Currently I am working on a book on the historical Jesus, trying to determine what we can say about the life of Jesus here on earth in terms that would satisfy an objective historian. Contrary to my expectation, it has turned out to be a two-volume project. The first volume—484 pages—has recently been published.a The second volume will probably be about the same length. If the work is long, the results are meager. The sources (mostly from the New Testament) are intractable and often unreliable from the viewpoint of a modern critical historian. Much of what I say may often seem like deliberate effort to cast doubt on the veracity of the Scriptures. For example, I conclude that Jesus was very probably not born in Bethlehem, but in Nazareth, contrary to the accounts in Matthew and Luke. His birth at Bethlehem is to be taken not as historical fact but as a theologoumenon, a theological insight narrated as a historical event.
Yet I am a man of faith—indeed, a Catholic priest. Since the quest is so difficult and the results so tenuous, why pursue it so relentlessly, as I and countless other scholars have done?
It is perhaps not surprising that resistance to the quest for the historical Jesus comes much more often from committed Christians than from agnostics or Christian “dropouts.” The latter groups regularly have the intellectual curiosity of “outsiders” to spur them on—if for no other reason than to justify their remaining outside. The agnostic or the secular humanist is quite used to examining claims from all quarters, however strange, and so has no qualms about examining data about and interpretations of Jesus.
It is rather the staunch believer who often feels that the quest is at best a waste of time and at worst a threat to faith. In this camp one finds strange bedfellows: strict followers of the theoloagian Rudolf Bultmann and dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalists. For opposite reasons they come to the same conclusion: The quest for the historical Jesus is irrelevant or even harmful to true Christian faith.
For the strict disciple of Bultmann, the quest is both theologically illegitimate and historically impossible. Theologically, the quest tempts Christians to prove their faith by human scholarship, a new form of justification by works. Historically, the sources are simply too meager, fragmentary and theologically colored to allow any full portrait.
Fundamentalists1 object to the quest for the exact opposite reason: The historical Jesus is naively equated with the Jesus presented in all four canonical Gospels. All tensions and contradictions in the four narratives are harmonized by hilarious mental acrobatics.
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Obviously, I do not agree with either group.
Both Bultmann and the fundamentalists speak from definite theological viewpoints. Replying to their objections demands that I doff for a moment the hat of an exegete using purely historical-critical methods and put on the hat of a theologian. Once I seek to reply to either Bultmannians or fundamentalists, I necessarily move from a purely empirical, historical-critical framework, which prescinds from what the believer knows or holds by faith, into a larger context in which faith, self-consciously reflecting on itself, seeks understanding. In other words, I move into an explicitly theological context.
This shift makes a great difference in concepts and terminology. For instance, in the historical-critical framework, “real” has to be defined in terms of what exists within this world of time and space, what can be experienced in principle by any observer and what can be reasonably deduced or inferred from such experience. Faith and Christian theology, however, affirm ultimate realities beyond what is merely empirical or provable by reason: for example, the triune God and the risen Jesus.2 Thus, to ask about the relation between the historical Jesus, reconstructed from modern historical research, and the risen Jesus is to pass from the realm of the merely empirical or rational into the larger framework of faith and theology as it seeks to relate itself to the historical-critical project.
The Jesus of history is not and cannot be the object of Christian faith. A moment’s reflection will make clear why that must be so. For more than millennium and a half, Christians believed firmly in Jesus Christ without having any clear idea of or access to the historical Jesus as understood today, yet no one will deny the validity and strength of their faith. The same can be said of many pious Christians in developed as well as developing countries today?3 But, even if all Christians were acquainted with the concepts and research connected with the historical Jesus, the church could still not make the historical Jesus the object of its preaching and faith. The reason is obvious: Whose historical Jesus would be the oject of faith? Albert Schweitzer’s4 or Eduard Schweizer’s5? Herbert Braun’s6 or Joachim Jeremias’7? Günther Bornkamm’s8 or E. P. Sanders’9? Jesus the violent revolutionary or Jesus the gay magician? Jesus the apocalyptic seer or Jesus the wisdom teacher unconcerned with eschatology? The constantly changing, often contradictory portraits of the historical Jesus served up by scholars, however useful in academia, cannot be the object of Christian faith for the universal Church.
Moreover, and more importantly, the proper object of Christian faith is not and cannot be an idea or scholarly reconstruction, however reliable. For the believer, the object of Christian faith is a living person, Jesus Christ, who fully entered into a true human existence on earth in the first century A.D., but who now lives, risen and glorified, forever in the Father’s presence. Primarily, Christian faith affirms and adheres to this person—indeed, incarnate, crucified and risen—and only secondarily to ideas and affirmations about him. In the realm of faith and theology, the “real” Jesus, the only Jesus existing and living now, is the risen Lord, to whom access is given only through faith.
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What, then—ask the objectors—is the usefulness of the historical Jesus to people of faith? My reply is: none, if one is asking solely about the direct object of Christian faith—Jesus Christ, crucified, risen and presently reigning in his church. This presently reigning Lord is accessible to all believers, including those who will never study history or theology for even a single day in their lives.
Yet I maintain that the quest for the historical Jesus can be very useful if one is asking about faith seeking understanding, i.e., theology, in a contemporary context. The theology of the patristic and medieval periods was blissfully ignorant of the problem of the historical Jesus since it operated in a cultural context bereft of the historical-critical understanding that marks the modern, Western mind. Theology is a cultural artifact; therefore, once a culture becomes permeated with a historical-critical approach, as has Western culture from the Enlightenment onward, theology can operate in and speak to that culture with credibility only if it absorbs a historical approach into its methodology.
For contemporary Christology, this means that faith in Christ today must be able to reflect on itself systematically in a way that will allow an appropriation of the quest for the historical Jesus into theology. The historical Jesus, while not the object or essence of faith, must be an integral part of modern theology. This appropriation of the quest by theology is not idolatry to passing fads; rather, it serves the interests of faith in at least four ways.10
•Against any attempt to reduce faith in Christ to a contentless cipher, a mythic symbol or a timeless archetype, the quest for the historical Jesus reminds Christians that faith in Christ is not just a vague existential attitude or a way of being in the world. Christian faith is the affirmation of, and adherence to, a particular person who said and did particular things in a particular time and place in human history.11 The quest underlines the fact that there is specific content to Christian faith, content connected with specific persons and events in past history. While the quest cannot supply the essential content of faith, it can help theology give theology give greater concrete depth and color to that content.
•Against any attempt by pious Christians of a mystical or docetic bent to swallow up the real humanity of Jesus into an “orthodox” emphasis on his divinity (actually, a crypto-monophysitism), the affirms that the risen Jesus is the same person who lived and died as a Jew In first-century Palestine, a person as truly and fully human—with all the galling limitations that involves—as any other human being.
•Against any attempt to “domesticate” Jesus for a comfortable, respectable, bourgeois Christianity, the quest for the historical Jesus, almost from its inception, has tended to emphasize the embarrassing, nonconformist aspects of Jesus: for example, his association with the religious and social “lowlife” of Palestine, his prophetic critique of external religious observances that ignore or strangle the inner spirit of religion, his opposition to certain religious authorities, especially the Jerusalem priesthood.
•But lest the “uses of the historical Jesus” all seem to run in one direction, it should be pointed out that, despite the claims of Reimarus in the 18th century and many others since, the historical Jesus is not easily co-opted for programs of political revolution either. Compared with the classical prophets of Israel, the historical Jesus is remarkably silent on many of the burning social and political issues of his day. He can be turned into a this-worldly political revolutionary only by contorted exegesis and special pleading.12 Like good sociology, the historical Jesus subverts not just some ideologies but all ideologies, including liberation ideology.
Indeed, the usefulness of the historical Jesus to theology is that he ultimately eludes all our neat theological programs; he brings all of them into question by refusing to fit into the boxes we create for him. Paradoxically, although the quest for the historical Jesus is often linked in the popular secular mind with “relevance,” his importance lies precisely in his strange, off-putting, embarrassing contours, equally offensive to right and left wings. To this extent, at least, Albert Schweitzer was correct.13 The more we appreciate what Jesus meant in his own time and place, the more “alien” he will seem to us.
Properly understood, the historical Jesus is a bulwark against the reduction of Christian faith in general and Christology in particular to “relevant” ideology of any stripe. His refusal to be held fast by any given school of thought is what drives theologians onward into new paths; hence the historical Jesus remains a constant stimulus to theological renewal.14 For this reason alone, the Jesus of history is worth the pains of the pursuit, including the initial pains of getting one’s categories, sources and criteria straight.
This article has been adapted from chapter 7 of A Marginal Jew—Rethinking The Historical Jesus by John P. Meier. Copyright 1991 by John P. Meier. Used by permission of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.
Currently I am working on a book on the historical Jesus, trying to determine what we can say about the life of Jesus here on earth in terms that would satisfy an objective historian. Contrary to my expectation, it has turned out to be a two-volume project. The first volume—484 pages—has recently been published.a The second volume will probably be about the same length. If the work is long, the results are meager. The sources (mostly from the New Testament) are intractable and often unreliable from the viewpoint of a modern critical historian. Much of what I say may […]
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A Marginal Jew—Rethinking The Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991).
Endnotes
1.
As is obvious from recent church history in the United States, fundamentalism is by no means restricted to Protestants. American Catholics have developed their own varieties.
2.
On this point, cf. G.G. O’Collins, “Is the Resurrection an ‘Historical’ Event?” Heythrop Journal 8 (1967), pp. 381–387. O’Collins argues (rightly, in my view) that, although the “resurrection is a real, bodily event involving the person of Jesus of Nazareth” (p. 381), the resurrection of Jesus “is not an event in space and time and hence should not be called historical” (p. 384), since “we should require an historical occurrence to be something significant that is known to have happened in our space-time continuum” (p. 384).
3.
As distinct from ordinary pious Christians, some liberation theologians from the Third World have attempted critical reflection on the historical Jesus—not always with the happiest of results; see John P. Meier, “The Bible as a Source for Theology,” The Catholic Theological Society of America, Proceedings of the Forty-third Annual Convention (1988), pp. 1–14.
4.
Albert Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben–Jesu–Forschung; English transl. The Quest of the Historical Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1910, repr. 1968).
5.
Eduard Schweizer, Lordship and Discipleship, Studies in Biblical Theology 28 (Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1960).
6.
Herbert Braun, Jesus of Nazareth: The Man and His Time (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979).
7.
Joachim Jeremias, The Problem of the Historical Jesus, English transl. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1964).
8.
Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, English transl. (New York: Harper & Row, 1960).
9.
E.P Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985).
10.
Cf. the remarks of Rudolf Schnackenburg, “Der geschichtliche Jesus in seiner ständigen Bedeutung für Theologie und kirche,” Rückfrage nach Jesus, ed. Karl Kertelge, Quaestiones disputatae 63 (Freiburg: Herder, 1974), pp. 194–220.
11.
Ernst Käsemann expresses the point this way: “Such research [into the historical Jesus] is theologically meaningful insofar as it struggles to grasp the unmistakable individuality of this earthly Jesus. The King of heaven has no countenance, unless it is that of the Nazarene” (“Die neue Jesus-Frage,” Jésus aux origines de la christologie, ed. J. Dupont, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum theologicarum lovaniensium 40 [Leuven: Leuven University; Gembloux: Duculot, 1975], pp. 47–57).
12.
Unfortunately, this holds true of the otherwise intriguing book by Richard A. Horsley, Jesus and the Spiral of Violence, Popular Jewish Resistance in Roman Palestine (San. Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987); see, e.g., his forced interpretation of the pericope on paying the coin of tribute to Caesar (Mark 12:13–17) on pp. 306–317. More satisfying is the book he coauthored with John S. Hanson, Bandits, Prophets, and Messiahs: Popular Movements at the Time of Jesus (Minneapolis, MN: Winston, 1985).
13.
Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben–Jesu–Forschung, vol. 2, p. 620: “Recognized by the peculiar, special character of his ideas and action, he [the historical Jesus] will always embody [literally, ‘retain’] for our age something strange and puzzling” (translation mine).
14.
For an attempt to write a present-day Christology that takes seriously both Christian sources and modern historical consciousness, see John Macquarrie, Jesus Christ in Modern Thought (London: SCM; Philadelphia: Trinity, 1990 ).
