The Story of Jesus in History and Faith

An Introduction

McDonald, Lee Martin

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441241528
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

Many books are available on the historical Jesus, but few address issues that are critically central to Christian faith--namely, Jesus as resurrected Lord, Christ, and Son of God. This comprehensive introduction to the study of the historical Jesus takes both scholarship and Christian faith seriously. Leading New Testament scholar Lee Martin McDonald brings together two critically important dimensions of the story of Jesus: what we can know about him in his historical context and what we can responsibly claim about his significance for faith today. McDonald examines the most important aspects of the story of Jesus from his birth to his resurrection and introduces key issues and approaches in the study of the historical Jesus. He also considers faith issues, taking account of theological perspectives that secular historiography cannot address. The book incorporates excerpts from primary sources and includes a map and tables.

1
History, Historical Inquiry, and the Historical Jesus

Since the church’s beginning, Christianity has anchored its faith in a God who acts in history, especially in remarkable events such as the exodus of the Jews from Egypt and the resurrection of Jesus from the dead.1 However, since the time of the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the consequent development of a new methodology for examining history, this belief has become the focal point of numerous debates. Does God work in phenomenal ways that can be observed, detected, or experienced through sensory perceptions? Does the God of the Bible who acts in history even exist? Did the miracles mentioned in the Bible actually occur, or were they simply the product of a primitive worldview that modern individuals can no longer accept? Again, does God intervene in the natural nexus by raising someone from the dead or in other ways by suspending or contravening the laws of nature? Are all such notions to be attributed to a primitive pre-enlightened age when mythological thinking was commonplace?

It is quite remarkable that many of the studies on the Jesus of history show a lack of awareness of how historians do history and the major assumptions of historical inquiry.2 For that reason, before we begin a study of the “historical” Jesus, our initial attention will focus on the nature of history and historical inquiry.

The Conflict between History and Faith

Since the Enlightenment, the notion of God’s activity in human affairs has been questioned and increasingly doubted. Since then a significant number of scholars have questioned whether miracles occur and whether the remarkable activity and fate of Jesus actually happened. At the same time biblical scholars presented a new methodology for understanding the Bible that raised questions about traditional notions regarding miracles and divine activity in human affairs. New criteria were employed that challenged the biblical worldview of a God who acts in history and in phenomenal ways. The new approach to biblical traditions was troublesome to many Jews and Christians. The goal in applying a new historical methodology to biblical traditions appears to have been to make biblical faith more credible and acceptable to modern society, but this had a significant impact on traditional biblical beliefs.

Church Responses to the Enlightenment

As one can readily imagine, many debates ensued within the church. Some theologians responded by claiming that the results of a historical inquiry that in principle or in practice ignores the activity of God in human affairs cannot be a valid tool of biblical inquiry, nor can the church trust its results. However, many theological scholars, including F. C. Baur, Ernest Rénan, Friedrich Schleiermacher, David Strauss, and others, looked for ways to wed biblical and religious thought to contemporary critical thinking. The results of their inquiry had a mixed and uneasy reception in churches. Some biblical scholars concluded that the biblical picture of divine activity in history was mythological; that is, it came from an earlier and more primitive worldview (German, Weltanschauung) that was no longer tenable in the modern age. They wanted to anchor Christian faith in a historical person, Jesus of Nazareth—not in one who was a miracle worker, who died for the sins of the world, and who was raised from the dead, but rather in one who was a great teacher of ethics and wisdom.

This “liberal” picture of Jesus drew converts within the church, but most Christians continued to reject it. How could Christians account for the transformation of the disciples after the death of Jesus and the birth of the Christian faith using the newly established historical methodology that denied, in principle at least, God’s miraculous activity in Jesus, especially his raising Jesus from the dead?

Rudolf Bultmann

In the twentieth century, no New Testament theologian challenged the traditional understanding of Christianity more than the German scholar Rudolf Bultmann. His application of the new strict historical-critical methodology to the biblical writings had the result of denigrating the prominent miracles of God recorded in Scripture. He argued that the true stumbling block of Christian faith was the cross (1 Cor. 1:23) and not its affirmation of the supernatural in history. For him, God acted in a hidden way in the death of Jesus that called his followers to give up all worldly security in order to find security in God alone. He questioned the relevance for modern society of talk about supernatural activity in history and attempted to translate the message of the New Testament into meaningful twentieth-century language. For Bultmann, God acts in “hidden ways” that are not discernible to the scrutiny of historians, but rather to the eyes of faith. The cause-and-effect events of the natural order are not interrupted by supernatural divine activity, but rather God has revealed himself to those who hear his call that comes through the preaching about Jesus who was crucified. A natural historian would have only seen an injustice done to a figure of history, but to those with faith, it was the place where the God who acts in hidden ways supremely acted in history. Bultmann’s goal, however well he achieved it, was aimed at identifying the true “stumbling block” of the Christian message and to present it with clarity to his generation. He did not believe that the true stumbling block of Christian faith could be its focus on miracles and the supernatural elements in the church’s traditional message, but rather on the message that God calls one to abandon all worldly security and, in radical obedience, surrender to the Christ who comes to us in the preaching of the cross and who reveals authentic Christian living.

Bultmann was without question a historian par excellence as well as a philosophical theologian and New Testament scholar. Rarely can anyone be proficient in all three, but Bultmann was; and it is precisely at the point where Christian faith and history intersect that Bultmann brought all three of his interests together to engage modern thinkers in a careful understanding of the Christian message. Whether or not he adequately understood the church’s Easter message or handled the New Testament traditions that confess the resurrection of Jesus will be explored later. As a historian, he challenged Christians of his generation to rethink the viability of their confession of God’s activity in history and to rethink the kind of history in which God does act. He was especially helpful in clarifying some of the major challenges that the church faces in the growing secular society where Christians live.

For Bultmann, God’s hidden acts, as in the case of the assurance of one’s salvation that comes through hearing the preached Word of God, often come in the various circumstances of life when God speaks in ways that are hidden to others. Bultmann asked the church to speak honestly when it speaks historically about God’s activity. While not denying the activity of God in history, he maintained that such activity is not verifiable through the historian’s method of inquiry, nor does it involve a violation of the natural order of events such as we see in the Bible. All such talk, he said, is mythological and grows out of a pre-enlightened view of the world. On the other hand, rather than rejecting the so-called myth in the Bible, that is, the supernatural activity of God in history, Bultmann chose to reinterpret it in terms of human self-understanding. In other words, the belief in the supernatural interventions of God in history was the ancient person’s way of concretizing the “otherworldly” activity of God in terms of “this worldly” experiences. Ancient persons encountered the activity of God in their personal experience of life, but they articulated it in mythological terms that were familiar to them. When properly interpreted (“demythologized”), the activity of God could be seen as a new and authentic self-understanding.

He believed that all events of history are open to the historian’s craft, and, if there is no empirical historical way to affirm, say, the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, then the church had to find an alternative way to confess its faith in the Christ who comes to us in the proclamation of the gospel. He concluded that the results of historical inquiry are the same for the Christian as for the non-Christian, and maintained that Christian faith can never be tied to the ever-changing results of historical inquiry. For him, the Christ according to the flesh, or the Jesus of historical inquiry, is largely irrelevant for Christian faith (2 Cor. 5:16).

The implications for traditional Christian faith that stem from the application of modern historical methodology to the study of the life of Jesus were of little concern to Bultmann. What the historian does with the traditional or biblical Jesus was of no consequence to him. He could say that he “let it [the traditional picture of Jesus in the Gospels] burn peacefully, for I see that that which burns is all fantasy-pictures of the life-of-Jesus theology, that is, the Christ according to the flesh. But the Christ according to the flesh is irrelevant for us; I do not know and do not care to know the inner secrets of the heart of Jesus.”3 For Bultmann, the manner in which the Easter faith arose in the disciples “has been obscured in the tradition by legend and is not of basic importance.”4 In a highly publicized essay, he stated unequivocally that “an historical fact that involves a resurrection from the dead is utterly inconceivable!”5 He concluded that the ancient worldview that made room for angels, demons, miracles, and resurrections was outdated and no longer tenable for Christians in the twentieth century, adding that “it is impossible to use the electric light and the wireless [radio] and to avail ourselves of modern medical and surgical discoveries and at the same time to believe in the New Testament world of spirits and miracles.”6 Referring to the similar conclusions of existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers, Bultmann argued emphatically that “he is as convinced as I am that a corpse cannot come back to life or rise from the grave.”7 For Bultmann, Christian faith in the resurrection meant that “death was not swallowed up into Nothing, but that the same God, who is always coming to us, also comes to us in our death. In this sense, faith in the resurrection is the criterion for whether someone is a Christian or a non-Christian.”8 In terms of Jesus’ resurrection, he could only conclude that Jesus was raised in the apostles’ faith.

After Bultmann

Although many modern theologians disagree with Bultmann’s conclusions, no one can doubt that he raised pivotal questions about our understanding of history that need to be answered prior to our investigation of the New Testament. More than any other biblical scholar of the twentieth century, Bultmann has shown that our worldview plays a significant role in the conclusions we draw from an investigation of the New Testament.

Others after Bultmann applied modern historical criticism to the Bible with equally radical consequences. Because of this, it is essential that we focus briefly on modern historical assumptions and how their application to the message of the New Testament can have an important impact on the results of our investigation. Is modern historical methodology adequate for evaluating or appropriating the fact and significance of God’s work in history, especially the biblical testimony about divine intervention in history through the suspension or contravention of the laws of nature?

Before answering this question, we must first decide what history is and how historians operate today, and seek to understand the contemporary philosophies of history including the methodologies used in examinations of the past. These matters need clarification since the assumptions and methodologies historians bring to biblical inquiry largely determine what conclusions they will draw.

History, Science, and Historical Inquiry

In what follows we will briefly consider the commonly accepted principles and assumptions of contemporary historical inquiry and their impact on an understanding of God’s activity in the story of Jesus and the foundational events for understanding Christian preaching. I will subsequently ask whether there is an approach to history that is credible and allows for the possibility of a faith in a God who acts in history.

The Meaning and Subject of History

The word “history” (derived from the Greek historia, historeō) originally referred to “learned” or “skilled” inquiry or visitation with the purpose of coming to know someone. It came to refer to an account ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Endorsements
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part One: History and the Historical Jesus
• Part Two: Sources for Studying the Historical Jesus
• Part Three: The Story of Jesus in History
• Select Bibliography
• Scripture Index
• Index of Modern Authors
• Subject Index
• Notes
• Back Cover