CHAPTER 23
The Quest for the Historical Jesus: An Appraisal
Helen K. Bond
The dominant view today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, [and] that we can know a lot about what he said. (Sanders 1985, 2)
The figure of Jesus has always aroused interest and inquiry, both from the devoted and from his detractors. It is only since the Enlightenment and the rise of biblical criticism, however, that it has been thought possible and even worthwhile to attempt to separate the "historical Jesus" who walked the Galilean hills from the "Christ of faith" preached by the Christian church. With this development, the "Quest for the Historical Jesus" was born, manifesting itself in a number of distinctive phases over the last two centuries. The aim of this chapter is to offer an assessment of the quest, particularly its most recent phase. What are the distinguishing features of modern ("Third Quest") Jesus research? What are the most disputed areas? Where is the quest most open to criticism? And what are the ways forward for future research? First, though, a few words about the Quest as a whole.
Quest or Quests? Messiness and Disorder
The Quest, as any introductory textbook will verify, is usually divided into four broad periods: the Old Quest (from Reimarus to Schweitzer, 1778-1906); the period of No Quest (from Schweitzer to Käsemann, 1906-1953); the New Quest (from Käsemann, 1953 to roughly 1985); and the Third Quest (roughly from 1985 to the present). As an initial orientation, this scheme is certainly useful in mapping the broad contours of research into the life of Jesus. Yet, it is clearly an over-simplification, and like all over-simplifications there comes a point when the four-fold schema may begin to obscure rather than to clarify—as a few examples will illustrate.
1. It is well known nowadays that the Quest did not really start as a "bolt from the blue" with Reimarus; rather he developed and synthesized views already current elsewhere, particularly amongst the English Deists (Brown 1985). It is true that Schweitzer began his highly influential book The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906) with the Hamburg professor, but Schweitzer was writing very much from his own late nineteenth-century German context and took little interest in scholarship outside his native land (Bowman 1949, Gathercole 2000).
More problematic is the period designated "No Quest." This title ignores the works of eminent scholars such as T. W. Manson, C. H. Dodd and Joachim Jeremias, all of whom published works on Jesus in the early twentieth century, not to mention important books by Jewish scholars such as Joseph Klausner (1925), whose work in some respects foreshadowed a number of third-quest assumptions. Furthermore, it quietly draws a veil over highly dubious scholarship from the Nazi era, some of it arguing for an Aryan Jesus (a topic to which we shall return below). The majority of New Testament researchers may well have been more interested in studying the composition of the gospels and the creativity of the early church at this period, but the broad label "no quest" is, at best, misleading (Marsh 1997).
And finally we have the problem of the "Third Quest": who is included and who is not? N. T. Wright, who coined the phrase (Neill and Wright 1988), redefined it some years later to include only those who presented an apocalyptic Jesus (Wright 1996); the non-apocalyptic Jesus presented by the Jesus Seminar and those associated with it (Crossan, Borg) was not included, an assessment shared by the Seminar itself, which seems to locate its work more within the New Quest.Most historical Jesus scholars, however, use the term much more inclusively to refer to everyone involved in historical-critical reconstruction of the life of Jesus of Nazareth, though some prefer "Life of Jesus Research" (Telford 1994) or simply "Jesus Research" (Charlesworth 2006). In what follows, I shall use all these terms interchangeably, simply to refer to the most recent surge of interest in Jesus since the mid-1980s.
2. It is also important to note that the usual, linear trajectory gives the rather misleading impression that research is moving in a straight line, and that there is a sense of “progress.” In fact, things are much more cyclical than this (Carleton Paget 2001). Strauss’ thoroughgoing use of “myth” in relation to the gospel stories anticipated the work a century later of Bultmann; Schweitzer’s apocalyptic prophet was recreated to some extent in the work of Sanders; and some see in the work of certain members of the Jesus Seminar a return not so much to the New Quest as to the Liberal Lives of the nineteenth century (Dunn 2003). In any analysis of the various quests, it is as important to stress the continuity and parallels between the various phases as what distinguishes them.
3. The Quest also suggests a unity of purpose and goal which cannot be assumed for its contributors over the centuries. The Old Quest grew out of Enlightenment rationalism and had a distinct anti-dogmatic motivation; the New Quest, arising from a post-Bultmannian desire to recover the core of Jesus’ teaching, had a much more theological agenda; and the Third Quest (as we shall see later) encompasses a diverse group of people, aims, and methods. Each phase of the Quest was clearly interested in the first-century man from Nazareth, but the motivations and presuppositions behind this interest diverged significantly from one to another.
4. Finally, Jesus Research clearly cannot be viewed in isolation, as if it existed in a vacuum distinct from Western culture as a whole. The Liberal Lives of the nineteenth century were clearly influenced by the artistic Romantic movement; the devastating legacy of two world wars in the early twentieth century left its impact on many aspects of Jesus scholarship; and the proliferation of profiles and methods in the most recent phase of research can hardly be unrelated to postmodern culture. Jesus research, like any discipline in the humanities, mirrors its historical and sociological setting. Changes in the landscape of New Testament studies have also left their mark: e.g., archaeological discoveries (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls or the Nag Hammadi library) and greater scholarly receptiveness to insights from the social sciences.
The story of the Quest needs constant revision. Decisions need to be taken over what is included and what is not, and where to locate significant turning points and new trajectories, which are often observable only in retrospect. Useful evaluations include Telford (1994), Wright (1996), Marsh (1997), Powell (1998), Meier (1999), Carleton Paget (2001), du Toit (2001), and Evans (2006). What is abundantly clear, though, is that the last thirty years or so have seen a new and exciting phase in Jesus research, characterized by diverse methods and an almost bewildering array of reconstructions. What, then, does all this work have in common? What is it that allows us to see this new phase of scholarship as something distinct from what has gone before?
Distinguishing Features of Recent Jesus Research
The modern Quest as an historical enterprise
One of the most striking features about modern Jesus research is its resolutely historical nature. While earlier phases of the quest were driven by theological or ecclesiastical concerns, the “historical Jesus” is now seen as a legitimate area of scientific enquiry, subject to the same constraints and methods of historical reconstruction as any other great figure from the past (Alexander the Great, for example, or the Emperor Augustus). Undoubtedly the main factor here has been the movement of the center of Jesus study from German theological faculties to secular University settings in North America (and, to a lesser extent, the British Isles). Contributors are no longer drawn from exclusively Protestant circles (though they still predominate), but now include Catholics, Jews, agnostics and secularists. A Christian agenda can no longer determine the questions (still less the outcomes), and the only language permitted is that of historical-criticism.
Of course, the appeal to “history” rather than “theology” is not quite so straight-forward as it might at first appear. Scholars have widely different conceptions of what “history” actually is, and the methods employed are as diverse as the contributors. Still, the essentially historical rather than theological nature of the endeavour is now assumed. (We shall return later to some of the implications of this assumption).
The Jewishness of Jesus
For many observers, the leading characteristic of third-quest research is the insistence that Jesus was a Jew (Casey 2005). This is not an entirely new phenomenon: earlier scholarship had acknowledged Jesus’ Jewishness but had either regarded it as having little relevance (so the Liberal Lives) or had used it to show Jesus’ inability to transcend the limitations of his own time and place (Reimarus and Schweitzer). Bultmann’s de-mythologizing approach tended to reduce the specifics of Jesus’ historical location in favour of a timeless, existentialist challenge, while the form-critical assumption that much of the gospels derived from the creativity of the early church directed attention towards nascent Christianity rather than the religion of its founder. The New Quest accepted that Jesus was a Jew, but was seriously hampered by the “criterion of double dissimilarity,” which maintained that only material demonstrably at variance with both the Jewish milieu and the early church could be regarded as genuinely from Jesus (Perrin 1967). Not surprisingly, as many have observed, this criterion produced a Jesus strangely at odds with his Jewish environment (not to mention the church which followed him!).
What is distinctive about the Third Quest is its insistence that Jesus needs to be seen not against his Jewish environment, but very much as belonging to it, as someone within the first-century Jewish world and its structures. Part of the spur here was the fact that scholars came to appreciate more fully the diversity of Second Temple Judaism in the wake of the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. The surge of interest that these scrolls awakened led to the breakdown of the division that scholars had erectedbetween Judaism and Hellenism, the end of the assumption that rabbinic attitudes could be read back into the first century, and the publication of a number of significant works challenging the characterization of Judaism as legalistic(most notably Sanders 1977). While New Questers presupposed a “normative,” monolithic Judaism of works-righteousness against which Jesus stood out, the Third Quest imagines Jesus operating within an extremely complex and diverse understanding of Second Temple Judaism. The question now is not so much “Was Jesus a Jew?” (the affirmative answer is assumed), but to which of the many branches of first-century Judaism did Jesus belong: apocalyptic, sapiential, prophetic, or sectarian (Essene, hasidic, Pharisaic, nationalist)? In other words, “What kind of a Jew was Jesus?” If the criterion of dissimilarity has not been entirely abandoned by recent research, it is used much more cautiously, while some prefer to replace it with a “criterion of plausibility,” in which the significant question is whether Jesus’ actions make sense within a Palestinian setting (Theissen and Winter 2002).
In view of the importance of Jesus’ context, reconstructing the Jewish world of the first century is now central for Jesus scholars. It is necessary to know details not only of religious observance, but also of the social, cultural, economic, and political strands of life so intertwined in an ancient setting. Studies of Galilee in particular have proliferated, detailing the degree of Hellenization in the region, the extent and effect of Antipas’ urbanization policies, relations between village and city, settlement patterns, taxation, and so on (see L. Levine 1992; Meyers 1999; Reed 2000; Chancey 2002; Jensen 2006). Interdisciplinary approaches are particularly popular, often drawing on sociological models developed by cultural anthropology and the social sciences more generally in an attempt to understand peasant societies, honor and shame, purity, patron and client relationships, and millenarian movements (so Oakman 1986; Horsley 1987; Crossan 1991; Borg 1998; Allison 1998). Archaeological excavations, too, have played a crucial role: historical Jesus scholars now take an interest in site reports from a variety of locations throughout Israel—Jerusalem, Caesarea Maritima, Sepphoris, Capernaum, and Bethsaida (Charlesworth 2006). The social and religious lives of women, along with the reconstruction of gender in the first century, have also become important (see, for example, Ilan 1996; Kraemer and D’Angelo 1999).
Literary texts continue to occupy a central position in historical reconstruction, but Jesus scholars now move beyond the information furnished by the gospels alone and consult a much wider range of contemporary literature. Recent decades have seen more sophisticated studies of Josephus (Freyne 1988; Mason 2003) and Jewish sectarian literature (Charlesworth 1982; Sanders 1985; Rowland 2002), particularly the Dead Sea Scrolls (Vermes 1997), the targums (Chilton 1984), and the New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha (Schneemelcher 1991-92; Robinson 1988). Although not all the authors mentioned in the last two paragraphs would regard themselves primarily as “Jesus scholars,” their work has provided invaluable guidance in situating Jesus within a realistic first-century environment. And this interest in the Jewish environment, and Jesus’ place in it, leads to our third distinguishing feature of third-quest research: its preference for what we might call the “larger picture.”
Focus on the larger picture rather than sayings
The New Quest focused all its attention on the sayings of Jesus; this was perhaps only to be expected, given the high store set by Protestants on “the Word” and the tendency of the form critics generally to regard narrative sections of the gospels as “legendary compositions.” While some still prefer to start with sayings (e.g., the Jesus Seminar; Crossan 1991; Meier 1991-2009), a striking feature of the majority of modern Jesus scholars is their confidence that it is possible to present a much more rounded picture of Jesus, his role, and his significance in his ancient setting. The search for the actual words of Jesus (the ipsissima verba) has now given way to broader questions: What were Jesus’ aims? Where do we locate him within first-century Judaism? How did he relate to his contemporaries (social outcasts, women, the Jewish leadership and the religiously impure)? Why did he die? And how can we explain the movement which followed him?
The approach of Sanders (1985) may be considered paradigmatic. Sanders starts with a reconstruction of both first-century Judaism and what he regards as “indisputable facts” relating to Jesus’ life. These include baptism by John, calling of the twelve, preaching the Kingdom of God, the demonstration in the Temple, and crucifixion. Sanders sees the Temple controversy as central, so he starts his investigation at this point, interpreting Jesus’ actions within the wider setting of Jewish restoration eschatology. Jesus, for Sanders, was an apocalyptic prophet, announcing the establishment of a new Temple and the restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel. It is only once this broader picture is in place that various gospel sayings, after some analysis, are placed into the framework. Most recent Jesus work has followed this basic pattern. There is still an interest in criteria for determining which sayings of Jesus are most authentic (multiple attestation, coherence, and embarrassment are popular), but this is very much secondary to establishing the broader context.
This general concern to establish the “larger picture,” however, is as far as the agreement goes. To a large extent, whichever aspect a scholar emphasizes in Jesus’ context determines the resultant portrait of Jesus. Where healing is seen as central, Jesus is presented as a magician (M. Smith 1978) or a charismatic healer and exorcist in the line of Honi the Circle Drawer or Hanina ben Dosa (Vermes 1973). If apocalyptic eschatology is the defining element, Jesus is characterized as an eschatological prophet of restoration (Sanders 1985; Meier 1994). Where teaching takes center stage, Jesus is seen as a sage or rabbi (Flusser with Notley 2007; Chilton 1984), a Pharisee (Maccoby 2003), a wisdom teacher preaching a radical egalitarianism (Schüssler Fiorenza 1983), a subversive sage (Borg 1998), or a social revolutionary (Horsley 1987). And those who argue for a strong Hellenistic influence on Galilee often categorize Jesus as a Cynic teacher (Downing 1992; Mack 1993; Crossan 1991). Despite their different emphases, however, all these reconstructions represent attempts to situate Jesus firmly within his Jewish environment, and to show his significance within that setting.
It is already apparent, however, that historical Jesus scholars are far from reaching a consensus on who Jesus was. Once we go beyond the three broad areas which I have highlighted—a commitment to the historical method, the certainty that Jesus was a Jew, and a concern to present the larger picture within a Jewish context—division and diversity reign. We shall now explore some of the main areas of disagreement.