Jesus as a Figure in History

How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee

Mark Allan Powell

• Publisher: Westminster John Knox Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9781611642391
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Études bibliques

Here is the first comprehensive, balanced account of historical Jesus studies. Beginning with brief discussions of the early days of historical research into the person of Jesus and the methods developed by researchers at the time, Mark Allen Powell offers insightful overviews of some of the most important participants in the contemporary Jesus quests.

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HISTORIANS DISCOVER JESUS

He comes to us as one unknown.

—Albert Schweitzer (1906)¹

I do indeed think that we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.

—Rudolf Bultmann (1926)²

No one is any longer in the position to write a life of Jesus.

—Günther Bornkamm (1956)³

We can know quite a lot about Jesus; not enough to write a modern-style biography, including the colour of the subject’s hair, and what he liked for breakfast, but quite a lot.

—N. T. Wright (1996)⁴

Historians search for Jesus for a variety of reasons. Some may be intellectually curious or intrigued by the challenge. Some hope to facilitate dialogue between religion and secular society. Some may wish to substantiate the Christian faith while others may want to discredit it. Many, no doubt, just want to submit their faith to honest scrutiny in the belief that only then can it be confessed with integrity. For whatever reason, the historian’s quest for Jesus has been proceeding by fits and starts for two centuries now, though never with more vigor than today. Although this book is primarily concerned with the flood of Jesus scholarship produced in the last decade of the twentieth century, we should begin with a survey of what has come before.

Gospel Harmonies

Prior to the Enlightenment, Jesus was not studied as a historical figure in the modern sense. Non-Christian scholars took little or no interest in him and Christian scholars simply regarded the biblical accounts as straightforward historical records of his life. One problem, however, was noted early on: The Bible presents four different records of Jesus’ life and they do not always seem to agree on what they report concerning him. Thus, for many centuries, creating a historical biography of Jesus was basically a matter of harmonizing the four Gospel narratives. This was actually done for the first time less than a hundred years after the Gospels themselves were written. A Mesopotamian Christian named Tatian wove the four Gospel accounts together into one continuous narrative, which he called the Diatessaron (“four-in-one”). The work was translated into several languages and was widely used for three hundred years. The Syriac version appears to have replaced the four individual Gospels in some churches.

We can only imagine what sort of decisions Tatian and others like him had to make as they sought to harmonize the Gospels. First would be the simple question of chronology: Even if we grant that Jesus did all of the things reported in all of the Gospels, we will still have to ask in what order he did these things. Creating one story from four forces the scholar to place some events ahead of others. In addition, we would have to ask about repetition. All four Gospels contain stories of Jesus turning over tables in the Jerusalem temple (Matt. 21:12–17; Mark 11:15–19; Luke 19:45–48; John 2:13–17). Do we assume that these are four reports of the same event? In the first three Gospels, the account comes near the end of the story, but in John it comes near the beginning. Did Jesus turn over tables in the temple twice? Some thirteen hundred years later, Martin Luther, confronted with precisely the same problem, would write, “The Gospels follow no order in recording the acts and miracles of Jesus, and the matter is not, after all, of much importance. If a difficulty arises in regard to the Holy Scripture and we cannot solve it, we must just let it alone.”⁵

There also would be the question of contradiction. In Matthew 8:5–13, a centurion comes to Jesus in Capernaum and asks that Jesus heal his servant, while in Luke 7:1–10, the same centurion sends Jewish elders to ask Jesus to heal his servant. The words attributed to the centurion (Matt. 8:8–9) or to his friends (Luke 7:6–8) are almost identical. Assuming these are two reports of the same story, how are they to be harmonized? It seems very unlikely that these are separate reports of two events, that Jesus healed this poor man from a distance twice, saying the same things both times (once to the centurion’s representatives and once to the centurion himself). The latter view has actually been tried⁶ and is still sometimes asserted by fundamentalists,⁷ but for the most part has been found wanting. But if the two stories report the same event, should a Gospel harmony such as Tatian’s have the centurion go to Jesus in person, send a delegation, or both? Some scholars, notably John Calvin, despaired of producing a continuous narrative like the Diatessaron and simply presented similar stories from different Gospels side by side in parallel columns.⁸

In producing Gospel harmonies, scholars were already asking historical questions about Jesus, but they did so within a context of faith, not skepticism. All this changed with the Enlightenment, the European movement that exalted the use of reason as the best means for discovering truth. The Enlightenment emphasized the orderliness of nature and so encouraged disciplined scholarship that adhered to well-defined methods for testing and verifying hypotheses. It furthered the acquisition of knowledge and the development of critical thinking. Though initially a philosophical movement (featuring such luminaries as Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Voltaire), the new orientation led to tremendous advances in science and mathematics. Eventually, its effects were felt on politics and on religion. One legacy of the Enlightenment for Western thought was a lasting distrust of assertions that cannot be verified. The distinction between religious faith and superstition appeared to be no more than a matter of perspective.

“Lives” of Jesus

During the period following the Enlightenment, scholars embarked on what came to be known as “the quest for the historical Jesus.” They went beyond the production of Gospel harmonies to write biographies, called Lives of Jesus. A Life of Jesus might draw heavily upon harmonization of the Gospel accounts but it differed in at least three ways. It would (1) typically impose some grand scheme or hypothesis upon the material that allowed everything to be interpreted in accord with a consistent paradigm (for example, “Jesus was a social reformer” or “Jesus was a religious mystic”), (2) exclude material in the Gospels that did not fit with this paradigm, submitting the biblical record to the author’s critical judgment of what seemed most likely to be correct, and (3) include reflection about Jesus not derived from the Gospels, attempting to fill in gaps in the biblical record with the author’s own projections concerning Jesus’ motivations, goals, or self-understanding.

Hundreds of these Lives of Jesus were produced, mainly during the nineteenth century. Below is a sampling of some of the most influential.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) believed Jesus was an unsuccessful political claimant who thought it was his destiny to be established by God as king of the restored people of Israel. Reimarus was a respected professor of Oriental languages at the University of Hamburg and his works on Jesus were not published until after his death. Apparently, he feared retribution for his controversial views during his lifetime. In any case, fragments of a large unpublished manuscript were printed between 1774 and 1778, and these mark what many consider to be the beginning of the quest for the historical Jesus.⁹ The audacity of Reimarus’s claims flew in the face of traditional pious scholarship and demanded engagement on historical grounds. Reimarus interpreted all of the passages in the New Testament where Jesus speaks of “the kingdom of God” or “the kingdom of heaven” as references to a new political reality about to be established on earth. Thus, Reimarus said, Jesus believed he was the Messiah (or “Christ”), but he meant this in a worldly sense. He thought that God was going to deliver the people of Israel from bondage to the Romans and create a new and powerful kingdom on earth where Jesus himself would rule as king. This is why he was executed, charged with the crime of claiming to be the King of the Jews (Matt. 27:37). This is also why, when he died, he cried out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46). He realized in his last moments that God had failed him, that his hopes had been misplaced. His disciples, however, were unable to accept this outcome. Not wanting to return to their mundane lives in Galilee, they stole his body from its tomb, claimed he had been raised from the dead (see Matt. 28:11–15), and made up a new story about how Jesus had died willingly as an atonement for sins. The message of the kingdom was spiritualized and the teaching of the failed religious fanatic was transformed into a religion promising salvation after death to those who joined an organization led by his followers. Thus, “the new system of a suffering spiritual savior, which no one had ever known or thought before, was invented only because the first hopes had failed.”¹⁰ Despite its radical (and ultimately untenable) ideas, Reimarus’s work raised questions and issues that had not been examined previously. Albert Schweitzer, who completely disagreed with the main thesis, nevertheless hailed its publication as “one of the greatest events in the history of criticism.” As a side note, he also called it “a masterpiece of general literature,” reflecting on the passion with which Reimarus spewed his venom against Christian religion: “It is as though the fires of a volcano were painting lurid pictures upon dark clouds. Seldom has there been a hate so eloquent, so lofty a scorn.”¹¹

Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus (1761–1851) was a veteran rationalist who became best known for offering naturalistic explanations for miracle stories reported in the Gospels. As professor of theology at the University of Heidelberg he published a two-volume work on the life of Jesus in 1828.¹² In essence, it was a Gospel harmony with explanatory notes. Paulus accepted the miracle stories as reports of historical events, but reasoned that a primitive knowledge of the laws of nature led people in biblical times to regard as supernatural occurrences what the advancement of knowledge has rendered understandable. For example, Jesus may have appeared to walk on water when he strode along the shore in a mist and he may have received credit for stilling a storm when the weather coincidentally improved after he awoke from sleep on a boat trip. Jesus healed people by improving their psychological disposition or, sometimes, by applying medicines mixed with mud (John 9:6) or saliva (Mark 8:23). Likewise, his disciples were provided with medicinal oil to use for curing certain ailments (Mark 6:13). The story of the feeding of the five thousand recalls a time when Jesus and his disciples generously shared their own provisions with those who had none, inspiring others in the crowd to do the same until everyone was satisfied. Paulus’s book evoked a good deal of opposition at the time of its appearance, but its ideas continued (and still continue) to resurface, especially in writings of those who do not otherwise know what to do with the miracles.

David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) appealed to modern understandings of mythology to steer a middle course between naive acceptance of Gospel stories and the sort of simplistic explanations for these stories offered by Paulus. In 1835, Strauss published The Life of Jesus Critically Examined, a two-volume work over fourteen hundred pages in length.¹³ He called for unbiased historical research to be done on the Gospels, establishing an orientation for scholarship that is still followed by many today. He discerned, for instance, that the stories in the first three Gospels are less developed than those in John which, accordingly, is the least valuable book for historical reconstruction. Still, Strauss regarded most of the stories in all of the Gospels as myths, developed often on the pattern of Old ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Historians Discover Jesus
• 2. Sources and Criteria
• 3. Snapshots: Contemporary Images of Jesus
• 4. The Jesus Seminar
• 5. John Dominic Crossan
• 6. Marcus J. Borg
• 7. E. P. Sanders
• 8. John P. Meier
• 9. N. T. Wright
• 10. The Quest Continues: Issues and Concerns
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Scripture and Ancient Sources
• Authors