and reflect his likeness. That is our heart’s deepest desire, the source of our deepest vocation. But Christianity has always said, with John 1.18, that nobody has ever seen God, but that Jesus has revealed him. We shall only discover who the true and living God actually is if we take the risk of looking at Jesus himself. That is why the contemporary debates about Jesus are so important; they are inevitably debates about God himself. {page 174}

Second, studying Jesus should be pursued out of loyalty to scripture. This may seem ironic to some on both sides of the old liberal–conservative divide. Many Jesus-scholars of the last two centuries have largely thrown scripture out of the window, and have reconstructed a Jesus quite different from the one we find in the New Testament. {page 174}

Third, there is the Christian imperative to truth. Christians, believing in God’s good creation, must not be afraid of truth. Of course, that is what many reductionists have said, as with apparent boldness they have whittled down the meaning of the gospel to a few bland platitudes, leaving the sharp and craggy message of Jesus far behind. {page 174}

Fourth, undertaking a study of Jesus is crucial because of the Christian commitment to mission. The question of ‘Who is Jesus?’ remains very much alive in the public square, and we have to be part of that conversation. {page 175}

Every year or so some publisher comes up with a blockbuster book saying that Jesus was a New Age guru, an Egyptian free-mason, a hippie revolutionary, or even that he never existed. Every year or so some scholar or group of scholars comes up with a new book full of imposing footnotes to tell us that Jesus was a peasant Cynic, a wandering wordsmith, or the preacher of liberal values born out of due time. {page 174}

 It therefore simply will not do to declare this question out of bounds, to say that the church’s teaching will do for us, thank you very much, so we do not need to ask historical questions. One cannot say that to an enquiring person who asks serious questions on a train journey, or to someone who wanders into a church one Sunday and asks what it is all about. If Christianity is not rooted in things that actually happened in first-century Palestine, we might as well be Buddhists, Scientologists, Marxists, or almost anything else. And if Jesus never existed, or if he was quite different from what the gospels and the church’s worship affirm him to have been, then we are indeed living in cloud-cuckoo-land. The sceptics can and must be answered. When we try to do that, we will not merely reaffirm the traditions of the church, whether protestant, catholic, evangelical, or whatever. We will be driven to reinterpret them, discovering depths of meaning within them that we had never imagined. {page 176}

THE QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS

In fact, for a long time in European intellectual establishments, Jesus was part of the university curriculum only insofar as theology and philosophy each presupposed the other. That link was broken in the eighteenth century with the advent of new philosophical movements promoting rationalistic theories of knowledge, which allowed no place for revelation or ‘supernatural’ intervention that was not empirically verifiable. Thus, in the period known as the ‘Enlightenment’, beginning in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, all knowledge, especially religious knowledge, was questioned. The Christian Bible in particular was scrutinized by new critical methods, and evaluated in the light of a changing of worldview from earlier forms of theism to a mixture of Deism (God as absentee landlord) and atheism (God as absentee). It was inevitable then that the gospels themselves, and the Jesus they hold forth, would be measured against the new rationalist philosophies that were making headway; all in order to test and stretch religious claims made about Jesus by a church that was increasingly regarded, in Europe and America, as stuck in the mud of traditional dogma. A vast range of studies about Jesus appeared during this modernist period, with various phases of research arising, concluding, and transforming themselves into yet further movements.

A useful taxonomy to describe the various periods of modern Jesus research—though by no means rigid and with some overlap—has been the sequence of a First Quest, then a No Quest period, followed up with a New or Second Quest, and then a Third Quest. {pages 176-177}

Despite their manifold diversity, they all agreed that the historical Jesus was unlike the person the gospels make him out to be, not a God-man but God-conscious, spiritual rather than religious, and fitting somewhere between the philosophical poles of the great German thinkers G. W. F. Hegel and Immanuel Kant. The purpose of such studies was basically twofold: (1) to destroy the orthodox view about Jesus, enshrined as it was with religious dogma and belief in the ‘supernatural’; and (2) to erect another view of Jesus that would be acceptable to the modern European mind. As such, the ‘first’ quest for the historical Jesus was an explicitly anti-theological, anti-Christian, and anti-dogmatic intellectual movement, riding the currents of English Deism, and endeavouring to construct a Jesus more palatable to the moral, racial, and philosophical dispositions of the day. {page 177}

According to Schweitzer, the Jesus of European thought was ‘a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb’.5 In place of the romantic portraits of Jesus, Schweitzer presented the image of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. His Jesus believed that God’s kingdom was at the door, and that he could bring about the end of world history, forcing God’s intervention through the work of his own public career. But—still according to Schweitzer—when the wheel of history refused to turn in the new direction, Jesus threw himself upon it, was crushed in the process, but succeeded in turning it nonetheless. Schweitzer thus tore down the sentimental portraits of Jesus and, like a revolutionary replacing the monarch’s portrait on the schoolroom wall with that of the new leader, put up instead the sharp, indeed shocking, drawing of Jesus the towering prophetic genius, the enigmatic hero figure, totally unlike modern men and women, yet strangely summoning them to follow in the noble path that would bring in the kingdom. {page 179}

George Tyrrell criticized the Jesus of the great liberal theologian Adolf von Harnack: ‘The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through nineteen centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well.’6 As it turned out, the quest for Jesus was a great place to construct a mirror of one’s beliefs, but poor history; it was a great way to do autobiography and call it the historical Jesus.7 Thus the First Quest ended with a bit of a whimper. {page 179}

FROM NO QUEST TO NEW (SECOND) QUEST

For the two giant figures of twentieth-century Christian scholarship, Rudolf Bultmann and Karl Barth, to go on a historical quest for Jesus was to miss the point. For a start, such a quest was methodologically impossible, since the gospel writers were not interested in a Jesus ‘according to the flesh’, but only in the Christ of faith (a view claiming some spurious support from 2 Cor. 5.16). Moreover, the quest was theologically improper, since it sought to ground faith in historical evidence rather than in trust of God’s revelation. What mattered was not the Jesus of history but the Jesus of the church’s proclamation. The powerful theological constructs of Barth and Bultmann formed an alliance with the fears of ordinary people as to what might happen to orthodox Christianity if history was scrutinized too closely. {pages 179-180}

Then in 1953, Ernst Käsemann, a former student of Bultmann, presented a lecture at the University of Marburg on ‘The Problem of the Historical Jesus’. Käsemann’s contention was that Easter-faith did not totally eradicate the continuity between Jesus and the early church. The primitive church never lost its interest in the life-history of Jesus as being properly basic for faith. As long as the one called ‘Lord’ was also known as the ‘crucified one’, it was impossible to eradicate history from the Christian message.9 Käsemann, constantly aware of the dangers of idealism and docetism, insisted that if Jesus was not earthed in history then he might be pulled in any direction, might be made the hero of any theological or political programme. Käsemann was writing in Germany in the aftermath of the Second World War when the memory was still fresh of how Nazi ideologies infiltrated Christian theology and produced an Aryan-compliant Jesus. In any event, Käsemann gave a new impetus to Jesus research, and launched a phase which has subsequently become known as the ‘New Quest’ or ‘Second Quest’ for the historical Jesus. Its notable proponents have included James Robinson, Günther Bornkamm, Norman Perrin, Eduard Schweizer, and Edward Schillebeeckx. {pages 180-181}

The reason why the New Quest did not get very far was in fact because its main criterion for assessing the historical veracity of gospel material was to regard as authentic only those sayings or deeds of Jesus that did not resemble anything a Jew or Christian could possibly say or do: Jesus must have been totally different, or at least only if he was could we be sure it was him! That is the so-called criterion of double dissimilarity. Yet such a criterion was a methodological absurdity. It resulted in a Jesus insulated from Judaism and shorn off from his later followers. Despite constructing an apparently more ‘historical’ portrait of Jesus, the resultant product was a Jesus who often looked far more like a twentieth-century Jewish existential philosopher than a first-century Jewish Messiah. {page 181}

Despite the bustling headlines generated by the Jesus Seminar in their reloaded New Quest for Jesus—what was in some ways a neo-Bultmannian movement, though such labels are dangerously generalized—they ended up giving us a Jesus who was still very much made in the image of the historian. Richard Burridge noted that the Jesus Seminar ‘produced a Jesus who is not Jewish in his teaching, but more like a Greek wisdom teacher or philosopher, and he’s against sexism, imperialism and all the oppressiveness of the Roman empire. In other words, he’s a Californian.’ {page 182}

Yet those same followers detected a growing trend to deify him. Following the lyrics of Tim Rice, some scholars claim that they can see clearly down the corridors of history, they can see around the naivety of dogma, they can see beyond the fog of faith, and the Jesus they see is not the Christian one. Jesus is a man, a brilliant man, a religious genius even, a man also worthy of imitation, but he is not the same man as we find in the gospels. For the gospels have so radically reworked the tradition that there remains only but the faintest whisper of the authentic voice of Jesus. {page 182}

‘Third Quest’ for the historical Jesus, which chronologically overlaps somewhat with the Second Quest, but has its own historical trajectory (there are of course few rigid periods in the history of scholarship). The Third Quest for the historical Jesus has antecedents in those many scholars who tried to study Jesus in his Jewish context, going all the way back to the early students of semitic languages. Yet it was Ben F. Meyer and E. P. Sanders, writing in the late 1970s and early 1980s, who really got the ball rolling in their respective works, situating Jesus in terms of first-century Judaism and setting his message within Jewish eschatological hopes, not for the ‘end of the world’ but for the long-awaited national restoration and renewal. {pages 182-183}

Researchers operating in this Third Quest were far more serious about identifying Jesus within his complex Jewish background, and not artificially partitioning Jesus away from the later church since the early church was, irrespective of how it developed, part of the effective history of the historical Jesus’ life and career. {page 183}

John P. Meier, a leading Roman Catholic scholar, lists what he thinks are the gains from the Third Quest:

1. the ecumenical and international dimension to the scholars involved in the research;
2. a re-examination of various texts as reliable sources for the quest;
3. new insights from archaeology, philology, and sociology in the illumination of Jesus and his context;
4. a more accurate picture of the diverse and variegated nature of Palestinian Judaism;
5. clarification of the criteria of historicity which has led to a more balanced appreciation of the historical traditions underlying the gospels;
6. a more positive treatment of the miracle-traditions in the gospels;
7. taking the Jewishness of Jesus with seriousness. {page 183}

In every phase of scholarship it has been agreed that Jesus matters. But how to study Jesus, and how to traverse the apparent divide between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith—and even whether that is the best way of putting the question!—will remain at the heart of the problem in historical Jesus research. {page 184}

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS ON THE HISTORICAL JESUS

In terms of method, there are frantic debates as to how to study the historical Jesus, and stern objections as to whether we can separate history and theology in the gospels sufficiently well to do a real historical study at all. Others still complain that historical Jesus scholars use their study to construct a Jesus in their own image. Others again protest that a ‘historical Jesus’, in the sense of a scholarly reconstruction, becomes essentially a ‘fifth gospel’, which is then put in deliberate competition to the canonical accounts. Scot McKnight, once a committed Third Quester, confesses how he lost faith in the entire historical Jesus enterprise:

The scholarly hope that we would discover the original Jesus had crashed against the rugged rocks of reality, and on that day we witnessed the end of a disciplinary era. One by one, most of us had become convinced that no matter how hard we tried, reaching the uninterpreted Jesus was nearly impossible—however fun and rewarding it was and however many insights about the Gospels we discovered along the way. Furthermore, a reconstructed Jesus is just that—one scholar’s version of Jesus. It is unlikely to convince anyone other than the scholar, his or her students (who more or less feel obligated to agree), and perhaps a few others. {page 184}

Christianity is, to some extent at least, the effective history of Jesus, the resounding echo of his influence on his closest disciples and upon the movement that consciously identified itself as devoted to him. To outline the history of early Christianity without engaging in a study of the historical Jesus makes about as much sense as plotting the history of modern India without bothering to take into account the life and times of Gandhi. Second, coming to the gospels, the evangelists are themselves fully aware that they are writing about a time prior to their own day. They point us towards the ‘back-then-ness’ of Jesus. In other words, the evangelists are not writing narrative commentaries on their own post-Easter faith in Jesus, as has often been suggested. They really do intend to write biographical testimonies about the pre-Easter figure of Jesus. The gospels, in fact, are not simply repositories of timeless truth, or treatises on faith, self-authenticity, or even theology; they are actually about Jesus. The historical ‘quest’, at its heart, need not be in fact an attempt to write a ‘fifth’ or ‘alternative’ gospel to the four we have. It can be the attempt to understand what was actually meant, in real first-century historical terms, by the four that we have. {page 185}

All this is important, because the point of having Jesus at the centre of a religion or a faith is that one has Jesus: not a cypher, a strange silhouetted Christ-figure, nor an icon, but the one Jesus the New Testament writers know, the one born in Palestine in the reign of Augustus Caesar and crucified outside Jerusalem in the reign of his successor Tiberius. If we close down that historical referentiality, or simply assume it, without getting our hands dirty in textual and historical excavation, we cease to read the gospels as they were intended, as historically rooted witnesses to Jesus as told by his disciples. {page 185}

As to how the historical Jesus relates to the entity called ‘New Testament theology’, that is relatively straightforward. The emerging portrait of the historical Jesus is not a replacement for the Jesus of the gospels, a super-canonical Jesus, or anything equally specious. Instead, a sketch of the historical Jesus is the preliminary narrative that emerges when we interrogate the various sources about Jesus and his context in a kind of group effort. By bringing together Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Paul, Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Jesus traditions in ‘other’ gospels, early manuscripts, Palestinian archaeology, greco-roman history, socio-economic paradigms, and the like, we develop a starting-point from which to begin commenting on Jesus and the early church. What emerges in a study of the historical Jesus should be a kind of opening précis—obviously open to constant revision—about what Jesus said and did, what his aims were, why he died, and who he thought he was. Viewed that way, the study of the historical Jesus is the first step in the recovery of the canonical Jesus, over and against those who would, for a variety of reasons, pull him in any number of directions.16 Jesus really did intend to launch the long-promised ‘kingdom of God’ on earth as in heaven; he really did do and say things which demonstrated in action what this would mean (radically redefining existing expectations as he did so); and he really did believe this would be accomplished through his own death, and that the one he called ‘Abba, Father’ would vindicate him after his death, raising him from the dead and installing him as the world’s rightful lord. The New Testament writers were explaining and promoting this as something which had now actually happened. They were not making it up from scratch. {pages 185-186}