Quest for the historical Jesus

This article is about the history of academic Jesus research. See The Quest of the Historical Jesus for the book by Albert Schweitzer.

The quest for the historical Jesus is the attempt to use historical rather than religious methods to construct a verifiable biography of Jesus. As originally defined by Albert Schweitzer, the quest began in the 18th century with Hermann Samuel Reimarus, up to William Wrede in the 19th century. The quest is commonly divided into stages, and it continues today among scholars such as the fellows of the Jesus Seminar.

Reimarus composed a treatise rejecting miracles and accusing Bible authors of fraud, but he didn't publish his findings. Gotthold Lessing published Reimarus's conclusions in the Wolfenbuettel fragments. D.F. Strauss's biography of Jesus set Gospel criticism on its modern course. Strauss explained gospel miracles as natural events misunderstood and misrepresented. Ernest Renan was the first of many to portray Jesus simply as a human person. Albrecht Ritschl had reservations about this project, but it became central to liberal Protestantism in Germany and to the Social Gospel movement in America. Martin Kähler protested, arguing that the true Christ is the one preached by the whole Bible, not a historical hypothesis. William Wrede questioned the historical reliability of Mark. Albert Schweitzer showed how histories of Jesus had reflected the historians' bias. Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann repudiated the quest for historical Jesus, and although the introduction of The Five Gospels asserts this suppressed any real interest in the topic from c 1920 to c 1970,, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church says there was a brief New Quest movement in the 50s conducted by Bultmann's students, and the search continued without break outside of the Bultmann school. Today, historical efforts to construct a biography of Jesus are as strong as ever.

The First Quest

As originally defined by Schweitzer, the quest began with Reimarus and ended with Wrede. This period saw increasing influence of historical Jesus as an academic and popular topic. Soon after Wrede's work, Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann denounced the whole effort, marking the end of the so-called first quest.

These scholars of what today would be called the Quest for the Historical Jesus applied the historical methodologies of their day to distinguish the mythology from the history of Jesus. Reimarus pioneered "the search for the historical Jesus", applying the Rationalism of the Enlightenment Era to claims about Jesus. Although Schweitzer was among the greatest contributors to this quest, he also ended the quest by noting how each scholar's version of Jesus often seemed to reflect the personal ideals of the scholar, an observation first stated by Johannes Weiss in 1890, and which continues to be observed in Jesus research (as it does in other historical studies) even today.

• Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) - credited as the father of the Quest for the Historical Jesus
• Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) - a US president who considered Jesus' ethics superb and miracles ahistorical: Jefferson Bible
• David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) - asserted that the supernatural elements of the gospels could be treated as myth.
• Ernest Renan (1823–1892) - asserted that the biography of Jesus ought to be open to historical investigation just as is the biography of any other man.
• William Wrede (1859–1906) - wrote on the Messianic Secret theme in the Gospel of Mark. He also wrote a crucial study of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which argued for its inauthenticity.
• Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965), The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) - "Schweitzer saw Jesus' ethic as only an "interim ethic" (a way of life good only for the brief period before the cataclysmic end, the eschaton). As such he found it no longer relevant or valid. Acting on his own conclusion, in 1913 Schweitzer abandoned a brilliant career in theology, turned to medicine, and went out to Africa where he founded the famous hospital at Lambaréné out of respect for all forms of life."[1]
• Rudolf Bultmann - identified the Signs gospel.
• Martin Dibelius - advocated that form criticism be applied to the New Testament.[2]

Some recent scholars have reasserted Schweitzer's eschatological view of Jesus: see Dale Allison in his 1998 work Jesus of Nazareth, Milenarian Prophet and Bart D. Ehrman in 1999 work Jesus, Apolocyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Conversely others, such as the Jesus Seminar, have denied the authenticity of Jesus' eschatological message, describing Jesus as a wandering sage.

In the early 19th century, existentialist philosopher Søren Kierkegaard cast doubt on the entire project, stating unequivocally: "It is infinitely beyond history’s capacity to demonstrate that God, the omnipresent One, lived here on earth as an individual human being. History can indeed richly communicate knowledge, but such knowledge annihilates Jesus Christ."

The Period of "No Quest"

Schweitzer's critique of historical Jesus research significantly undermined the two-century old attempt to discover a historical Jesus who conformed to the tenets of Enlightenment Era rationalism. This period lasted from the time of Schweitzer until the Ernst Käsemann's 1953 lecture "The Problem of the Historical Jesus.". Boyd suggests four significant factors contributing to this malaise;

• Schweizer's critique of the Old Quest "produced a Jesus that was unappealing to modern minds" whilst at the same time his emphasis on the nonhistorical motivations of the researcher undermined confidence in the idea that one could write an objective account of the historical Jesus.
• The Old Quest had relied heavily upon the purported reliability of Mark as a source document but confidence in this thesis was decisively undermined by Wrede's critical analysis of Mark's historicity in The Messianic Secret (first published as Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien: Zugleich ein Beitrag zum Verständnis des Markusevangeliums in 1901).
• The rise of form criticism, with its emphasis on oral transmission and development of Jesus traditions together with adherence to a naturalistic world-view, "served to place an apparently immovable wall of early Christian distortion between the Gospel texts and the historical Jesus".
• A new theological perspective on the importance of historical Jesus research. Following Martin Kähler, it was increasingly accepted that "the vicissitudes of historical research with their more or less probable results could never provide a foundation for faith." This led to the widely proclaimed distinction between "the Jesus of History" and "the Christ of Faith." (Evans, 1996)

The most prominent figure from the period of "no quest" was Rudolf Bultmann. He was intensely skeptical regarding the historical Jesus and argued that the only thing we can know about Jesus is the sheer "thatness" (German: Dass) of his historical existence, and very little else. He considered the Gospels conveyed the meaning of Jesus proclamation in the dress of a "mythical" first-century world-view and argued that the Gospels must be stripped of these mythical forms ("demythologised") in order that scientifically literate persons might encounter Jesus message. By appealing to Heidegger's existential philosophy, Bultmann was able to lay an emphasis upon response to Jesus message, whilst downplaying the significance of Jesus as a historical figure.. Through this period British scholars tended to be less radical than their German counterparts and retained some confidence in the possibility of "reaching assured knowledge of the historical personality of Jesus."

The New Quest

Also called the Second Quest.
The New Quest was a brief movement in the 1950s to revive the quest for historical Jesus.
These scholars emphasized the "constraints of history", so that despite uncertainties there were historical data that were usable. Moreover they disputed claims of extreme lateness for the formation of the New Testament and generally accomplished a consensus of approximately year 70 AD, give-or-take a decade or two depending on a specific text. Likewise they emphasized how the redaction of the New Testament resulted from a process over time, so that the New Testament included early textual layers, around which later and later layers crystalized. The form of the Gospel of Thomas was often argued to corroborate the existence of the Q Gospel, whose hypothetical form would resemble it. Hypothesizing about the existence of original source texts became useful for data relevant to the Historical Jesus. These early texts continue to remain hypothetical unless future discoveries render proof of their existence.

• Gunther Bornkamm
• Ernst Käsemann
• James M. Robinson
• John A. T. Robinson
• Edward Schillebeeckx
• Gerhard Ebeling

Third quest

Research into historical Jesus is strong today, especially thanks to better knowledge of first-century Judaism, a rebirth of Roman Catholic biblical scholarship, broad acceptance of historical methods, sociological insights, and literary analysis.

As the Bultmann school faded, it became increasingly clear that the "new quest" was one-sided. Scholars of the new quest had a theological agenda, and they attempted to separate Jesus from Judaism and from the earliest Christian heresies. As such, they preferred orthodox sources. The "third quest" appeared first among English-speaking scholars, and sociological investigation replaced the theological orientation of the "new quest." There were, however, earlier important works by Jewish scholars such as Constantin Brunner (Our Christ: The Revolt of the Mystical Genius, original in German, 1921) and Joseph Klausner (Jesus of Nazareth, original in Hebrew, 1922). The three characteristics typical of the "third quest" are an interest in the social history, a Jewish context for Jesus (especially restoration eschatology), and attention paid to non-canonical sources. The "third quest" is split between those scholars who advocate a return to a non-eschatological picture Jesus and those who see him as leading a eschatological restoration movement.

These scholars tend to focus on the early textual layers of the New Testament for data to reconstruct a biography for the Historical Jesus. Many of these scholars rely on a redactive critique of the hypothetical Q Gospel and on a Greco-Roman "Mediterranean" milieu as opposed to a Jewish milieu and tend to view Jesus as a radical philosopher of Wisdom literature, who strives to destabilize the economic status quo. Some scholars also rely on a critique of non-canonical texts for early textual layers that possibly evidence Jesus.

• Marcus Borg
• John Dominic Crossan
• Alvar Ellegård
• Robert Funk
• Burton Mack
• Morton Smith

The Jewishness of Jesus is first and foremost. These scholars use the archeology of Israel and the analysis of formative Jewish literature, including the Mishna, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament (as a Jewish text) and Josephus, to reconstruct the ancient worldviews of Jews in the 1st-century Roman provinces of Iudaea and Galilaea - and only afterward investigate how Jesus fits in. They tend to view Jesus as a proto-rabbi who announced the Kingdom of Heaven. The focus on Jesus's social environment rather than on Jesus himself is an intentional methodology to increase the influence of verifiable scientific criteria for evaluating Jesus and to reduce the influence of personal subjective criteria.

• David Bivin
• Roy Blizzard
• Raymond E. Brown
• Bruce Chilton
• Haim Cohn
• James H. Charlesworth
• W.D. Davies
• James D. G. Dunn
• Robert Eisenman
• Harvey Falk
• David Flusser
• Paula Fredriksen
• Joachim Jeremias
• Ray Vander Laan
• Robert Lisle Lindsey
• John P. Meier
• Ron Moseley
• Jacob Neusner
• Peter Pokorny
• Ray A. Pritz
• Dwight A. Pryor
• E.P. Sanders
• Shmuel Safrai
• David H. Stern
• Geza Vermes
• Marvin R. Wilson
• Ben Witherington
• N. T. Wright
• Brad H. Young

• Members of the Jerusalem School (a consortium of Israeli Christian and Jewish scholars: periodical Jerusalem Perspective)

See also

• Cultural and historical background of Jesus
• Historical Jesus
• Historicity of Jesus
• Jesus as myth