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SOVERVIEW
The search for the historical jesus-John moore
Long before the "Jesus Seminar" made headlines with its bold
pronouncements about the "true" Jesus, the groundwork for the organisation
had already been laid. The story of the "Quest for the historical jesus" is
a sobering tale of academic arrogance and folly that begins in the early
nineteenth century. Theologians seeking to be rely adopted the latest
assumptions about reality that came from prestigious faculties of
philosophy-often down the hall from their own departments. As philosophical
trends changed-say, from neo-Kantianism 1 logical positivism-so did
theological views.
Theologians desperate for peer respectability Quickly adopted d
latest views. They abandoned the very gospel they had been entrusted to
preserve, altering it to fit current philosophical vogue. Early in ti game
they declared there were no such things as miracles. After that they
proceeded to "unearth" the true Jesus beneath the strata of "myth
As we reach the end of the twentieth century we now witness when
this journey has taken us-to final bankruptcy. as today's academic elk
declare that the "true" jesus is merely the jesus of our own imagination The
Jesus Seminar has merely borrowed from this academic Quest th has gone on
for the better part of two centuries as great sectors ( Christendom have
continued to fall behind these blind guides. Ti wreckage has been
staggering.
9
THE QUEST FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS
John Moore
over the past several hundred years there has been a unique assault on the
"faith which was once for all
delivered to the saints" (Jude 3 NASB). It has come from the most
prestigious and influential universities in the West where theologians,
biblical "critics," and other scholars have been relentlessly destroying the
pillars of the faith-first chip ping away, then tearing them down.
The byproduct of this organized campaign of intellectual cynicism
can be seen in the West-across Europe and America-in the empty churches that
were once bastions of robust faith and orthodoxy. These often beautiful, at
times grand edifices had much happier days before their riches were
plundered. Once full of steadfast believers who knew their Lord and God,
they have been robbed by a unique den of thieves. Today they stand largely
empty, little more than a quaint reminder of bygone days.
When the grand universities and academies ceased to believe, they
passed their sepsis of unbelief down the hier-archy of learning, from
theologians to clerics. Reverends in long, flowing robes could show off
their newfound bank-ruptcy of faith. From the pulpits, this high sounding
doubt
was passed down to parishioners. At first these new if became fashionable
among the educated, a sign of b ahead socially and intellectually.
Gradually, other sheep 1 dered into this wasteland of emptied meaning in a
gen "falling away," which is now the state of much of Christian former
bastion, Europe. The church in the United States, ' evidence would indicate,
is not far behind.
1
One of the most potent forms this intellectual and a emit plundering
took was through what is known as "quest for the historical Jesus." The
development of this provides us a unique glimpse into the process of
apostasy. a glimpse into history that has had an impact on all Christi The
Jesus Seminar that we see today is just the latest, and : haps the final,
chapter in a tale of academic arrogance pride that spans the centuries since
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. What follows is a brief tour of the
vari stages of this quest.
The First Quest
The first leg of the story begins in the late eighteenth century and
runs through the whole of the nineteenth, an mainly a story of German
New Testament scholarship, begning with Herman Reimarus. Reimarus's work,
publis: posthumously in 1778, was a skeptical account, the first I tried to
separate Jesus' words from those supposedly giver Him by His disciples.
Reimarus believed that Jesus had Orignally preached a this-worldly message
in line with Jeu nationalistic hopes. The disappointed disciples later rewor
His message into that of a universal Savior.' In believing Jesus' words as
recorded in the New Testament were not own, or at least not entirely His
own, but that they had b conscripted into the service of a later
socioreligious rnq ment, Reimarus gave birth to the idea that there was a t
' "historical" Jesus hidden somewhere behind the layers of tlg dition and
theology in the New Testament documents. -' quest to find that true Jesus of
history was begun. ,+
The roots for Reimarus's work had been laid earlier, however, by the
Englishman John Locke (1632-1704) and his contemporaries. Locke, whose
thought and writings were to play a significant role in shaping the thinking
of the founding fathers of the United States, was a champion of the
resur-gence of the Stoic (ancient Greek) idea of natural law, according to
which miracles were a violation of sound
thinking. Locke and his contemporaries, notably Matthew Tindal, wrestled
with two philosophical problems in particular: the problem of miracles as
reported in the Scriptures, and the particularity of the gospel.
Miracles were an affront to natural law, which sought to explain all
activity in terms of the orderly, predictable opera-tion of scientific
principles (naturalism). And the particularity of the gospel was an affront
to the seventeenth-century sense of justice: how could a gracious, just God
reveal Himself to just one gvnufi of people at just one time and this be
considered the saving event of the universe?*
(since I have experienced 2 of the NT miracles, I havnt got a problem with
them-John)
These questions flowed naturally out of the upheavals in religious
and political thought of the preceding century, the Reformation, and the
Enlightenment. The Reformation, with Martin Luther's translation of the
Bible into German, had opened the Scriptures to the common man, paving the
way for critical evaluations of its contents. The Enlightenment, with its
emphasis on man's reasoning ability as the supreme good and the measure of
all things, gave birth to the intellec-tual streams of rationalism (the
reliance on reason as the basis for establishment of religious truth) and
its sister naturalism
(the doctrine that scientific laws are adequate to account for all
phenomena).
In response to these problems, Locke published (anonymously) a
little book called The Reasonableness of Christianity As Delivered in the
Scriptures (1695). In it, he called on Christians to approach the Scriptures
from the common ground of reason, and work toward interpretations of
Scripture that would not conflict with reason, as understood by natural law.
174 THE CONSPIRACY TO SILENCE THE SON OF GOD
This book and other similar works laid the groundwork
naturalistic approach to the interpretation of Scripture was adopted, with
great gusto, by a generation of Gel scholars almost a century later,
starting with Reimarus.
In fact, this approach to biblical interpretation endured, and has
become almost the defining modern critical scholarship. The view that true
mira not happen, and therefore the miracles reported of Jd were in fact
something else-pious fictions, misundentd/ natural phenomena, or myth "pure
and simple"-is the stated or unstated presumption of all of the nineteenth
century quest, the later twentieth century "New Quest" (a second quest), and
now much of the so-called "Third Quest" for 1 historical Jesus (more on the
"New Quest" and "Third shortly). The tenet of modern thought that
evangelical scholar Phillip Johnson calls "atheistic naturalism," and tint
elsewhere referred to as "philosophic naturalism," enters B lical
scholarship here, with Locke.
In response to the skeptical naturalistic reconstuction being
produced by the First Quest, several German orthodox scholars attempted
orthodox, naturalist reconciliation's' proposing rational explanations for
the miracles: when Jesus walked on water He was actually in the shallows-fog
helI create the illusion of a miracle; the transfiguration was naturally
ally the result of a strange interplay of clouds and sunlit and so forth.
Unfortunately, as might be imagined, the tred of this "scholarship" was
simply to cast the Gospels as na misinterpretations of the historical
events, or, at worst crude deceptions. As Howard Clark Kee put it, these
pretations seemed to transform the Gospel accounts
"Good News" into "gross misunderstanding."
Into this milieu, David Friedreich Strauss interjects another
possibility. In his 1835 book The Life of Jesus, Strauss was the first to
propose with "thoroughness and concept that the miracles recorded by the
evangelists were no deception, nor were they misunderstandings of natural
events
They were, in fact, augmented perceptions of reality Wthenot confined to the
strictly historical record.3 In other words, they were myths. Strauss's work
offered, for some, a theologians satisfying answer to the question of the
origins of the "Christ of creed and dogma." The early disciples could, from
this view, be seen not as deceivers or simpletons, but as simply eperating
from a different conception of reality.
Of course, it required a jump from understanding the Gospels as
concrete history to understanding them as "his-tcnco-spiritual" history-an
understanding that is incompatible with the orthodox view. To the world of
liberal criticism, however, Strauss's mythopoetic solution was a seemingly
bril-liant compromise-it allowed the exclusion of miracles as historical
fact, as required by naturalism, but it offered the possibility of retaining
the "spiritual reality" of the miracles.
Strauss's reconstruction was to prove corrosive as its implica-tions spread
from the realm of biblical criticism into that of theological instruction,
and from there into the church.
Meanwhile, the First Quest for the historical Jesus continued
throughout the rest of the century. Space forbids a detailed discussion of
the various remaining aspects of this ini-tial quest. I will, however,
mention two more scholars from this period: Adolph von Hamack, because of
many interesting parallels between his work and that of the Jesus Seminar,
and Albert Schweitzer, whose work is credited with bringing the First Quest
to its stumbling end.
Adolph von Hamack (1851-1930) is widely regarded as one of the most
accomplished scholars of his day. His work represents both the high point
and the ultimate futility of the scholarship of the First Quest. By the end
of the century, prob-lems with the First Quest had become apparent: the many
studies that had been conducted using "purely objective" techniques of
historical analysis had produced many diver-gent and contradictory pictures
of the "historical Jesus."
Von Hamack determined to ignore the problems of trying o recreate
the events of Jesus' life and simply concentrate on is teachings. Howard Kee
outlines the problems with this approach in a way that sounds like it could
have been vvrq with the Jesus Seminar in mind: 3j
This decision [to dismiss the question of the life of Jesus and
concentrate on his teachings] is a value judgment: that d the enduring
significance of Jesus does not lie in hishistocical existence, in the
activities and events of his life, but & the content of his teachings. But
even in this more limited field of investigation, certain choices must be
made as tdpiii which among the array of sayings attributed to Jesus are ai
be regarded as authentic and which are later accretions. , . .*+i Once
certain criteria for authenticity have been adopted, an impressive case can
be made for reconstructing what Jesus .t "really" taught-but only if the
reader is willing to accept the 4 presuppositions of the reconstructor.
,?
In 1900 von Harnack produced a popular work What Is Christianity
that set out, essentially, to strip Jesus' m$l sage of any apocalyptic
elements. He acknowledged the p# ence of apocalypse-the revelation of the
truth about Gallilean activities at the end of time-in Jesus' teachings, but
fd the concepts distasteful-"wretched miserablisms." His reconstruction of
the "true" message of Jesus became, in effect, 1 message that he wished
Jesus had delivered. Von Hamac& an incredible act of presumption, set out to
correct the tl ology of Jesus to make it conform to his own nineteenth+ tury
liberalism and universalism.
To make the point again, it was not that von Hamack 4 not believe
that Jesus had delivered an eschatological messsage-he did. It was simply
that von Harnack felt that Jd message would be "better" if it were stripped
of this offending material.
As Albert Schweitzer was soon to show, however, only two options
with regard to Jesus' message as p the Gospels. Either Jesus' message was
one of "thoroughly eschatology" or the entire record was a fiction
Schweitzer shortly). Von Hamack took an unter route, one which he must have
known as a scholar was historically impossible: the apocalypticism of Jesus'
message had been added later to the otherwise trustworthy records of His
teachings.
The idea that God would judge the peoples of the earth at the end of
time, sending some to eternal glory and some to eternal damnation, was a
major stumbling block not only for van Harnack, but for much of the rest of
liberal nineteenth-century scholasticism. As B.A. Pearson notes:
Eschatology as such, involving ideas of the last judg-ment,
resurrection, and the supernatural deliverance of the elect from temporal
earthly existence, is quite foreign to the modern (or "postmodern") ways of
thinking, and it was inevitable that a scholarly struggle would be mounted
against it as holding the key to Jesus' teaching.5
That Jesus would teach such things was inconceivable to these
scholars. And many, such as von Hamack, attempted to set the record
straight. This attempt was quelled for a time by the black eye that the
First Quest received from the work of Albert Schweitzer.
Albert Schweitzer-The End of the First Quest
The result of the entire enterprise of the nineteenth century First
Quest was the conformance of the "historical Jesus" to the personal views of
those seeking Him. This is the message driven home by the thesis of the
young Albert Schweitzer (18751965), which is credited with more or less
putting an end to the German First Quest.
Schweitzer's work, The Quest of the HistoricalJesus (1906)) is
almost universally regarded as demonstrating two things:
First, in conjunction with the work of Johannes Weiss (1827-1918))
Schweitzer showed that the message of Jesus was one of "thorough going
eschatology" (in direct contradiction to von
harnack, among others). In Schweitzer's view, Jesus was an apocaly@cal
fanatic who tried to force the hand of God paid with His life at the
hands of the Jewish and authorities. Schweitzer was operating from the
natural rationalistic assumptions common to the rest of the Quest.
Nevertheless, though he found Jesus' eschatolo message personally offensive,
he persevered in presenting id faithfully as the core of Jesus' message.!i\
Second, Schweitzer showed, in a scathing analysis, that the conflicting
historical "Jesuses" of the previous century's quest were uniform in one
respect-they all mirrored the Phil& sophical preconceptions of the scholars
doing the questing,' Evangelical scholar Scot M&night sums it up nicely:
"Evel)u body simply claimed Jesus for his own cause."`j
Schweitzer's thesis was so acidic to the scholarship that had gone before
him that it was not accepted by the department to which he submitted it at
his university. This is no doubt part of the reason Schweitzer subsequently
abandoned a career in theology and turned to music, and then medicine, In
fact, the "scholarly struggle" over Schweitzer's work corn tinues to this
day. The Jesus Seminar has optimistically made the overturn of Schweitzer's
thesis the fifth of their "seven pillars of scholarly wisdom."
Rudolph Bultmann and the Period of "No Quest"
Schweitzer's work seems to have produced in liberal criticism a kind of
crisis in confidence. From the publication of The Quest of the
HistorkalJ2su.s through the end of World War
II, there was a period that is now termed the "No Quest" Rudolph Bultmann
summed up the prevailing mood during this period when he pronounced in his
1934 book Jesus and thd
Word, We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of
Jesus, since the early Christian source8 show no interest in either, are
moreover fragmentary and often legendary."'
In this now famous quote, Bultmann dismisses the scholarship of the
nineteenth-century quest, and at the same time reveals the prejudices that
have become the hallmarks of late1
~entieth-century liberal criticism. Bultmann's defeatist complaint about the
lack of objective evidence is the tip of a deeper iceberg: a more general
defeatism about the possi bility of truly objective historical research.
Schweitzer's Qwst drove home the defeat of nineteenthcen tmy rationalism,
naturalistic reason had been shown to be an inadequate basis for the
interpretation of history. Since ratio nalism had already replaced
revelation with reason as the ulti mate basis for understanding, and reason
bud faikd, those who had placed their faith in rationaliim were at a loss.
Maybe the whole understanding of reality implied by rationalism was fun
damentally flawed. One possibility would have been to return to revelation
as the basis of epistemology.* As we know, this was not the option chosen.
Instead, modem criticism began to search for something beyond rationalism as
its foundation.
At this juncture in history-the beginning of the twentieth century-in a move
that has had profound consequences, Rudolph Bultmann had an epiphany about
the true meaning of Jesus. He declared that the true meaning of Jesus was
not in His activities as a person on earth, but in His message as p claimed
by the church. Bultmann was acting on the suggestion of another, earlier
theologian, Martin Kahler (1835-1912). Eahler had stated in an address in
1892 that the real, that is the actual Christ, who strides through the
history of his people, with whom millions have had com munion in childlike
faith, with whom the great witnesses of faith have communed as they
struggled, accepted, con quered and surrendered-the real Christ is the
preached
Ch&. 8
Kahler, who was a mentor of Paul Tillich, and who also heavily influenced
Bultmann, conceived the "real Christ" as a way to make an end-run around the
vagaries of the First o Epistemology is the study of the nature and grounds
of knowledge, especially with respect to its limitations and validity.
Quest. Instead of depending on the results of the critical theologians who
Jesus was, K%hler envisioned a "real" J
the "preached Christ"-who was distinct from the his Jesus. In a sense, this
was just the reverse of the "ques real Jesus was now the Christ of creed and
dogma.
1
All of this sounds vaguely comforting to Protestant 4 with its
emphasis on the proclamation of the Word of God preaching. The underlying
assumption of this position, however, is that Jesus of Nazareth, whoever He
might have beq is not as important as whatever the church has chosen to
about Him, or (and here is where the Devil's bargain becomes plain) what it
may choose to say about Him in future. In fact, in Bultmann's view, Jesus
of Nazareth was 1 important impetus behind the start of the church, but q
message is actually pre-Christian, because it p-e-dates the creatiq ofthe
Christian gospel. This is the same conclusion arrived atI those who assumed
the "historical Jesus," but come at it the other side.
The "quest" originally assumed that the true Jesus person whose real
life and message were obscured by theological encroachments of the church.
Bultman those who follow him, assume that the true "Jesus" dynamic creation
of the church, which bears, perha an incidental likeness to the Jesus of
Nazareth, a first Jew about whom not much can be known.
This proposal of K2hler and Bultmann, if accepted, important
implications for the modernist conception objective reality. For if the
message about Jesus assumes macy over the actual Jesus, and the message
is control1 the messengers (the Gospel writers), then the messe have control
over the "reality" of Jesus. Bultmann's means that classic modernism-the
view of re out of the Enlightenment-is no longer tenable beauty, is in the
eye of the beholder. In fact, this ist the root of all Eastern philosophies.
What has taken pl this switch is the triumph of Strauss's mytical-poetic
paradigm
It is no longer of final importance what Jesus did or said. What is of final
importance is what is belimed about Him.
Bultmann was also tremendously influential as a critic who pioneered
the use of form criticism on New Testament texts. Form criticism originated
among Old Testament scholars who were trying to determine the way texts were
used in the cultic" (that is, liturgical) practices of ancient Judaism. For
example, it is widely agreed by the form critics that the book of Esther was
originally an oral tradition commonly recited as part of the ancient Jewish
festival of Purim, only later codified as the written book of Esther.
From such beginnings, however, form criticism soon mutated into
complex and esoteric systems for identifying the "layers" of tradition found
in Old Testament documents, pro-ducing such things as the infamous JEDP
"Documentary hypothesis" about the authorship of the Pentateuch." When
imported into the world of New Testament criticism, form criticism
exacerbated the tendency of liberal critics to view the Gospels as composite
documents, assembled over decades and centuries by multiple authors from
multiple competing traditions.
Out of form criticism came another of the "higher" criticisms,
redaction criticism, which attempts to determine the theological biases of
the authors of the ancient texts. Com-bined with the Buhmannian view of
reality, form criticism and redaction criticism inevitably provide pictures
of Bible texts as complex assemblages of individual traditions-layers of
some-times competing tradition-combined by later "redactors" (or editors)
who assembled them to suit their own theological
agendas. These ancient scissor-and-paste specialists were not concerned with
reality as "we" understand it, assert the higher
*The JEDP theory is a form of higher criticism which holds that the five
books of Moses were not the works of a single author. Rather, the
contributions of several anonymous authors could allegedly be identified by
the names they used for God and other factors. These hypothetical authors
came to be known as the Yahwist (J). the Elohimist (E), the Deuteronomist
(D), and the Priestly Source (P).
critics, because they did not share our rationalist preconceptions about
history.
All of this may have some elements of truth, of coum one assumed a
completely literal interpretation of the gospels for example, the higher
critics would no doubt have so1 thing to tell us about the kinds of ancient
history writing pl tices that would go into creating a passage such as
"Sermon on the Mount" (Matthew 5-S). The higher criticswould tell us that
Matthew assembled various sayings of Jesus and couched them in the narrative
framework of Jesus go, up a mountain with His disciples and teaching them.
wi to say, the Sermon on the Mount is not a court-reporter's m scription of
one actual sermon that Jesus delivered on q particular mountain on one
particular date. This is ina
esting, perhaps, but hardly earthshaking; unless one as sw a kind of
"straw-man" literalism (such as the kind the Jq Seminar identifies with all
of its "fundamentalist" opposition As Craig Blomberg, an evangelical New
Testament scholar 1 Denver Seminary, points out:
Take the Sermon on the Mount. We know it's not a straight,
stenographic account. When you look up those passages in Matthew, they can
be read in a matter of minutes. Whereas a teacher who spoke to a large crowd
like that might have held forth much of a day.g
Whether the Sermon on the Mount is a condensed sion of a single,
historical address, or a collection of Jesus' ings that have been
"framed" in a traditional first-cc narrative device, is a matter of
reasonable debate, well wi the confines of orthodoxy. But asserting that
Matthew selected various connected sayings of Jesus and presented thed):{'
as a single discourse is a long way from asserting that Matthew. actually
made up most of the words and has Jesus speak th% in order to advance his
(Matthew's) own theological
That, however, is exactly the jump that the criticism of th& "quest" takes
as its starting point. It is an even assert that these supposed "made up"
words of Matthew's are actually the message of the "real" Jesus; that is,
that they rep resent the reality of the "proclaimed Christ." But that is the
,,nderlying, usually unstated assumption of the leg of the quest that comes
after Bultmann-the New Quest.
me New ("Second") Quest
The New Quest (the second quest) was started by former students of
Bultmann after World War II, when they eventu-ally grew dissatisfied with
his pronouncement that nothing ceuld be learned about the Jesus of history.
The New Quest left behind some of the radical agnosticism of Bultmann's
l&ion, but took with it the new tools of "higher" criticism, sad a modernist
framework substantially altered from that of be original quest.
The certainties of the nineteenth-century First Quest were based on
the assumption that the reality of the first century and that of the
nineteenth century were congruent. Human events in any century were of a
piece, and the application of rational analysis to the records of a prior
epoch, no matter how encrusted with irrational beliefs, would yield the true
pic-ture that was desired.
The New Questers, after Bultmann, could entertain no such
confidence. The reality of the first century was a creature of the
firstcentury mind, and to fully analyze it, one would have to map the
contours of that mind. This would involve moving into the world of unreason,
a world in which irra-tional beliefs were often as not the basis of reality,
as nowunderstood. This was a project that had no assurances of suc-cess
under rationalist principles.
The fractured modernism of the New Quest is an odd creature. It
maintains the essentially naturalistic view of the world of the
nineteenth-century, but it has been forced to make room for the irrational
in the makeup of reality; it beEties in the reality of myth. The New Quest
is a "transitional form," straddling the boundaries between modem and
postmodern. Evangelical scholar Michael J. Wilkins and J. P. Mo comment on
the effects of this strange mix:
This [fractured modernism] has produced intriguing contradictions in
methods and presuppositions among scholars who combine "modernism's"
optimistic scientific" quest with "postmodernism's" skepticism. On the one
hand,; these scholars attempt to be objective in their quest for the
historical Jesus, establishing criteria that sift nonhistorical elements in
historical records from truthful ones. On the" other hand, these scholars
are influenced by postmodernism's declaration that objectivity is
impossible: we al,' look through our own eyes, bringing our own perspectivee
and biases, so we can only make the best of what we see.'0
It is not surprising, given its lineage, that the New Quest has been
able to identify little in the New Testament do ments that it considers
reliable. What is perhaps surprisiq that it finds anything that can be
relied on-but it does, 01 least did. For example, Norman Pert-in, one of the
best kna scholars of the New Quest, in 1974 summarized a list of thi that
could be confidently asserted about the life of Jesus:
His baptism by John, the proclamation especially in parables of the
present and future kingdom of God, a min-istry of exorcism, his gathering of
disciples across socioeco= nomic 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 011 charges of blasphemy and by the Romans
for sedition, and his crucifution.' l
This list is substantially longer than anything that be admitted to
by the Jesus Seminar. Even so, it leaves plenty. When it is understood that
the term "exorcism, the modern mind, is synonymous with psychological heal
it is clear that this list leaves nothing of Jesus' miracles, n of His
prophetic statements, none of His claims of a Um relationship with the
Father, no claims of being the Messiah, and no resurrection.
me Third Quest
The aging New (second) Quest was never really anything very anew."
It amounted to the First Quest with a postmodern facelift ad a post-Bultmann
historical agnosticism. Within the past 15 te 20 years, however, another
branch of scholarship has arisen bat may in fact deserve the designation
"New." This is the so-called "Third Quest," which is made up of scholars who
have concentrated on placing Jesus' life and message in the context of first
century Judaism. This includes such scholars as Ben Meyer at McMaster
University in Canada, E. P Sanders of Duke University, James Charlesworth of
Princeton, Gerd Theissen from Heidelberg, and A. E. Harvey and Geza Vermes
(a leading Jewish scholar) from Oxford. Although rooted in the same
nat-uralistic framework as the rest of the "quest," the Third Quest has
"spawned a substantial optimism concerning how much of the first three
Gospels reflect historically trustworthy material."'*
Many scholars of the Third Quest have imported tools from the fields
of sociology and anthropology to understand better the social world of
first-century Palestine. These scholars use these tools to create models of
the first-century Jewish-Palestinian culture using evidence from all the
avail-able resources, including biblical texts, extrabiblical texts, and
archeological evidence. They then analyze the picture of the first century
presented in the New Testament texts in light of the picture generated by
the sociological-anthropological models. The degree to which the biblical
evidence "agrees" with the larger picture is used to gauge its historical
accuracy.
The results of this type of analysis have been quite positive for
the view that the New Testament documents, or at least the Synoptic
Gospels,* are authentic, historically reliable texts
ansing from within the framework of first-century Judaism.
*The Synoptic Gospels are Matthew, Mark, and Luke. These Gospels can be
"seen together"-that is, they present the details of Jesus' life and
ministry using a con-sistent timeline.
Craig Blomberg summarizes the findings of this scholastic with respect to
the Synoptic Gospels:
Indeed, major studies of almost every theme or segment of the
Synoptic tradition have advanced plausible arguments for accepting the
historical dubili~ of substantial portions of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, once
they are inter-preted in light of the early first-century Palestinian Jewish
setting.*3
As has been noted, the Third Quest is rooted in the still
naturalistic tradition as the rest of the "quest," and therefc generally
rejects the more spectacular of Jesus' "nature" miracles-such as walking on
water and raising the dead-as mystical. It tends to regard as questionable
instances where f Synoptics differ considerably in relating the same event,
a it puts less weight on traditions that are recorded in only a source (that
is, only one of the Synoptic Gospels). It a shares the rest of modem
criticism's suspicion about the i torical reliability of the Gospel of John.
Still, in looking a side the inbred world of biblical criticism for sources
academic insight, the Third Quest has escaped the existr tialist malaise of
the New Quest. From a believer's point view, the Third Quest's ability to
make rational findings ba on objective historical evidence is positively
refreshing, es cially after spending any amount of time in the brackish ba
water of postmodem biblical criticism.
The Jesus Seminar-End of the Road?
This brings us to ask, Where does the Jesus into the scheme of the
grand "quest"? Detailed on the Jesus Seminar will be provided in the (:
follow this one. At this juncture, the important t is that the Seminar would
like to claim intellectectual scholarshiip in the so-called Third Quest.
But as Jesus saic
and bad trees, 'You will know them by their frui 7:16 NASB).
The Third Quest finds good reason to believe that "substantial"
portions of the Synoptic Gospels are historically reli-able. The Third Quest
tells us that the sociocultural world that the Gospels present-the world of
the Pharisees, Sadducees, zealots, tax-collectors, Herod, Pilate, Romans,
John the Bap-
tist, and Jesus-is a historically accurate one. This is, of course, what
conservative scholars have said all along.
In contrast, the Seminar finds almost nothing about the Gospels to
be historically reliable. To the Seminar, nothing is what it seems. Jesus is
not a prophet, nor the Messiah. His fol-lowers forced these images upon Him
because they couldn't fathom what He truly was: a secular Jewish cynic
sage.14 The Seminar has taken the Bultmannian "hermeneutic of suspicion" to
its logical end. To the Seminar, everything is false until "proven"
true-every narrative element evidence of a
theological plot, every reference to the Old Testament Scrip tures an
obvious ploy for scriptural justification, every recorded miracle a mythic
reinterpretation of natural events, or an outright hoax.
How did the fellows of the Seminar come to these conclusions? In
theory, each of their methods of historical inquiry are potentially unique;
and the results of the Seminar's votes reflect a consensus view over a wide
range of potential hermeneutical and historical positions. This is the
theory. In actual fact, the Seminar's "Rules of Evidence"* appear to be a
kind of ideological screen through which all fellows must
Pass, albeit no doubt eagerly. The Seminar's lockstep pattern of compliance
with these "rules" gives their claims to freedom from "ecclesiastical and
religious control" a perverse irony. The "rules"-no doubt the product of
mastermind Funk determine a very specific, very liberal, and very skeptical
henneneutic.
The Seminar reflects the logical consummation of both fie First and
New (second) Quests. It has a thoroughgoing *The next chapter contains a
thorough discussion of these "rules." paranoia about all motives: everyone
in biblical ti to deceive, distort, commandeer, reshape. The me of the
Seminar is more of a psychoanalysis of authors than a historical
investigation. It hides facade of standard historical inquiry, but in fact
has lost confidence in the ability of such methods to final truth. It has
lost confidence in the nature of truth itself. route to understanding chosen
by the Seminar bow heavily from the pliable tools of psychology, and it assq
spectacularly clear insights into the minds of those whom Q purporting to
study. How were these insights derived? aren't really told, because the
Seminar hides most of its q important "work" behind the facade of objective
acadeq inquiry.
To be sure, there is at least one well understood psychological
principle present in the Seminar's work: the princil of projection. The
Seminar carves up the words of Jesus to into their own worldview, and
behold, the earliest disc@ have done the same thing. The Seminar doesn't
believe t coming kingdom of God, a final judgment, or a return Jesus the
Messiah; and uoila, Jesus didn't believe in any of 4 stuff either. The
fellows of the Seminar create a Jesus in th own image, but they are no doubt
confident that this is jl the latest chapter in the definition of the "real"
Jesus, process that has been ongoing since the foundation of 4 church.
In the final analysis, the "quest" of the Jesus Seminar historical,
because they have presupposed a reality that doesn't support historical
reconstruction. The "reality" of 1 Jesus Seminar is the shifting,
rational-irrational, semi-mysti reality of the postmodernists. And through
it, they have fou not the "historical Jesus" but an a-historical Jesus of
their o projective imagination.
- 1
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