The last two centuries have seen many shifting scholarly judgements about the figure of Jesus before arriving at something approximating a consensus today about the general course of his life. This is true of many academic disciplines.
The journey of science toward confident judgements about the world is the result of a huge amount of new information and much better investigative tools. In a similar way, the quest for the historical Jesus has benefited from numerous discoveries and greatly improved methods over many generations of critical discussion. And perhaps the best-kept secret of all is that this academic discipline has not become more sceptical of Jesus’ life but less.
The fact that many among the general public still have the impression that scholars think we know little about Jesus is really just a function of the way culture is often 30 years behind academia. Textbooks often speak of three phases in research—three “quests”—into the life of Jesus.
THE FIRST QUEST: THE RATIONALIST JESUS
The first of these quests for Jesus was born in the Enlightenment, that Europe-wide movement of the 17th and 18th centuries which broke away from the traditions of the past, whether the philosophy of Aristotle or the dogma of the church. Instead, it emphasised individual human powers of reason to discover what is true about the world. This celebration of reason soon directed its attention to the central figure of Western culture to that point: Jesus of Nazareth.
Leading the charge to challenge the “traditional” Jesus and uncover the supposedly original historical figure was a professor from Hamburg, Germany, named Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). He had long harboured reservations about Christian doctrine. He thought there was probably a God but only in the sense of a distant Mind behind the rational order of creation. He did not believe God entered the world in Jesus to save us and take us to some ethereal “kingdom come”. In his Apologia or Defence of the Rational Worshippers of God he proposed that Jesus was little more than an anti-Roman Jewish rebel whose followers later elevated him to spiritual “Saviour”. The modern contrast you sometimes hear about between “the Jesus of history” and “the Christ of faith” comes from Reimarus.
A different tack was taken by another German Enlightenment thinker named David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874). Rather than describe the Gospels as deceptions, Strauss suggested these texts can be read as “myth”. He did not simply mean they were false. He meant that the Gospels were metaphorical accounts of the religious impact of Jesus. Jesus did not actually give sight to the blind—every good Enlightenment thinker knew that miracles do not happen! Such stories were, Strauss argued, intended to remind readers of the spiritual health, or insight, we can gain from Christ. His work The Life of Jesus Critically Examined was one of the most popular books of the 19th century. Its impact is still felt today whenever people suggest that the Gospels are parables of spiritual truth rather than biographies of a real life.
One further Enlightenment academic is worth mentioning (there were dozens who explored Jesus from this rationalist perspective). Joseph Ernest Renan (1823-1892) was a French historian and philosopher. He published his Life of Jesus in 1863, and the work can probably be credited with the still hugely popular idea that Jesus was a simple, beautiful teacher of ethics, not an authoritative messianic figure.
THE DEATH OF THE RATIONALIST JESUS
All of these portraits of Jesus—whether as a political rebel, a symbol of the higher life or a simple ethical teacher—have two things in common. First, their authors did not apply any discernible historical method to the source material (the Gospels). Each scholar simply included some evidence and excluded other evidence. There was little attempt to do what historians now consider the basis of all good history: read the entire testimony in the Gospels in light of all that is known from other sources about the setting from which the testimony comes (more about that later).
Had Reimarus followed this now-typical course, he would have noted how difficult it is to make Jesus fit the pattern of a Jewish freedom-fighter. Had Strauss read the Gospels against the wider literature of the first century, he would have seen how closely the Gospels align not with the mythical literature of the period but with the numerous historical biographies of the day. And had Renan accessed the wider Jewish materials from the era, he would have observed how well Jesus’ theology and eschatology (that is, ideas about a future coming kingdom) resonated with the hopes of many in his day, and how his ethical teachings cannot be understood apart from that eschatological theology.
The second thing that such portraits have in common is that, on closer inspection, they all read like (unconscious) efforts to project onto a first-century figure the ethics and philosophy of the 18th- and 19th-century Enlightenment. They were wish-fulfilments. And it fell to a colossus of early 20th-century academia to point this out, and so bring down the entire Enlightenment search for Jesus in one humble volume. The book was titled The Quest of the Historical Jesus, and its author was Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965).
THE END OF THE FIRST QUEST
Albert Schweitzer was a freak of intellect. He held a doctorate in philosophy, another in theology, and later picked up a medical degree. After gaining a reputation as the foremost authority on the music of J.S. Bach (and as an expert organist), Schweitzer turned his considerable powers of analysis to the study of Jesus. He published several groundbreaking volumes on Christianity, but it was his book on Jesus that had the most impact. It is no exaggeration to say that in the field of Christian origins Schweitzer was an Albert Einstein figure: things could not be the same after him.
Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus came out in 1906.[9] It was mostly a stinging critique of the previous 150 years of scholarship, including that of Reimarus, Strauss, Renan, and many others. It called on experts to give more serious attention to the ancient sources themselves, and to stop allowing their “preferred Jesus” to determine what evidence was included, and how that evidence was handled. The Jesus of the Enlightenment, he concluded, was little more than “a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb” (p 396). This “Jesus”, in other words, was really just a rationalist, and equally dogmatic, counter-theology to replace the dogmatic theology of the church.
Schweitzer himself offered only a meagre portrait of Jesus—what he called a “sketch”. And no one could accuse him of projecting his own preferences onto the ancient Galilean. In Schweitzer’s analysis, Jesus was an “eschatological prophet” who forewarned Israel of impending doom and called on people to find shelter from the coming judgment in himself. Thus his death (which, Schweitzer was adamant, Jesus himself intended and provoked) was a conscious attempt to bear in himself the great catastrophe coming upon the world, so that at least a few people—his disciples—would avoid judgment and enter a new world order: the “kingdom of God”. I reread Schweitzer just before writing this paragraph; it is provocative stuff!
Schweitzer admitted that he did not know what to do with this eschatological Jesus. His portrait was not as timeless as Strauss’ mythic story of spiritual insight; nor was it as immediately relevant as Renan’s charming Galilean ethicist. But it was historical. That is what Schweitzer was aiming for. He was willing to sacrifice the personal religious significance of Jesus for an accurate account of his life and aims. “The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma”, he lamented (p 397).
It is unclear if Schweitzer maintained the Christian faith of his youth—his father had been a Lutheran minister. He soon gave up his scholarly career and became a doctor among lepers in Gabon, West Africa. When I visited his family home, now a museum, in Kaysersberg (now part of France) a few years ago, I couldn’t help looking at all the ponderous, almost grave, photos of him from a century ago and wondering what he really thought about Jesus, beyond his “sketch”.
Astonishingly, Schweitzer’s portrait of the eschatological prophet warning of judgment and calling on people to flee to the safety of his vision of the kingdom has largely stood the test of time. In fact, with the discovery in the 1940s and 50s of thousands of Jewish texts in caves by the Dead Sea—the famous Dead Sea Scrolls—as well as hundreds of archaeological finds in Galilee and Judaea over the last few decades, this basic eschatological account of Jesus is the only one that commands wide agreement across the scholarly spectrum today. I wish Schweitzer was alive to see how, because of new evidence and methods, his humble “sketch” has grown into a marvellous tapestry of historical knowledge.
If Albert Schweitzer brought down what we call the “first quest” for Jesus (the Enlightenment search), he also set the stage for the vast scholarly programme known today as the “third quest” for Jesus.
THE SECOND QUEST FOR JESUS
You may be wondering what happened in the “second quest” for Jesus. Not a lot. For the 50 years after Schweitzer, scholars were nervous about exploring the historical Jesus. Not only had Schweitzer unsettled scholars with the realisation that it is easy to project onto Jesus our own cultural preferences, but his sketch left people scratching their heads about the usefulness of an eschatological prophet for philosophy, theology, ethics, or culture. As a result, the number of works on the historical Jesus between 1906 and the 1950s dropped dramatically.
What we call the second quest for Jesus was a highly cautious attempt (from the mid 1950s) to establish some basic facts about the man from Nazareth. Its results and impact were limited. It was also led astray by a new historical methodology dubbed the “criterion of double dissimilarity”. This approach affirmed that material in the Gospels which does not sound Jewish or Christian probably came from the historical Jesus himself. The reasoning was simple: the writers of the Gospels were unlikely to invent material that did not fit with their Jewish background or with the later teachings of their churches. So things that are “dissimilar” from Judaism and Christianity would not have been made up.
But, as many have since pointed out, that’s like trying to uncover the real Winston Churchill by excluding anything about Great Britain or Englishness before and after the great wartime prime minister.
THE THIRD QUEST FOR JESUS
The second quest for Jesus was quickly surpassed by what is now called the third quest. Third-questers (the vast majority of the thousands of experts today) strive to do what second-questers hesitated to do (even avoided doing): interpret Jesus against the backdrop of all that we know about Jewish culture in the Roman period.
Rather than trying to isolate this or that saying of Jesus (bits that don’t sound too Jewish or Christian), third-questers follow an approach far more typical of the broader class of ancient historians today. They pay attention to all the portraits of Jesus in our various sources and assess the plausibility of those portraits by setting them against all that we know of the background of Jesus’ time and place.
The starting point for all good history is determining what fits and what doesn’t. Even if we can never fully verify specific details of a figure’s life and thought, we must aim to make a broad judgement about the general plausibility of our accounts. This is how historians investigate lives such as Alexander the Great, Cleopatra, Emperor Tiberius and the rest. And it is the starting point for studying Jesus.
Historians of Jesus are not usually interested in proving the exact details of something Jesus said or did (the way Christians embrace every word of the New Testament as divinely inspired), but nor are they quick to dismiss what they read in the Gospels, the way some sceptical folk instinctively reject what cannot be externally corroborated. Third-questers are usually more interested in determining whether what is said about (and by) Jesus in the Gospels plausibly fits with our wider knowledge of his time and place. If it fits, it may tentatively be included in our growing database of credible features of the Gospels’ portraits of Jesus. As the database of plausible features grows, historians begin to offer hypotheses about what kind of Jew Jesus was, what his aims might have been, why he might have got into trouble with the Jerusalem and Roman authorities, and so on. Such hypotheses are always subjected to new evidence or better interpretations of old evidence. And, hopefully, over time, a robust picture of the historical Jesus emerges.[10]
The basic idea of the third quest, then, is to allow Jesus’ words and actions as recorded in our sources to be illuminated by the politics, culture, geography, economics and religion of first-century Galilee and Judaea. Rather than wishing Jesus to be a particular kind of figure—whether a simple moral teacher or the Lord and Saviour of the world—good historical method submits every thought, whether sceptical or religious, to all of the evidence we have from the time. We might call this the criterion of historical plausibility (in fact that is exactly what some scholars call it): To what degree does the testimony about Jesus in our direct sources (for example, the Gospels or Paul’s letters) cohere or interact with the teachings and events we know to have been current in his day?
When the level of coherence (or interaction) is high, historians tend to have confidence that the testimony is plausible. When it is low, scholars tend to be wary.
The rest of this book will unpack some of the specific findings of the third quest and offer various thoughts about the meaning of all this for today. Unlike Schweitzer, I am not so pessimistic that “the historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma”.
Notes
[9] Originally published in German, of course, a standard English version is The Quest of the Historical Jesus (Dover Publications, 2005).
[10] The big name in the field of the philosophy and methodology of history, as it relates to the study of Jesus, is Jens Schröter of Humboldt University in Berlin: see his From Jesus to the New Testament: Early Christian Theology and the Origin of the New Testament Canon (Baylor University Press, 2013)
Written by John Dickson in "Is Jesus History?",The Good Book Company in partnership with The Oxford Centre for Christian Apologetics and The Zacharias Institute,UK, 2001. Digitized, adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.