The Quests for the Historical Jesus
It has become fashionable in the past several hundred years to attack the Christian faith in a unique and allegedly scholarly manner. Prominent universities, critics, skeptics, and scholars try to deny what the New Testament record reveals about Jesus Christ. Generally, most people will accept Jesus as a moral teacher whose followers developed His teachings into a religion, but what they will not accept is the testimony of Christ and Holy Writ.
A prominent movement has come about that is proposing that there was a historical Jesus who was the inspiration for the Jesus of the New Testament. However, this historical Jesus is believed to be a separate person from the Christ of the Gospel accounts.1 The quest for the historical Jesus is divided into three basic quests. Nearly all of the quests can be traced back to a late 18th century German scholar, Herman Reimarus (1694-1768). Reimarus’ work unofficially started the First Quest, which was almost entirely an exclusive product of German scholarship. The First Quest was deeply entrenched in the naturalistic mindset of the Enlightenment. For instance, the First Quest argued that miracles were not possible and since miracles did not occur then any references to miracles should be categorized in the sphere of the “mytho-poetic.”
It was in the 19th century that the First Quest officially began with David Strauss’ publication Das Leben Jesu (1835-1836). He believed “that the Gospels could no longer be read straightforwardly as unvarnished historical records of what Jesus actually said and did.” Strauss’ argument was that one must acknowledge the use of myth in the Gospel accounts.2 Others followed the lead of Strauss such as Joseph Ernest Renan’s Vie de Jésus (1860). It was the contention of Strauss that “unbiased historical research” needed to be done to truly discern whom Jesus of Nazareth was. Stephan Evans provides an answer as to why Strauss could no longer accept the testimony of the evangelists: “The quick answer is simply ‘modernity.’” In the era of the Enlightenment, intense optimism concerning man’s reason quickly led to the renunciation of the supernatural. Reports of miracles and resurrections were now to be considered as pre-scientific and mythological.3 It was because so much of the Gospels dealt with the supernatural that the New Testament documents were no longer considered to be historical.
The First Quest ended with Albert Schweitzer’s classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906). Schweitzer’s classic work challenged the objectivity of the scholarship involved in the quest. It was his conclusion that most of the attempts to discover the historical Jesus revealed more about the authors themselves. Schweitzer’s research proved that the scholars of the First Quest had (as one example) distorted the eschatological and apocalyptic teachings and life of Christ rather than actually clarify whom Jesus of Nazareth was.
The next period to result was that of “No Quest,” wherein it was determined that nothing could be known of the historical Jesus. Rudolph Bultmann, a liberal theologian, concluded that one could know virtually nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus.4 Eventually the Second, or New, Quest was begun. During the Second Quest, the use of higher criticism such as form criticism (an approach that seeks to determine genre, setting, structure, and intention of each element of the Gospels in hopes of reconstructing the earliest tradition and also seeks to form a relationship between the texts and the people and customs of ancient Israel) and redaction criticism (an approach that focuses on the Gospels as they exist in their entirety, rather than on the transmission process) was an exciting tool because it was new.
The Second Quest began in the 1940’s with students of Rudolf Bultmann. It was his assumption that not only could there be little information gathered concerning the historical Jesus, but also that only certain events such as His life and death could be documented as being accurate. Even though the Second Quest proceeded with predominantly moderate expectations as to what could be determined about the historical Jesus, it did maintain the firm conviction that there was some information that could be discovered concerning the historical Jesus. The deep entrenchment of the First Quest in the naturalistic mindset of the Enlightenment was still quite dominant in the Second Quest.
The Second Quest was largely cynical toward objective reality (a feature that is all too common of the ever developing postmodernism that is so common in this current age). Robert L. Reymond writes, “…every theory that would endorse the idea that literal truth cannot be revealed or communicated propositionally from God to man because language per se is incapable of such is ultimately an attack against Jesus Christ.”5 Likewise, Lightner believes that any unwillingness to not believe in the knowability of revelation as doctrine is direct opposition against Jesus’ earthly ministry as Prophet, Teacher, and Messiah.6 The fact is that God has provided revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus Christ, who is equally and fully God.
In the mid-1970’s the Third Quest for the historical Jesus began with the rise of a new enthusiasm about the prospects of historical study.7 New archaeological and manuscript research together with the latest findings in the fields of anthropology and sociology has greatly increased the knowledge of Palestine in the days of Jesus. The Third Quest seeks to know who Jesus was by understanding the world in which He lived. It is noteworthy that the method of scholarship in the Third Quest is very different than the previous two quests. Additionally, the discoveries proposed by Third Quest scholarship are in numerous ways very different than the First and Second Quest.
For instance, Third Quest scholarship is predominantly differentiated from the previous quests because of its deep awareness of the necessity to consign the historical Jesus into a meaningful context of the social and cultural environment of 1st century Palestine. In contrast to the First and Second Quest, the conclusions of the Third Quest have been quite acquiescent to those particular doctrines that are held by conservative Christian scholarship. However, it must be readily stated that the Third Quest still persistently rejects the majority of the miracles of Jesus,8 the “I AM” statements made by Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus.
The Jesus Seminar (or perhaps the Last, or Fourth, Quest) labors hard to appear in good favor with the scholarship of the Third Quest, but any kind of sound investigation will demonstrate that the Jesus Seminar is actually the unsound suppositions proposed by the Second Quest. Objectivity toward the propositions of the Jesus Seminar demonstrates the movement to be the result of the terrible logic in the methodology of the First Quest in combination with the prominent modernity of the Second Quest. In actuality, the Jesus Seminar is the aftereffect of the cynical and existential mindset of modernity that led into the development of the postmodern mindset. In other words, the Jesus Seminar is the result of the failed efforts of modernity.9
From Jesus to Christ
The Public Broadcasting System (PBS) aired a television program entitled “From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians.” The documentary is stated to be “an intellectual and visual guide to the new and controversial historical evidence which challenges familiar assumptions about the life of Jesus and the epic rise of Christianity.”10 At one point in the PBS special (Part I) the narrator comments that “with so little evidence to go by, archaeologists must sift the clues and scholars decode the stories told by the first followers of Jesus.” It is obvious that the various differences between in the Gospel records of Christ’s arrest and resurrection will be argued as substantive proof that the records are not historically accurate. Paula Fredriksen, professor at Boston University, stated that “the Gospels are very peculiar types of literature….What they do is proclaim their individual author’s interpretation of the Christian message through the device of using Jesus of Nazareth as a spokesperson for the evangelist’s position.”
During the PBS program, each scholar presented the historical Jesus as a mere man who preached concerning the eschatological kingdom of God. The historical Jesus was not God. This group believes that He was simply charismatic enough to gather a group of disciples who would follow Him and then would circulate His teachings after His death. According to this line of reasoning, the Gospel records were more the product of myth, or legend, in the desperate hope of explaining the life of Jesus to later readers of the narratives.
The views presented on the PBS program are very typical of liberal scholars, secular media, and college universities. These individuals will not accept the testimony of the evangelists to stand or fall on their own. It should be stated that the Gospel writes present themselves as eyewitnesses of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus at a time when mythical stories would have been impossible to develop due to the hostile atmosphere against Jesus. These self-professed biblical scholars presuppose that the Gospel records are not historical and then engage in perfectly circular reasoning that Jesus did not perform any supernatural acts. In one of his books, John Dominic Crossan, professor at DePaul University, writes, “I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life.”11 The obvious presupposition is that since the supernatural is impossible then the accounts of Jesus cannot possibly be accurate because they present Jesus performing the supernatural.12
The title of the program itself suggests that the views of the scholars will not be orthodox. The notion is that Jesus of Nazareth evolved into the Christ figure (similar in some ways to the false teachings of the New Age movement). The impression given is that the disciples of Jesus transformed Him into the Christ, the Son of God, which was something that He never intended. The result was a discontinuity between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith. Therefore, the necessity of another quest for the historical Jesus is needed in the near future.
The First Quest
The beginning of this quest was late in the 18th century until the end of the 19th century. Reimarus first attempted to distinguish between the actual words of Jesus and those words that were attributed to Him by His disciples. It was Reimarus’ proposition that the teachings of Jesus were very much in line with the nationalistic hopes of Judaism, but that later in time Jesus’ disciples changed the teachings of His into a message whereby Jesus was proclaiming Himself as the universal Savior of mankind.13 The belief of Reimarus was that a true historical Jesus existed in 1st century Palestine, but the real Jesus was hidden somewhere in the respective “layers” of tradition and theology of the New Testament documents.
The cynical thinking leading to the search for a historical Jesus had been laid previously set forth by John Locke (1632-1704) and his contemporaries14 (notably Matthew Tindal). For instance, Locke and his colleagues could not accept the occurrence of miracles in the Bible nor with the consideration that both a gracious and just God would reveal Himself to only one specific ethnic group at one chronological period in time and deem this to be the universal offer of salvation to all mankind.15
One of the affects of the Enlightenment period was to place an undue emphasis upon man’s reasoning capabilities. It was this emphasis that in turn led to the inception of rationalism. Whereas the Enlightenment placed the emphasis upon man’s reason, it was rationalism that would establish man’s reason as being the basis for all of religious truth. The logical conclusion of rationalism is that if there is ever anything in Scripture, whether by implication or interpretation, that conflict with natural law, or reason, then it is Scripture that is incorrect and certainly not man’s high regard of his reason. This type of reasoning is a liberal hermeneutic that is used quite commonly amongst modern critical scholarship.
In order to keep pace with rationalistic thinking, the assumption was made that in no way do not miracles occur since natural law cannot demonstrate them. The conclusion to follow is that the miracles that the disciples documented as being performed by Jesus were pure myth. A large number among German scholarship regarded the miracles of Jesus in the Gospels as being historical, but they interpreted those so-called “miracles” with rationalistic explanations. In other words, the miracles were not really supernatural, but the disciples of Jesus misunderstood natural phenomena, which led to their conclusion that the event was supernatural, and therefore a miracle of Jesus.
For instance, the account of Jesus walking on water in the Gospels was not a miracle, as the disciples understood the event. The account of Jesus walking on water is explained by the German scholarship to be the misunderstanding of the disciples that Jesus was walking in a shallow part of the water, amidst much fog, which gave the illusion of a miracle. In the same manner, the transfiguration was simply the disciples’ misunderstanding of a natural interaction of the sun and clouds. The interaction of the sun and clouds was certainly extraordinary, which is why the disciples misunderstood the event to be a miracle. Of course, such reasoning follows along evolutionary thinking that man was not evolved enough intellectually to understand that the event was not a miracle, and just a natural phenomenon in harmony with man’s evolved wisdom and modern understanding of natural law.
David Strauss’ work, The Life of Jesus (1835), set out to demonstrate that the early Christian belief concerning Jesus was the result of a zealous Messianic expectation that came to fruition in the minds of those disciples who believed the historical Jesus had fulfilled Old Testament prophecies. According to Strauss, Jesus was simply a Jewish rabbi of such a charismatic personality that the disciples conjured up an image of Him in their mind of a mythical quality (devoid of any objectivity) after His death and set forth those beliefs in the Gospel.
Strauss was an Hegelian16 who believed that the mystical views of the disciples masked the objectivity of the life of historical Jesus, yet the Gospels were also based upon those beliefs. He did not believe that the miracles of Jesus were lies that the disciples conjured up after Jesus’ death, nor were they misunderstandings of natural phenomena, rather he believed the accounts of Jesus’ miracles to be allegorical truths that were not restricted to an exact historical record. In other words, Strauss believed the miracles to be purely myths (a belief that was certainly influenced by 18th century Romanticism). For many critical scholars the explanations provided by Strauss were palatable answers to reckon with the Jesus of faith. Strauss’ work was not without devastating consequences for what started out as textual criticism swept into the realm of the universities and seminaries where the professors would transport there liberal views to their students who as they entered the ministry would then carry these liberal views to the local church where they served.
Another critical scholar of the First Quest is Adolph von Harnack (1851-1930). His well-admired book, What is Christianity (1900), was a desperate attempt to remove any offensive apocalyptic teachings from the historical Jesus. The work of von Harnack was not the result of careful scholarship; rather it revealed his expectation of the sayings of Jesus. In other words, he sought to develop a Jesus that would be in step with his own 19th century liberal worldview. Although von Harnack believed that Jesus did teach on eschatological events, he also believed that the disciples added the apocalyptic element to Jesus’ teachings. The supernaturalism of eschatological judgments and deliverances was incompatible with von Harnack’s universalistic worldview, so he decided that with a stroke of his pen the offensive material would be removed.
The end of the First Quest was the result of the work of Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965). In his classic work, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), Schweitzer called attention to the “thoroughgoing eschatology” of Jesus (along with Johannes Weiss, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, 1892). It was his conclusion that “The Jesus of Nazareth (of liberal theology) never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.”17
However, Schweitzer did assert that Jesus tried to manipulate the plan of God through His radical apocalypticism, which resulted in both the Jewish and Roman authorities putting Him to death. Although his worldview was at odds with the teachings of Jesus, Schweitzer did argue for their historicity. His work was of value since it demonstrated that the scholars of the First Quest were creating a Jesus that matched the subjective conclusions of their own worldview. Scot McKnight, professor at Trinity Evangelical Divinity, comments:
Schweitzer’s book uniquely demonstrated that, in the history of scholarship on Jesus, one could demonstrate that, when a picture of Jesus was fully drawn by any given scholar, that picture so resembled the scholar himself that the entire project became a perverse comedy. Everybody simply claimed Jesus for his own cause.18
The Second Quest
Former students of the German theologian, Rudolf Bultmann, began the Second Quest. Bultmann’s students were not completely satisfied with their mentor’s conclusions that virtually nothing could be ascertained concerning the historical Jesus. The methodology of the Second Quest was unique because of its firm assertion of the reality of myth and its attempts to remain objective concerning the quests for the historical Jesus. This interesting blend causes quite a tension when one desires to be objective, yet their postmodern mindset deems complete objectivity to be impossible. Norman Perrin is one of the more popular scholars of the Second Quest. Perrin summarizes what could actually be known for certain concerning Jesus:
His baptism, the proclamation especially in parables of the present and future kingdom of God, a ministry of exorcism, his gathering of disciples across socio-economic boundaries, his sharing a common meal that celebrated their new relationship to God, his challenge to the Jewish teachers of His day, the arousal of opposition that led to his arrest, his trials by the Jewish authorities on charges of blasphemy and by the Romans for sedition, and his crucifixion.19
Although Perrin’s list may appear to be rather long (certainly compared to the Jesus Seminar), it still omits much more that is known concerning the life of Jesus. The author refers to Christ’s “ministry of exorcism,” which may seem fine at first glance. However, for Perrin an exorcism is nothing supernatural, but has to do with a psychological healing. Therefore, the supernatural miracles, resurrection, eschatological teachings, claims of one and only Sonship with the Father, and Messiahship are still removed from the witness of the Gospels.
The Third Quest
It was in the early 80’s that the Third Quest for the historical Jesus began. The reason for this was due to the rise of a new enthusiasm concerning the prospects of historical study.20 Third Quest scholarship was characterized by a driving attentiveness to consign the life and message of Jesus in 1st century Judaism. However, the Third Quest is also entrenched in the same naturalistic mindset that characterized the previous two quests. The result of this is that the Third Quest rejects the supernatural element in Jesus’ miracles because its scholarship believes that they are myth. The Third Quest also has a strong presupposition that a large amount of succession exists between the traditions of the early church, as revealed in the New Testament documents, with the actual life and teachings of the historical Jesus.21
The Jesus Seminar
Liberal theologians, such as Burton Mack and John Dominic Crossan, differ significantly in their conclusions than the scholarship of the Third Quest.22 The Jesus Seminar tries to claim intellectual scholarship with the Third Quest, but fails miserably in such desperate attempts. For example, the Third Quest believes that there are considerable sections of the Gospels that are historical. In contrast, the Seminar believes that only a minute section of the Gospels are historically reliable.
According to the Jesus Seminar, Jesus was neither a prophet nor the Messiah. After His death, the disciples of Jesus purportedly forced images upon Jesus because they could not accept the fact that their charismatic leader was nothing more than a Jewish sage.23 The Seminar conjures up images and words of Jesus that fit within their modern worldview. Likewise, the New Testament writers are purported to have done the same. The Jesus of the Seminar is not an historical Jesus in any respect; rather he is the fixed projection of the Seminar’s own hopeful imagination.
End of the Quests
The conclusions of the three quests and the Jesus Seminar should not surprise those who accept the Gospels as God’s inspired, inerrant Word. There simply is no true historical reason to reject the testimony of the Gospel writers. The only explanation for their rejection is a theological bias that will not allow the real historical Jesus to speak for Himself.
The disquieting trend in surveying the scholarship of the quests for the historical Jesus is the level of demand that is placed upon the Christian church to adjust its theologies and doctrines in light of the progression of historical reconstructionism of modern scholarship. It was this agenda that was quite apparent as a huge component of the First and Third Quest. However, these demands assume that the modern discoveries concerning the historical Jesus are the definitive interpretation of Jesus in contrast to the testimony of the Gospel writers. The question that needs answering is whether or not the historical Jesus of the quests is the true counterpart of Jesus in His fullness as the New Testament documents reveal Him.
The answer to the question is without equivocation a resounding “no.” The breach between the historical Jesus of the quests24 and the real Jesus of history and faith requires two things. First, scholars who are relying on history alone as the most important tool to understand Jesus Christ must understand and recognize the limits and restrictions of history. Without equivocation, the Christian faith is historical but understanding the whole of Christianity has never been based solely on historical studies. The interpreter of Scripture needs to be able to properly evaluate and reevaluate the role of history in studies of Jesus. Second, scholars must be able to correctly consign the real and historical Jesus within the life and theology of Christianity as a whole. The modern reconstructions of the historical Jesus quests need not put centuries of Christian thought and practice out of place. Certainly, the quests are profitable if the proper method and perspective are employed in such studies of the Person and work of Jesus Christ.
One must recognize though that any study of the Person of Jesus Christ requires humility. Man is a finite creature and does not possess complete knowledge of God and His creation. Scholars seek academic acceptance from their peers, but they must also strive for honesty, humility, and integrity in their research. Unfortunately, these three character traits are lacking in most of modern scholarship in the historical studies of Christology. Scholars within the Jesus quests suppose to annihilate the Jesus of faith with modern critical methodology. However, the real Jesus has already spoken up in history when He rose from the dead. The orthodox belief through the centuries of the church has reflected the revelation of Jesus in its simplest form: “Christ has risen from the dead, trampling down death by death.”
The Jesus of faith is a historical person. Both His words and deeds, which would include His miracles and resurrection from the dead, are accurately recorded in the Gospel records. Christians have nothing to fear of valid historical studies concerning the Person of Jesus Christ. New Testament scholar, N.T. Wright states: “It’s hard work, but if you stick with the historical enterprise to the bitter end, not only can you preach from it, but it’s more powerful than what the Fundamentalists or the liberal reductionists offer.”25
The Real Jesus Has Spoken
The real and historical Jesus declared that to honor Him was to honor God (Jn. 5:23) and to receive Jesus is to receive God (Mt. 10:40). He also said, “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (Jn. 8:12). To believe in Jesus is to believe in God (12:44, 45; 14:1). He revealed the exclusivity of belief in Him: “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (14:6). To see Jesus was to see God (8:19; 14:7) and to know Him was to know God (14:7). If one hated Jesus then that person was said to hate God (15:23) and to deny Jesus is to deny God (1 Jn. 2:23). Jesus declared that God the Holy Spirit would bear witness and glorify Him (16:14). Jesus’ command to mankind is to love Him in the exact same way that they love God, that is, with all their heart, soul, and mind (Mt. 22:37, 38).
In the Olivet Discourse (Mt. 24-25), Jesus said that He would actually return at the end of the world itself; He alone would judge every person who has ever lived; He would personally raise all the dead of history, and; all nations would be gathered before Him for judgment. Jesus said that He would sit on His throne of glory and would separate mankind from one another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats (25:31-46; cf. Jn. 5:25-34). Clearly, Jesus was teaching that mankind’s eternal destiny depended upon a personal relationship with Him (Jn. 8:24; Mt. 10:32).
Every statement given above leaves one with little indecision as to whom Jesus was claiming to be. The only choices that are possible after reading such information are that Jesus was either God incarnate (as He said) or He was absolutely crazy. The latter would be in direct contrast with His life and teachings. Eventually, the conclusions of the liberal scholarship will be relegated to the circular files of rationalistic and historical skepticism. The conclusions of David Van Biema writing for Time was in four or five years the final outcome of the Jesus Seminar would be quite questionable since “their areas of argument, thus far, have largely been in the negative, and their respective rescued Jesuses vary considerable.” Even Crossan has admitted that the end result might be “hopeless disagreement.”26 It may be petitio principii, but the question should be asked what else did these scholars expect based on the heavy subjectivism on their part that was employed in such biased research?
There is substantial reasoning to be concerned about the kind of historical reconstructionism of the quests for Jesus. The real Jesus did not evolve into the Jesus of faith. He is, and will continue to be, the one and only Christ from the very beginning of time (cf. Lk. 2:11, 26). On several occasions Jesus made one’s understanding of Him to be a primary issue (Mt. 16:13-20; Jn. 11:25-27). If liberal scholarship does not care for the “offensive apocalypticism” of Jesus Christ then they will need to also erase the indictments that Jesus placed upon the whole of humanity. For instance, He taught that man is essentially evil (Mt. 12:34) as a result of the Fall and is capable of great wickedness (Mk. 7:20-23). Jesus taught that man is totally depraved and utterly bankrupt apart from Him (Lk. 19:10). Man is in great need to repent before a holy and just God (Mk. 1:15) and to be born again (Jn. 3:3, 5, 7). Jesus did not describe sin as ignorance, but as blindness (Mt. 23:16-26), sickness (9:12), enslavement (Jn. 8:34), and darkness (Jn. 8:12; 12:35-46).
The conclusions by reductionist scholars are utter foolishness in view of the words of the real Jesus that they claim to be discovering. Christians need to point to history and Scripture as the disclosure of God’s personal, objective, self-revelation to mankind. The ultimate answer to the identity of Jesus in found in 1 Corinthians 15 (vv. 3 and 4): “For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.” Jesus’ death and resurrection are irrevocable evidences that God came in history as a willing sacrifice for man’s sin and declared Himself to be the very Son of God that would reconcile fallen humanity by grace through faith.
1 Scot McKnight, “Who is Jesus? An Introduction to Jesus Studies” in Jesus Under Fire, gen. eds. Michael J. Wilkins and J.P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), pp. 51-72.
2 Ben Witherington III, The Jesus Quest (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1995), p. 9.
3 C. Stephan Evans, The Historical Quest and the Jesus of Faith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 13.
4 Witherington, Jesus Quest, p. 11; James F. Kay, Christus Praesens (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), pp. 11-13.
5 Robert L. Reymond, A New Systematic Theology of the Christian Faith (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1998), p. 23.
6 Robert P. Lightner, A Biblical Case for Total Inerrancy (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 1999), pp. 11-37.
7 Witherington, Jesus Quest, p. 12.
8 The teaching that is attached to each miracle of Christ is purposed to bring out spiritual significance. In each miracle is the objective attestation of the power in Christ’s teaching. The miracles that Christ performed were designed to bring attention to Christ rather than the miracles themselves. Christ’s character did not depend upon the demonstration of the supernatural, but the signs attested to Christ’s deity (Merrill C. Tenney, John: The Gospel of Belief [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1948], pp. 28-31).
9 In essence, postmodernism is the result of post-rational modernism. (See The Death of Truth, Dennis McCallum, ed. [Minneapolis: Bethany House, 1996])
10 “From Jesus to Christ: The First Christians,” 6 April (Part I) and 7 April (Part II) 1998, PBS.
11 John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1994), p. 95.
12 Compare to the arguments of David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, L. A. Selby Bigge, ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1902), pp. 114-16.
13 Howard Clark Kee, Jesus in History (New York: Harcourt Brace Janovich, 1977), p. 12.
14 See John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity as Delivered in the Scriptures (1695); John Toland, Nazarenus; or Jewish, Gentile and Illahometan Christianity (1718); Matthew Tindal, Christianity as Old as the Creation, or the Gospel a Republication of the Religion of Nature (1730); Thomas Woolston, Discourses on the Miracles of our Saviour (1727-30); Thomas Chubb, True Gospel of Jesus Christ (1738); cf. Immanuel Kant, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793); Friedrich Schleiermacher, Speeches on Religion Addressed to its Cultural Despisers (1799).
15 Many have referred to this objection as the “scandal of particularity” that deals with supersessionism by a priori arguments. Kant would argue that Christianity is universally acceptable based on moral (natural) law. Schleiermacher argued for Christianity’s universal acceptance based on human transcendental dependence (he also thought it was highly peculiar that God would have bestowed special favor on any one group of people, and certainly not the Jewish people, only once in history). A recent book publication by InterVarsity Press warns Christians that if they regard “non-Christian religions as netherworlds of unmixed darkness, the church’s message will be a scandal not of particularity but of arrogant obscurantism” (Gerald McDermott, Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions? [Downers Grove: Intervarsity Press, 2000]). Christopher Seitz in Word Without End: The Old Testament As Abiding Theological Witness, writes, “Though it should seem obvious, we should remember that a “historical” Jesus has never been the object of the church’s faith, but rather the triune God, revealed in Old and New Testaments and presently alive in the body of Christ through the presence of the Holy Spirit. Consequently, to search for a “historical” Jesus apart from the witness of Israel’s scriptures is to drive a wedge between the One raised and the One doing the raising. It is this avenue that Paul shuts off, as do the creeds, when they say that Jesus rose again “in accordance with the scriptures” (Eerdmans, 1997). R. Kendall Soulen, The God of Israel and Christian Theology (Fortress, 1996) and Walter Brueggemann, Theology of the Old Testament (Fortress, 1997) are also recent publications addressing the issue of a supersessionist reading of Scripture. The mystery of this so-called “scandal of particularity” has the weight of both the Old and New Testament as evidence to the fact.
16 Ferdinand Christian Baur, founder of Tübingen School, was also an Hegelian but sought to refute the assertions of Strauss in his book Paulus der Apostel Jesu Christi (1845). Werner Kümmel declared all that could be learned from Baur is that the New Testament needs to be interpreted based on the history of the 1st century of the church (The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems, 1972). In his preface to Galatians (1865), J.B. Lightfoot stated: “I feel very confident that the historical views of the Tübingen School are too extravagant to obtain any wide or lasting hold over the minds of men. But even in extreme cases mere denunciation may be unjust and is certainly unavailing. Moreover, for our own sakes we should try and discover the element of truth which underlies even the greatest exaggerations of able men, and correct our impressions thereby.”
17 Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 398-399.
18 Wilkins and Moreland, Jesus Under Fire, p. 54.
19 Norman Perrin, The New Testament: An Introduction (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Janovich, 1974), pp. 287-288 as quoted in Wilkins and Moreland, Jesus Under Fire, pp. 25-26.
20 Witherington, The Jesus Quest, p. 12.
21 Gregory A. Boyd, Cynic, Sage, or Son of God? (Wheaton: BridgePoint, 1995), p. 49.
22 Ibid., p. 118.
23 Birger A. Pearson, “The Gospel According to the Jesus Seminar” in Religion (1995), p. 320.
24 This is not to imply that historical Jesus studies are without their merit in terms of understanding the Person of Jesus Christ in the 1st century context of Palestine. It is accurate to state that the historical Jesus of the quests is a division with the real Jesus in all His fullness. The metaphor “historical,” as used in the quests, does not present the real and historical Jesus accurately.
25 David Van Biema, “The Gospel Truth” in Time, 8 April 1996, p. 58.
26 Ibid., p. 59.
|
