What has come to be known as the “quest for the historical Jesus” is a child of the eighteenth century and the European Enlightenment. Ever since Albert Schweitzer’s 1906 landmark survey of the (old) quest (translated into English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus), it has become common to mark the beginning of the quest with the publication of the work of Hermann Reimarus in 1778.
An array of early modern thinkers such as Benedict Spinoza, Isaac La Peyrere, Richard Simon, Thomas Woolston, Peter Annet and Thomas Morgan laid the groundwork for what would eventually emerge as the mature historical-critical method. Perhaps the clearest example of a precursor to Reimarus can be found in the work of the British deist Thomas Chubb (1679–1746). In 1738 Chubb published a book about Jesus, presenting him as “a sort of first-century Palestinian Deist, garbed in the seamless robe of reason and natural religion.” Unfortunately, according to Chubb, much of the later Christian dogma was later foisted on the deist-like Jesus of history by the apostle Paul.
Old Quest
Reimarus
From Reimarus’s perspective just who was this historian’s Jesus? Simply put, “he was born a Jew and intended to remain one.” More specifically, Jesus was a Jew who proclaimed the “kingdom of God,” by which, according to Reimarus, he must have intended “the usual meaning of this phrase among the Jews of his time”—i.e., a political kingdom centered in Jerusalem that would be established by the Messiah through the use of military force.
How then did the Christian faith arise? Reimarus’s answer is daring: Hoping to finally attain the riches and glory they had planned on receiving when Jesus became king, his disciples stole his body, fabricated a resurrection story and eventually concocted “the doctrine of a spiritual suffering savior of all mankind.”
Over the last few centuries only a few have concluded, similar to Reimarus, that Jesus was in fact a politically minded revolutionary: Robert Eisler, The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist (London: Methuen, 1931); S. G. F. Brandon, Jesus and the Zealots (New York: Scribner, 1967); George Wesley Buchanan, Jesus: The King and His Kingdom (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1984); Robert H. Eisenman, James the Brother of Jesus: the Key to Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls (New York: Penguin, 1998).
Rather, it is certain elements of his method that have continued to find relevance in later stages of the quest. First, the firm line drawn by Reimarus between the Jesus of history and the Christ figure of the Gospels has remained an unquestioned presupposition for many scholars throughout the quest. Second, Reimarus raised a question that continues to be hotly debated to this day: namely, what role, if any, does historical investigation of Jesus have to play within the context of the Christian faith?
Finally, in setting Jesus firmly within the world of Jewish eschatology, Reimarus ignited a debate that continues raging to this day—the question of to what extent, if any, Jesus embraced views associated with first-century apocalyptic eschatology. Schweitzer, who likewise believed that Jewish eschatology held the key to understanding Jesus (though in a manner different from that argued by Reimarus), praised Reimarus at this very point.
Between Reimarus and Strauss
Following his survey of Reimarus’s thought, Schweitzer turns in Quest of the Historical Jesus to consider what he dubs “the lives of Jesus of the earlier rationalism.” Names such as J. J. Hess, F. V. Reinhard, E. A. Opitz, J. A. Jakobi and J. G. Herder dominate this period. A characteristic feature of these studies was an embrace, to one degree or another, of “rationalist” explanations of the Gospel materials. These early pioneers of the quest tended to place their emphasis on Jesus’ moral teachings and did their best to render him palatable to the more rational, “enlightened” thought of the times.
The work of two scholars in particular is worth noting. In his four-volume A Non-supernatural History of the Great Prophet of Nazareth (1800–1802), K. H. Venturini offers various “rational” explanations for the reported miracles of Jesus. For example, Jesus’ miracles of healing are explained by the fact that Jesus was a proficient herbalist, always accompanied by his “portable medicine chest.” Adding a twist of conspiracy to things, Venturini also argues that Jesus, along with his cousin John the Baptist, was nurtured and groomed by a covert faction of the Essenes. Although undergoing crucifixion, Jesus only appeared to die and was later revived in the tomb with the help of an Essene collaborator, Joseph of Arimathea. While few could take Venturini’s theory seriously at the time, since the 1947 discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumran and the attendant burst of interest in the ancient Jewish sect of the Essenes, Venturini-like theories have come to life again. They remain, however, generally the fruit of either eccentric scholars or non-academic conspiracy theorists.
In the 1828 work of H. E. G. Paulus, The Life of Jesus as the Basis of a Purely Historical Account of Early Christianity, we find the epitome of the eighteenth-century “rationalist” approach to Jesus. Here Paulus famously does his best to explain the miraculous elements in the Gospels as nothing more than the disciples’ mistaken interpretations of what were, in fact, purely natural events in the life of Jesus. And so, for example, the account of Jesus walking on the water is explained as something of an optical illusion—Jesus had been walking in the shallow water off the shores of the Sea of Galilee, but from a distance it had appeared to the disciples that he was farther out, and thus walking upon the very waves themselves. From Paulus’s view, and in good liberal fashion, this approach should not in any way detract from the achievement of Jesus, since it is not his miracles but rather his admirable character that truly matters.
D. F. Strauss: Jesus and “myth.”
One of the most influential figures of the “old” quest is David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874). His book The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, originally published in 1835, became one of the most controversial studies of Jesus ever written. Like his more robust rationalist predecessors, he was a thoroughgoing methodological naturalist. But to Strauss’s mind, the rationalist attempts to explain the Gospels as mistaken interpretations of historically occurring natural phenomena entirely missed one of the most important elements of the Gospels—namely the robust religious imagination of the early followers of Jesus and the expression of this imagination in the category of myth. In comparison to the theories of his predecessors, Strauss explains, the advantage of the “mythical view” is that it “leaves the substance of the narrative unassailed; and instead of venturing to explain the details, accepts the whole, not indeed as true history, but as a sacred legend.” As Schweitzer notes, while Strauss was not the first to use the notion of myth to understand the Gospels, he applied this interpretive lens in a more ruthlessly consistent fashion than anyone before him.
Armed with this critical perspective, Strauss’s study of Jesus largely consists of analyzing the various contents of the Gospels with an eye to unmasking and explaining the many instances of myth contained therein. Over and over again, Strauss concludes, early Christian imagination served to fabricate material about Jesus out of various Old Testament stories and concepts. In the end, all that was left for Strauss, historically speaking, was a small core of bare facts about Jesus.
His consideration of the myth-making process at work within the early oral Jesus tradition would eventually develop and mature, almost a century later, into the discipline of form criticism. His privileging of the category of myth would be followed by the single most influential New Testament scholar of the twentieth century—Rudolf Bultmann. And his use of comparative non-Christian religious material foreshadowed the full flowering of this method at the end of the nineteenth century in the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule (i.e., the old “history of religions school”) made famous by Wilhelm Bousset and others.
Finally, we can recognize in Strauss a quality that is both admirable and all-too-rare within the history of the quest: an explicitly stated self-consciousness concerning the religio-philosophical presuppositions that guide (both motivationally and methodologically) his critical study of Jesus. He was always quite forthright about the influence of Hegel on his study of Jesus.
Between Strauss and Schweitzer
The negative historical results and resultant skepticism of the Gospels displayed in Strauss’s Life of Jesus spurred a variety of reactions. At one extreme, Bruno Bauer, taking his cue from Strauss’s critical methodology and concept of myth, pushed the thesis to its furthest possible point and concluded that all was myth and nothing was history—Jesus never was an actual person in history. With this move Bauer became a leading early proponent of the “Christ-Myth” theory, with others like Paul-Louis Couchoud, Arthur Drews and John M. Robertson eventually following in his wake. While Bauer’s Christ-Myth theory has had minimal impact on the scholarly quest, it captured the attention of Karl Marx and became a common feature of Soviet Marxist thought.
In the face of such skepticism, others sought to shore up some basis for the historical credibility of the Gospels. One effect of this effort was the rise of «modern source criticism of the Gospels. During this time, the “two-source” theory of Gospel relations came to prominence—the view that Mark was written first and that, along with an early written collection of Jesus’ sayings labeled “Q” (from the German word Quelle, meaning “source”), was used by both Matthew and Luke in the composition of their Gospels. One of the attractive features of the two-source theory is that it allows Mark (with no embarrassing infancy narrative) and Q (sayings of Jesus without any narrative and thus without miracles) to provide a generally reliable basis from which to reconstruct the life of Jesus. Though the two-source theory has always faced its challengers, it remains to this day the most widely held solution to the infamous “Synoptic Problem»
In France, Ernest Renan, an erstwhile Roman Catholic, produced his famous Life of Jesus in 1863, which went on to become a best-selling work with multiple editions. Renan’s book presents a Jesus who began as a wise teacher of ethical principles who reveals the loving character of the heavenly Father, but who, inspired by apocalyptic hopes, eventually became a would-be messiah who was crucified for his efforts. Like his rationalist German counterparts, Renan denied any room for the supernatural in his reconstruction.
More conservative renderings of Jesus are short on new and daring proposals, following a course instead that is heavily dependent on the Gospel accounts themselves. Beyond this, many of the more conservative studies of this time were written as responses to the more radical proposals rather than as independent lives of Jesus. It’s worth mentioning figures like Frederic Farrar and Alfred Edersheim from Britain, as well as August Neander and August Tholuck from Germany.
Culminating the old quest: Wrede and Schweitzer.
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, the critical quest had left in its wake a wonderfully “liberal” Jesus—a Jesus stripped of the more unenlightened entanglements associated with the Gospels and Christian orthodoxy such as miracles and divine status. This Jesus was a moral reformer to be sure, a teacher who revealed the fatherhood of God, the brotherhood of humankind, and the simple tenets of a reasonable, love-based religion. This Jesus, elaborated by such theological giants as Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack, could still appeal to an enlightened European culture.
As the new century dawned, however, two new voices served to cut the ground from beneath this reasonable, manageable Jesus of the old quest. In 1901 William Wrede produced his famous essay on the “messianic secret” theme in the Gospel of Mark. Among the implications of his study was the disturbing conclusion that, contrary to the current liberal consensus, the Gospel of Mark did not supply the generally reliable chronological framework for the life of Jesus that so many of the nineteenth-century questers had relied on. Rather, in a move that foreshadowed future redaction-critical studies, Wrede argued that both Mark’s framework and much of its detail derives not from reliable traditions about Jesus, but from fabrications fed by post-Easter theological reflection of the early church.
In 1906 Albert Schweitzer published his renowned The Quest of the Historical Jesus—a book so far-reaching in its impact that its publication date now marks the end of the old quest (though not an outcome that Schweitzer necessarily desired or anticipated). Following the prior work of Johannes Weiss, Schweitzer argued strongly that the proper context for understanding Jesus was Jewish apocalyptic eschatology. In this context, Jesus appears not merely as a (liberal) social reformer and teacher of love, but as an end-times enthusiast who fervently believed that his own sufferings would play a vital role in the apocalyptic culmination of this world.
For Schweitzer, Jesus was ultimately a failed apocalyptic prophet—he predicted the end of the world and it never came. What then is salvageable from Jesus for the contemporary Christian faith? Once the eschatological beliefs of Jesus are dispensed with as an outdated Jewish worldview, one can still embrace the message of love that characterized Jesus’ teachings.
The (so-called) “no quest” period: From Schweitzer to Käsemann (1906–1953).
It is common to designate the next period of time as that of “no quest,” which suggests that the quest came to a halt for nearly a half-century.
Beyond the effects of Schweitzer’s work, at least two other factors served to call into question the viability of the quest. The first involves the rise of a new method of Gospel analysis: form criticism. Between 1919 and 1921, three important German works, authored by K. L. Schmidt, Martin Dibelius and Rudolf Bultmann, launched New Testament form-critical studies. Of these, Bultmann’s The History of the Synoptic Tradition quickly became the classic statement of this approach for years to come. While form criticism focuses on the question of the pre-Gospel oral Jesus tradition, it brought with it (particularly in Bultmann’s influential version) several methodological assumptions that served to further amplify skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels as historical sources. Among these was the conviction that the Gospels were a mixture of historically rooted tradition and early Christian mythology reflecting the post-Easter faith. And so, in the eyes of many, form criticism served to reveal that a largely impenetrable veil of myth separated the modern scholar from the Jesus of history. This conviction led Rudolf Bultmann to conclude:
I do indeed think that we can know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either, are moreover fragmentary and often legendary; and other sources do not exist.
Through Bultmann’s influence (particularly in Germany), this skeptical perspective did much to douse hopes that the Jesus of history could ever be recovered in any detail.
If the first two factors presented historical obstacles to the quest, the third added to this a theological objection. An early articulation of this theological assault on the quest came in the form of Martin Kähler’s famous little book, The So-called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ (1892). In essence Kähler argued that the quest was theologically unnecessary—even illegitimate. It was little more than a journey down “a blind alley” since “the historical Jesus of modern authors conceals from us the living Christ.” For Kähler, what is at stake is the very nature of Christian faith: the certitude of mountain-moving faith cannot be dependent on the always tentative and changing conclusions coming out of the quest. Thus for Kähler, “Christian faith and a history of Jesus repel each other like oil and water.” Kähler’s convictions were picked up and deepened in the influential theological movement of post–World War I neo-orthodoxy. Here leading (mostly German) theological voices of the twentieth century such as Karl Barth, Emil Brünner, Paul Tillich and even Bultmann himself expressed their theological reserve regarding quest-like activity. The apostle Paul himself provided the biblical proof text: “Though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now henceforth we know him no more” (2 Cor 5:16 KJV). Furthermore, from the neo-orthodox perspective, any attempt to render the Christian faith dependent on an objective, historical foundation was seen as a violation of the defining Reformation principle of “justification by faith alone.”
Despite these challenges, the conviction that the Jesus of history could (historically) be pursued and should (theologically) be pursued continued right on through this period. It was during these very decades that notable works on Jesus by the British scholars T. W. Manson and C. H. Dodd were produced.
The new quest (1953–1970s).
Several ironies are tied to what has come to be known as the “new” (second) quest for the historical Jesus. The first involves the fact that it was launched in Bultmann’s very presence by one of his own former students who, along with most of the significant scholars in this quest, largely shared Bultmann’s generally skeptical views regarding the Gospels as historical sources.
It is customary to trace the beginning of the new quest to a very specific date: October 20, 1953. On this date, Ernest Käsemann presented a lecture titled “The Problem of the Historical Jesus” at an annual meeting of Bultmann and his former students. He began by noting the factors, both historical and theological, that had contributed to the demise of the first quest in Germany. But he went on to suggest that these obstacles could not be the end of the story—and his reason for saying so was, interestingly enough, decidedly theological in nature:
we also cannot do away with the identity between the exalted and the earthly Lord without falling into docetism. . . . Conversely, neither our sources nor the insights we have gained from what has gone before permit us to substitute the historical Jesus for the exalted Lord. . . . The clash over the historical Jesus has as its object a genuine theological problem.
Ironically, whereas the old quest began with Reimarus’s attempt to reveal an unbridgeable gulf between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith presented in the Gospels, the new quest was inspired by the necessity of demonstrating continuity between them.
Within three years of Käsemann’s call for a renewal of the quest, another of Bultmann’s former students, Günther Bornkamm, answered that challenge with a slim volume entitled Jesus of Nazareth. From the very first sentence, it is clear that the pessimism surrounding the no quest period has not been entirely dispelled within the new quest: “No one is any longer in the position to write a life of Jesus.” But, while Bornkamm does explicitly deny that we can any longer pursue an historical understanding of Jesus “along biographical, psychological lines,” he nonetheless clearly affirms that not all is lost; we can still talk about “occurrence and event” in the life of Jesus. Bornkamm goes on to reconstruct something of the characteristic teachings and conduct of Jesus. When it comes to the question of whether Jesus thought he was the Messiah, he agrees with Bultmann’s view that Jesus never proclaimed himself to be the Messiah as such. However, he manages to retain some continuity here between history and faith when he states that “the Messianic character of his being is contained in his words and deeds and in the unmediatedness of his historical appearance.”
Other studies followed, though not all were hampered by vestigial Bultmannian pessimism. Beyond Bornkamm, significant figures in the new quest period (in terms of methodology and/or practice) include Herbert Braun, C. H. Dodd, Ernst Fuchs, Ferdinand Hahn, Leander Keck, Norman Perrin, Edward Schillebeeckx and Ethelbert Stauffer. In 1959, the formal name for this stage of the quest was secured when James Robinson published his survey and assessment, titled A New Quest of the Historical Jesus.
During this phase of the quest, a number of new developments took place in Gospels research. First was the rise of redaction criticism in the 1950s. The thrust of the redaction-critical enterprise is driven by the conviction that the authors of the Gospels did not function as mere collectors of earlier tradition, but rather allowed their own literary and theological tendencies to shape the gospel texts. One of the effects of this perspective was to add a new layer of editorial fabrication that separates the reader of the Gospels and the historical Jesus, this one a factor of the literary creativity of the Gospel authors themselves. Second, the Q document took on a new importance in this era as many within the Bultmannian wing of scholarship came to see it not merely as a supplementary sayings list, but rather as a full-blown “Gospel” in its own right. In time, these first two developments would coalesce, and redactional analysis of perceived editorial layers of Q itself got underway. Today a number of scholars have pressed on to attempt to identify the early Christian communities and sociological forces behind each hypothesized layer of Q.
Finally, it was during the new quest that criteria designed to determine the potential historical authenticity of the Gospel material were more formally assessed and utilized. Most notorious among these authenticity criteria is the “(double) dissimilarity” criterion, which states that the earliest form of a saying we can reach may be regarded as authentic if it can be shown to be dissimilar to characteristic emphases both of ancient Judaism and of the early Church.
The third quest (1980s–present)
The term “third quest” was first coined by N. T. Wright. While it is widely used today, there remains debate as to what exactly it refers to and whether in fact it even exists as such.
Unlike the other stages of the quest, the beginning of the third quest is not easily marked by a specific year. For convenience’s sake, some have proposed 1985 as the inauguration of the third quest, since this year saw both the publication of E. P. Sander’s groundbreaking volume Jesus and Judaism and the launch of the Jesus Seminar. Things are not that neat and simple, however. Others trace the origins of the third quest back into the late 1970s with works such as Ben Meyer’s The Aims of Jesus. In any case, disagreement on the precise launch date of the third quest notwithstanding, there is widespread agreement that a new stage of the quest was incrementally inaugurated through the 1970s and early 1980s with works by scholars such as Meyer, Sanders, Anthony Harvey, John Riches, Geza Vermes, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk (with his launching of the Jesus Seminar). Since then the last three decades have seen a flood of scholarly works on Jesus. Among these studies are multivolume projects like those by John Meier and N. T. Wright; landmark works like Crossan’s The Historical Jesus and James Dunn’s Jesus Remembered; insightful survey’s such as Mark Allan Powell’s Jesus as a Figure in History, Theissen and Merz’s The Historical Jesus, and Ben Witherington III’s The Jesus Quest; and a number of useful reference works, status reports and resource guides, such as those produced by Darrell Bock.
“Historical Jesus research is becoming something of a scholarly bad joke.” according to John Dominic Crossan. The primary reason for this, he notes, is “the number of competent and even eminent scholars producing pictures of Jesus at wide variance with one another.” For some this radically divergent assortment of historical Jesuses at the end of the day suggests the quest has hit a dead end. For many, however, this plurality of Jesus-portraits seems to represent an exciting opportunity for more rigorous methodological reflection, more careful historical study and more engagement in interdisciplinary dialogue.
But while consensus in Jesus studies today is elusive, it is not entirely absent. For example, there is widespread (if not always total) consensus that Jesus was baptized by John, that he taught and preached in Galilee, that he drew followers to himself, that he was known as an effective miracle worker and exorcist, and that he made a final journey to Jerusalem for Passover where, in conjunction with an incident in the temple, he was arrested, convicted by Pilate and crucified.
In the words of Bernard Brandon Scott, “The historical quest for the historical Jesus has ended; the interdisciplinary quest for the historical Jesus has just begun.” And many see this fact as one of the most distinctive and fruitful features of the third quest. It is no longer merely New Testament scholars and historians who are wading into the rushing waters of the quest, but an entire cadre of interdisciplinary explorers, each bringing their own distinctive disciplinary methods, tools and insights to the historical study of Jesus and the Gospels.
P. Rhodes and J. K. Beibly The Historical Jesus: five views (2009)
