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A case can be made that anything you read on this page is a waste of
your time...
It is rare
these days to read an introduction to the New Testament or to the
gospels that doesn't contain a chapter on something called the
"Historical Jesus." On the face of it, the title seems a bit ridiculous.
A historical Jesus, as opposed to what? Scholars engaged in the endeavor
will quickly answer: "The Christ of faith." But does such a dichotomy
exist, and if so, can it be clarified by the assumptions
and methods of Biblical scholarship? What does the assertion of such a
dichotomy suggest about the validity and historicity of religious beliefs about Jesus?
What might it suggest about the assumptions or prejudices
of so-called historical criticism when dealing with the claims made
about Jesus by faith communities? I don't pretend to have a definitive
answer to these questions. It may be the case that no answers exist to
be found. But I'll start with a confession: I think anyone on either side of
this debate that doesn't take all of these questions seriously is
probably not worth being taken seriously themselves. We'll lay some
groundwork, then look at some significant voices, then make some
observations. Make of it all what you will.
Back to
the Worldview Question
We should put this issue in its context, and its context is distinctly
Modernist. Recall our previous distinctions between Pre-modern, Modern,
and Postmodern worldviews. For present purposes, the assumptions behind
the Modern worldview are most relevant: Whereas the Pre-Modern worldview
was characterized by the acceptance of both logos and mythos
as means by which truth could be revealed and communicated, Modernism
reduced truth to that which could be reliably proven by the scientific
method. Tradition and Revelation were to be rejected, at least to the
extent that the skeptical mind could find no reasonable basis for
believing in them.
Realize that
this type of thinking, though originating in the so-called "natural
sciences," eventually found its way into virtually every academic
discipline, to the extent that such disciplines were seen as being
objective, and to the extent they were considered to be scientific. This
is an assumption with significant consequences for the Humanities: How,
for example, does one "prove" history in a way that can be considered
scientific? What proof can one offer for a specific interpretation of a
particular piece of literature? Thus begins the quest for "reliable"
method or theory- theory that can trump the apparent (or even the
explicit) intentions of a given source or author. After all, how can we really know
what an author intended, especially if the author is no longer alive?
Meaning is always shaped by context, sometimes even subconsciously...is
it not possible that the well-trained critic could illuminate the
meaning of a given text even better that the author, if the proper
method or theory is followed? Questions and assumptions such as these are the bedrock of
modern historical inquiry.
And inquiry
into the "Historical Jesus" is unmistakably modern. Certainly, there
were Pre-modern authors who sought to assert or prove the historicity of
the life of Jesus. But such authors were always quite comfortable with
relying upon wisdom received from respected predecessors, rather than
treating such sources with a hermeneutics of skepticism. Therefore,
pre-modern quests for the Jesus of history amounted to little more than
attempts to resolve apparent contradictions between gospel accounts. Not
so for the modern quest (or rather, "quests"- most scholars would argue
that there have been at least three distinct quests in the last two
centuries), which sees the gospels as equivalent to a tell (or
artificial mound; an overused analogy from archaeology), with "layers"
of interpretation, bias, opinion, etc. that have built up and must be
carefully, methodically peeled away. Beneath them somewhere might lie a
skeleton or fragment of the real Jesus, waiting to be reassembled to
whatever extent possible by the expertise of modern biblical
scholarship, then revealed in all his raw humanness to a grateful
public; a triumph not of insightful religious contemplation but of
scholarly rigor and method. Indeed it is almost axiomatic that whatever
such scholarship reveals, it will contrast sharply with the claims made
about Jesus by organized religion and will therefore challenge the
validity of such claims, making complacent or reactionary religious
leaders nervous, to say the least.
I have no
interest in dissecting the underlying assumptions of this approach at
present. For now I will only point out that, just as the Protestant
Reformation produced not one corrected and reinvigorated Christianity,
but countless denominations and distinctions, so too has the quest for
the historical Jesus and the scholarly "protest" against the Dogmatism
of Organized Christianity produced not one accurate and reliable picture
of the Jew from Nazareth, but dozens: Approximately one for every author
with an opinion on the subject. You'd think that such a plethora of
"Real" Jesuses, all supposedly the product of the same set of
assumptions and reliable methodology, would lead scholars to have doubts
about that method or even the validity of the whole enterprise. You'd
think.
So Why
Bother?
In his recent book Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine, author and
literary critic Harold Bloom voiced his concern with the endless
questing for a historical Jesus, claiming that
...every
searcher for the "historical" Jesus invariably discovers again
herself or himself in Jesus. How could it be otherwise? This is
hardly deplorable, particularly in the United States, where Jesus
has been an American nondenominational Protestant for the last two
centuries. (pp21-22)
Bloom's
observation is hardly a new one; in fact it can be traced back to one of
the most important of the Questers: The 19th Century scholar and
humanitarian Albert Schweitzer. In his Quest of the Historical Jesus,
Schweitzer made the same observation as Bloom: That scholars involved in
the quest for a historical Jesus inevitably wind up producing a Jesus
who sounds an awful lot like the scholar doing the questing. Of course,
this didn't stop Schweitzer from making his own contribution, and it
hasn't stopped quite a few scholars from beginning their own books with
an acknowledgement of Schweitzer's warning, a claim to some unique
insight or methodological tweak that "controls" for their own bias, then
a fearless plodding into the same murky waters of "Jesus scholarship."
See, for example, the opening chapters of Bart Ehrman's Jesus:
Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium.
And yet, for
all the difficulties, contradictions, hypocrisies and fickleness of
historical Jesus scholars and scholarship, the quest and the questions
remain irresistible: Who was Jesus? To what extent is the historical
person reflected in the canonical and non-canonical gospels? In
Christian dogma? There must be some way to formulate a reasonable
conjecture, to know that faith or its rejection is grounded in something
real, something historical, something knowable. Otherwise, the only
basis for faith is itself faith: Faith in the reliability of a received
tradition. I recognize that as a Catholic, my own church considers that
tradition to be guided by the holy Spirit and to be just as
authoritative as the scriptures, but that too is a historical claim that
is not exempted from reasonable inquiry. And any questions about the
nature of that claim will lead inevitably to questions about the nature
and identity of Jesus of Nazareth.
A Brief
History of the Quest
As I previously stated, there is a sense in which the quest for the
historical Jesus can be said to have begun the moment the Jesus of
History vanished from our presence, whether he ascended into heaven or
his body was secretly reburied (as is claimed in The Jesus Family Tomb
and the related documentary The Lost Tomb of Jesus) or otherwise
disposed of. Even the canonical and non-canonical gospels can be seen as
literary claims to the identity of the true Jesus. But modern scholars
rightly point out that such literature is more concerned with what Jesus
means than with journalistic fact recording (do we even believe in that
anymore?), thus it is useful as possible evidence but cannot be treated
as adequate reconstruction.
Methodological Considerations
A fair place to begin our look at the current quest is with the very
thing with which that quest seems most preoccupied: Method. If we were
to look at the quest as an attempt to structure a valid and sound
argument (which it is), then we might say that the method would be the
agreed-upon first premise. everything else should be built upon it. |
