Have You Heard of the Historical Jesus?
An Overview of the Quests and Approaches to the Jesus of History
What comes to mind when someone talks about the “historical Jesus”? Have you encountered this idea before, either from others or from skeptics and mythicists? What do we mean when we say the “historical Jesus”? For the average Christian, I’m guessing this might be an odd phrase since it’s taken for granted that the Gospels give a historical account of Jesus. “Historical Jesus” is a truism if they ever had heard one. So, why do scholars talk about the “historical Jesus”? Previous generations of scholarship, especially from the Enlightenment period, made a separation between the “historical Jesus,” or the “Jesus of history,” and the “Christ of faith.” There was a skepticism that was applied to the Gospels that attempted to sort out what was fact or fiction when it came to Christianity’s understanding of Jesus, particularly in the Gospels. I’ll talk about this more, but here’s what is typically meant by “historical Jesus” scholarships, according to Nijay:
This approach to studying Jesus is about analyzing the sources (including the canonical Gospels) carefully and developing as well as possible a holistic theory about his life, influences, aim, and actions.1
3 Quests for the Historical Jesus
Given this understanding, let’s talk about those previous generations of historical Jesus scholarship. In New Testament studies, scholars typically talk about three “quests” for the Historical Jesus. During the Enlightenment, a paradigm shift happened among scholars who began using a fancy new way of studying history called the “historical-critical method,” which would be used to search for the historical Jesus.
First Quest
The first quest is associated with the work of Hermann Reimarus (1694–1768). Using the historical-critical method, which excluded all things supernatural, Jesus’ miracles were set aside so historians could have the “real” Jesus stand up. Reimarus saw Jesus only as a human who failed at what he set out to do. Reimarus seems to have set a precedent for scholars to separate fact from fiction within the Gospels in order to get at the “real” person and ministry of Jesus.
David F. Strauss (1808–74) continues with the historical-critical method but departs from Reimarus’ view and studies the Gospels as myths - “formative stories that shape the identity of a community, such as the early Christians.”2 Strauss’ work pushed the needle forward for scholarships in that he saw the Gospels as theological narratives and literature that had a bearing on a real community.
William Wrede (1859–1906) contributed with the well-known “messianic secret” within the Gospels. Wrede understood the importance of the author’s contribution to the Gospels as theological narratives. Interestingly, he thought that those passages where Jesus told his disciples to be silent about his identity reflected the gospel writers’ humiliation over the fact that many Jews didn’t come to believe Jesus in response to his message. This led many to be skeptical of the motives of the gospel writers and the historical reliability of the Gospels.
At the dawn of the twentieth-century, we see a significant pivotal within this first quest with Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965). Schweitzer challenged previous questers by focusing on Jesus’ eschatological mission, a point massively overlooked or downplayed in the first quest. Jesus had a mission to usher in the end times and it wasn’t being taken seriously enough. For Schweitzer, though, Jesus wasn’t the main character of his own story.
Schweitzer presented Jesus as an eschatological prophet heralding the coming of a Son of Man (not Jesus himself). When this Son of Man failed to show up, Jesus adopted this role, and he believed his own death would prompt God’s kingdom to come—but it didn’t. Jesus was wrong and his mission a failure.3
Despite Jesus being a failure, Schweitzer made Jesus strange again as an ancient figure who inspired the multitudes and left an influential legacy of self-sacrifice.
After Schweitzer, “questing” for the historical Jesus seemed to have dipped and NT scholarship shifted its gaze to the existentialist work of Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976). Bultmann found that questions about the historical Jesus via the “historical-critical method” were irrelevant and insignificant. For him, the Gospels weren’t about ‘historicity’ but about the reader’s existential response to the mythic narrative of the “Christ of Faith.” In a certain sense, Bultmann was right to refocus on the personal invitation to faith that the Gospels provide readers. As a professor, however, this didn’t prevent his students from taking up historical questions.
Second or “New” Quest
Ernst Käsemann (1906–98) was a student of Bultmann and took Jesus scholarship into a “new quest.” Agreeing with the existential component of the Gospels’ call to faith in Jesus, Käsemann also believed that studying Jesus as a historical figure with an earthly ministry was important. Important for Käsemann was the methodology and retrieval of Jesus’ words with a certain exactness.4
With Käsemann, Norman Perrin (1920–76) also considered it vital to have a methodology for retrieving the historical Jesus, particularly discerning the reliability of his words and deeds recorded in the Gospels. So, he developed historical criteria that aimed to do just that.
Some Criteria for the ‘Historical-Critical’ Method
There are more criteria than the three Nijay provides in his chapter, but this is just to give a flavor of some of the most significant criteria.
Dissimilarity
Dissimilarity is about discerning which information in the Gospels about Jesus is both “striking and distinctive,” particularly about known conventions of Judaism in the first-century and even when compared to the beliefs and theological emphases of the early church. This criterion is about making sure there are not any later Christian traditions being imposed on Jesus.
Multiple Attestation
Multiple attestation is basically about trying to corroborate the sources available, seeing “the value of multiple sources confirming a particular event, story, or teaching.”5 We have four different Gospels that attest to Jesus of Nazareth, which is multiple attestation, and we also have sources outside the New Testament, both Jewish and Roman, that help corroborate Jesus as a historical figure.
Embarrassment
Embarrassment is the idea that historians could count as authentic embarrassing or strange sayings and words of Jesus that would not benefit early Christians to fabricate. That Jesus insisted on being baptized himself was probably strange to early Christians because it was held that he was without sin and didn’t need repentance or his sins forgiven. But the strangeness provides credence to its historical authenticity since there wouldn’t have been any benefits to making up this scene.
Overall, some would discount some or all the criteria that Perrin and others offered for various reasons. For our sake, it’s important to know that the full gamut of criteria is still being used by scholars today.
Third Quest
Around the same time as the second quest (1980s), a new quest had begun. This quest is perhaps most familiar today because it focused, and continues to focus, on the “Jewish Jesus” and interpreting the Gospels in light of the New Testament’s Jew and Roman background. Jesus didn’t reject his own Jewish identity and start a brand new religion, as previous questers seemed to have supposed. Rather, Jesus was a devout Jew who believed that he was fulfilling the law and the prophets and called his fellow Jews to repentance and faith.
The ‘Jesus Seminar’
During this third quest, however, some scholars continued with the concerns of the second quest. A large group, which included many biblical scholars, formed the Jesus Seminar that judged the historical authenticity or inauthenticity of many of the sayings and stories of Jesus. Only sixteen to eighteen percent of the material they judged was deemed authentic.6 There were about 9 to 15 statements or profiles about the historical Jesus that the Seminar wrote, but the following are the ones that all the scholars involved agreed upon:
1. Jesus of Nazareth did not refer to himself as the Messiah, nor did he claim to be a divine being who descended to earth from heaven in order to die as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.
2. At the heart of Jesus’ teaching and actions was a vision of a life under the reign of God (or, in the empire of God) in which God’s generosity and goodness is regarded as the model and measure of human life.
3. Jesus did not hold an apocalyptic view of the reign (or kingdom) of God—that by direct intervention God was about to bring history to an end and bring a new, perfect order of life into being. Rather, in Jesus’ teaching the reign of God is a vision of what life in this world could be, not a vision of life in a future world that would soon be brought into being by a miraculous act of God.7
Of course, the Seminar isn’t without its critics, who say their approach in the first place is very flawed. Because I haven’t robustly presented the Seminar, so I will not go into the reasons that are given since the critiques might not make sense unless you know more about their methodology and some of the concerning results.8 What we know is that critics of the Seminar believe that we can know more about the historical Jesus than the Seminar claimed and that we can construct Jesus’ life reliably and with confidence.
Jesus of Nazareth: Four Different Approaches
There have been many ways that the historical Jesus has been approached, but Nijay distills four prominent and different approaches. A caveat to these approaches is that they depend on “what kind of material is included and excluded, and how much of that material is taken at face value.”9 Taking for granted Markan priority and the existence of Q material, whether the Gospel of John is attempting to provide a historical depiction of Jesus, and so on shape the various approaches given by the following scholars.
The Prophet
There’s widespread agreement that the Gospels portray Jesus as a prophet (e.g., Mt 16:14; 21:22: 21:26 and Lk 24:19). What kind of prophet he was seems up for debate. Prophets in the ancient were not limited to foretelling the future as we might often imagine today. Often, they were outsiders and charismatic and mystical figures who did wonders and miracles. Geza Vermes, for example, sees Jesus as belonging on the very edge of acceptable Judaism and resembles Honi the Circle Drawer and Hanina ben Dosa, two known contemporary spiritual miracle workers of his time.
Along this line is Marcus Borg, who sees Jesus as a Jewish mystic figure who used himself as a conduit of God’s new way to relate to Israel by the Spirit. Pivoting from this but drawing on Schweitzer, E. P. Sanders saw Jesus as an eschatological prophet who pronounced God’s future judgment of Israel and the coming of a new world. In his earlier scholarship, Dale Allison echoed Sanders, calling Jesus the “millenarian prophet” who taught about a future dispensation where Israel will be restored and a great tribulation will occur before the end of the millennium.
The Wise Sage
Other scholars have made a point to argue that Jesus was a wise sage or philosopher. Taking their lifestyles and philosophy from Diogenes centuries before, Cynics were known in the time of Jesus as a person who lived a rugged lifestyle and valued “freedom of speech, self-sufficiency, and indifference (apathy).”10 Jesus’ instruction to his disciples to not appear like itinerate philosophers in Luke 10 seems to have invited scholars to compare Jesus’ life and teachings with those of the Cynics. Rather than the eschatological prophet, Jesus’ pithy sayings and wise teachings made him a bona fide Hellenistic Jewish philosopher. This emphasis only works if there’s skepticism about the eschatological and other materials in the canonical Gospels.
John Dominic Crossan is a scholar who has argued that Jesus was a Cynic Jewish philosophy. Crossan claims that John the Baptizer’s message initially attracted Jesus but began proclaiming his own message which was directed at the oppressive and classist economic realities in his context. Ben Witherington III holds a more balanced emphasis that doesn’t overemphasize Jesus as a sage but affirms this and more about him. Witherington seems to be highlighting this aspect of Christ’s identity within a traditional Christology. Jesus was not just a wise man, but the embodiment of God’s Wisdom who taught accordingly.
The Social Revolutionary
Rather than speaking to the words of Jesus, a social revolutionary emphasis is most interested in the actions of Jesus. Richard Horsley, for example, sees Jesus as an agent of socio-political change. Jesus was more concerned about calling out and challenging the colonial oppression of Rome than about being a traveling teacher of wisdom. Nijay further characterizes this position, stating that “Jesus’s emphasis on the kingdom of God did not pertain to spiritual insight into a heavenly institution; it is the vision of a real community that is just and peaceable for all.”11 There’s overlap here with the Crossan’s view of Jesus, which legitimately recognizes Jesus’ actions that show his concern for soci-political and socio-economic disparities of people under the shadow of the empire.
The Messiah
Recalling that questing for the historical Jesus has always involved questioning the authenticity of the canonical Gospels in many ways, it’s not as surprising that Jesus’ self-understanding as Israel’s Messiah is also questioned. The question arises with claims that Judaism wasn’t monolithic in the time of Jesus nor was the concept of the messiah well-developed and widely accepted. However, the concept is there and it wasn’t a fringe idea. Nevertheless, Jews had ideas about the messiah, and this title or designation best fits the historical data about Jesus in the Gospels. For N. T. Wright, messianic claims made by Jesus himself and others historically make a lot of sense. Jesus was an eschatological prophet, wise sage, a social revolutionary as Israel’s Messiah, “as a representative leader of his people, a king, who brought redemption to his people by taking sin and death upon himself.”12
Wright posits that if Jesus was crucified—as almost all Jesus scholars agree that he was—he must have operated in such a public and political manner that he was deserving of public execution in the eyes of Jews and Romans; such a damnation would make sense for a pretender king or a messiah.13
Wright has been very influential in the field of New Testament studies because, on both a popular and academic level, he has brought to light a large stream of modern scholarship that reads Jesus in light of Second Temple literature.
Questioning the Quest as a Whole
Questing for the historical Jesus hasn’t been limited to the methods, figures, and views discussed here. Questing has gone in many directions, some fruitful and some not so much. Scholars have searched for the historical Jesus, but I suppose we might ask: have they found him? Well, given the dominance of the historical-critical method, some are skeptical about finding the “historical Jesus” if it means “cutting and pasting sources together” in whatever sophisticated way scholars choose. Morna Hooker, in 1970, kickstarted a group of scholars to abandon and call for the demise of the criteria of authenticity. As Nijay puts it, Hooker “basically claimed that if all you have is a hammer, then everything you see is nails; that is, the tools used by questers are flawed and limited at best and should be abandoned.”14
Scot McKnight moves from skepticism to pessimism about the project of the quest. He thinks it’s downright futile because it was flawed in many ways, which he states in the article he wrote for Christianity Today entitled “The Jesus Will Never Know.”15 In his own words:
As a historian I think I can prove that Jesus died and that he thought his death was atoning. I think I can establish that the tomb was empty and that resurrection is the best explanation for the empty tomb. But one thing the historical method cannot prove is that Jesus died for our sins and was raised for our justification. At some point, historical methods run out of steam and energy. Historical Jesus studies cannot get us to the point where the Holy Spirit and the church can take us. I know that once I was blind and that I can now see. I know that historical methods did not give me sight. They can't. Faith cannot be completely based on what the historian can prove.16
While his words are true, there is still merit in studying the “historical Jesus” for the sake of historical inquiry. New methods, findings, and ideas continue to breathe new life into this scholarship and perhaps we can all be less pessimistic about what it will find, knowing that historical methods will not “prove” the essential theological claims of Christianity.
Conclusion
What’s been clear to many today is that historical Jesus scholars can often fall into the trap of confirmation bias, confirming their presuppositions and agendas. In essence, they find the Jesus they were searching for. Sources can have an impact on this as well, for they often determine where the historical investigation goes. For example. recall how scholars compared Jesus to Cynics and so emphasized Jesus as a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher. But that emphasis is dependent on doubting eschatological material attributed to Jesus in the canonical Gospels. As Nijay summarizes nicely, contentions among historical Jesus scholars are “disagreement about the best sources that count for evidence and how they ought to be weighed.”17
Method continues to be debated, too, since some prefer the scrupulous practice of applying specific criteria to individual words, phrases, and passages in various kinds of sources. Others would prefer to examine the sources more generally and with a different approach than the historical-critical method. The background of the individual scholar plays a key role in their research because they have specific knowledge and skills that can be fruitfully applied to historical Jesus scholarship (e.g., Jewish scholars studying the Jewishness of Jesus or Classics scholars studying the Greek and Roman context of Jesus). All scholars have academic “baggage,” if you will, that influences their confirmation bias, use of sources, and method(s).
Nijay has his reflections on what the future of historical Jesus research holds, but I will say that it looks like the questing won’t stop but will continue to branch off and keep questing with new, non-historical-critical methods, like an interdisciplinary approach, and by continued examination into the Jewish and Greco-Roman background.
Nijay K. Gupta, A Beginner's Guide to New Testament Studies: Understanding Key Debates (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2020), Kindle Edition, 16.
Gupta, A Beginner's Guide to New Testament Studies, 16.
Gupta, 17.
But there was another concern Käsemann had, as Nijay notes: “In the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust, Käsemann considered it crucial to keep the knowledge of Jesus rooted in history, so people would not be tempted to remake Jesus in their own image, as some Nazis and Nazi sympathizers had done” (Ibid., 18).
Ibid., 19.
They state that “[a]mong the findings is that, in the judgment of the Jesus Seminar Scholars, about 18 percent of the sayings and 16 percent of the deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels are authentic.” See “The Jesus Seminar,” Westar Institute, accessed May 18, 2024, https://www.westarinstitute.org/about/the-jesus-seminar.
See “Jesus Seminar Phase 3: Profiles of Jesus,” Westar Institute, accessed May 18, 2024, https://www.westarinstitute.org/seminars/jesus-seminar-phase-3-profiles-of-jesus.
Nijay provides several comments about what the critics say: “First of all, their “scientific” system is highly restrictive and leads to a collection of somewhat random information. Second, it is noticeable that the historical Jesus that emerges is not very Jewish—their strict application of the criterion of dissimilarity tends to produce a contextless, heritage-less Jesus. Third, given the meager information they surmise that one can know about the historical Jesus, is it even possible to construct a life of Jesus with any confidence or to any profitable end? For these reasons and others, the influence and prominence of the Jesus Seminar has largely waned, but historical work of this nature continues in many different circles.” See Gupta, 21.
Ibid., 21.
Ibid., 22.
Ibid., 24.
Ibid., 25.
Ibid., 25-26.
Ibid., 26.
Scot McKnight, “The Jesus We’ll Never Know,” ChristianityToday.com (Christianity Today, April 9, 2010), https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/april/15.22.html.
McKnight, “The Jesus We’ll Never Know.”
Gupta, 28.