Quest for the Historical Jesus

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This article is about the history of academic Jesus research.
*For the book "The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede", see 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. The quest is commonly divided into stages, and it continues today among scholars such as the fellows of the Jesus Seminar.

Contents

[edit] The First Quest

Also called the Old 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 seemed little more than an idealized autobiography of the scholar himself - a criticism that still haunts Jesus research to this day.

  • 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) - Established 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.
  • Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) - "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]

Some recent scholars have reasserted Schweitzer's eschatolgical 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 attempted to work around the eschatological Jesus and have been left with virtually nothing!

[edit] The No Quest

These scholars asserted the Quest for the Historical Jesus was impossible because of insufficient evidence. These scholars demonstrated how later redactors adapted, relocated, framed and censored the stories (pericopes) about Jesus to form the New Testament. (See Form criticism.) Outright fictions about Jesus via "prophecy" were also speculated. The New Testament was seen as evidencing the later non-Jewish Christian followers only and saying virtually nothing about the Historical Jesus himself. These scholars tended to embrace the modern philosophy of Existentialism and to advocate Jesus as an ahistorical symbol who personified a pure act of will in the throes of the ungrounded subjectivity of freedom: that is, an Existentialist take on "faith". Despite claims of historical agnosticism about Jesus, they tended to present Jesus as an Existentialist philosopher.

[edit] The Second Quest

Also called the New Quest

[edit] Quest 2A

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 CE, 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 detection of such early texts became useful for data relevant to the Historical Jesus. The existences of these early texts remain hypothetical until archeological discoveries find them thus prove them, but many textual researchers support the methodologies to identify them, and certain texts such as the Q Gospel and the Passion Narrative are widely accepted. The form of the Gospel of Thomas was often argued to corroberate the existence of the Q Gospel, whose hypothetical form would resemble it.

[edit] Quest 2B

These scholars tended to focus on the early textual layers of the New Testament for data to reconstruct a biography for the Historical Jesus. Context is meaning. By dislocating these early texts from the rest of the New Testament's context, the default contexts (whether conscious or unconscious) often lacked methodology and the resulting meanings of the early texts seemed arbitrary and occasionally wild. Many of these scholars relied on a redactive critique of the hypothetical Q Gospel and on a Greco-Roman "Mediterranean" miliue as opposed to a Jewish miliue and tended to view Jesus as a radical philosopher of Wisdom literature, who strives to destabilize the economic status quo. Some scholars also relied on a critique of non-canonical texts for early textual layers that possibly evidence Jesus.

[edit] The Third Quest

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 God. 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. The reconstruction of the wider environment of the ancient Judaisms allows a more stable reference point from which to view Jesus.

  • Ben Witherington is a critic of the history of the quests for the Historical Jesus and conveys an Evangelical response to their scientific methodologies.

[edit] See also

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