Moore Perspective: The Quest for the Historical Jesus

Since the late 17th century the historical reliability of the Gospels has been attacked and challenged in the academic world by skeptics who have driven a wedge between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith. At least three waves of critical analysis, collectively referred to as “The Quest for the Historical Jesus,”¹ have been based on the historical-critical method with attempts to identify and evaluate sources believed to be behind the Gospel records. From the 18th-century European Age of Enlightenment, naturalists and rationalists have questioned the supernaturalistic claims of scripture and approached the texts as they would any other writings of antiquity, including secular and pagan works.

The First Quest

German theologian F. C. Baur (1792-1860) and his Tübingen School popularized the theory that Christianity began as two conflicting movements, viz. an early Petrine Jewish form (represented in Matthew) and a later Pauline Gentile form (represented in Luke), with Paulinism originally viewed as heretical. By the mid-2nd century the opposing factions were synthesized (represented in Mark), producing the mostly spurious documents that now comprise the NT. The Gospels, according to Baur, “can only be looked upon as intentional deviations from historical truth in the interest of the special tendency which they possess.”²Many others followed Baur’s lead, as his unorthodox claims had a sizeable impact on NT scholarship that continues to this day.

The Second Quest

The hyper-subjectivism of this “first quest” was convincingly challenged by Albert Schweitzer in the early 20th century,³ paving the way for a “second quest.” In the meantime Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976),⁴ along with Karl Barth (1886-1968), argued that very little about the historical Jesus can be known apart from his mere existence on earth and his death. Hans Conzelmann (1915-1989) then promoted, through critical analysis known as Redaction Criticism, the theory that the Gospel of Luke and the early Christians changed the initial idea of an imminent return of Christ to the concept of “Salvation History,” extending the parousia into the more distant future and living as disciples in the church age.⁵

In the 1950s Ernst Käsemann, followed by Günther Bornkam, Norman Perrin, James M. Robinson, and others, through Form Criticism reclaimed the historicity of a number of Christ’s teachings but rejected others. In the 1980s–1990s Robert W. Funk, John Dominic Crossan, and the Jesus Seminar took this to an extreme, endeavoring to show that an even smaller amount in the Gospels (less than 20% of the sayings attributed to Jesus) was authentic. Their skewed methodology and conclusions, however, have been criticized and rejected by mainstream scholarship.

The Third Quest

Interest in a “third quest” emerged in the 1960s–1980s, as more evidence came to light from the Dead Sea Scrolls, along with the impact of E. P. Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). This led to an interpretive strategy that focused more on Jesus in his 1st-century Palestinian environment and reaffirmed the historical value of the Gospels.

Making a significant contribution to conservative scholarship and a considerable impact on NT scholarship in general, British theologian Ian Howard Marshall published Luke: Historian and Theologian (1970),⁶ largely in response to Redaction Criticism’s misdirected extremes of the 1960s. Marshall maintained that history and theology are not incompatible. Building on the works of forerunners like William Ramsay, Marshall reiterated the historical reliability and importance of Luke’s writings. He also shifted the prevailing proclivity of merely harmonizing to analyzing each Gospel according to its own distinctive theological perspective.

Significant works in more recent years include Darrell L. Bock and Robert L. Webb, eds., Key Events in the Life of the Historical Jesus: A Collaborative Exploration of Context and Coherence (2010); and Craig S. Keener, The Historical Jesus of the Gospels (2012). These studies reinforce the solid historical foundation upon which the portrait of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels stands.

The Ongoing Quest

What many are calling a “fourth quest” has emerged within the past decade or so, with greater attention given to the Fourth Gospel’s contribution and the historical value of its distinctive features.⁷ Still in its early stages, “the [fourth] quest of the historical Jesus still has plenty of promising fruit to yield.”⁸

The quest continues to this day across the vast expanse of the theological spectrum. Out of all this analysis, discussion, and debate has developed at least three dominant critical disciplines. Form Criticism classifies individual “forms” or “units” in the biblical texts and seeks to trace their origins and developments through an extended period of oral transmission. Source Criticism seeks to identify and analyze literary sources assumed to be behind the biblical documents. Redaction Criticism evaluates how authors have presumably copied, arranged, and edited materials to produce the final product.⁹

Richard Bauckham comments:

We should be under no illusions that, however minimal a Jesus results from the quest, such a historical Jesus is no less a construction than the Jesus of each of the Gospels…. What is in question is whether the reconstruction of a Jesus other than the Jesus of the Gospels, the attempt, in other words, to do all over again what the Evangelists did, though with different methods, critical historical methods, can ever provide the kind of access to the reality of Jesus that Christian faith and theology have always trusted we have in the Gospels.¹⁰

How reasonable is it to think 19th-, 20th-, and 21st-century westerners are in a better position to determine the true state of affairs of persons and events thousands of years in the past in distant lands and foreign cultures than those who actually lived and reported contemporaneously? Rather than stand on the shoulders of giants, many seem determined to start all over from scratch.¹¹

--Kevin L. Moore

Endnotes:

¹ See B. Witherington III, The Jesus Quest 9-13; M. A. Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History 13-15; J. G. Crossley, Reading the NT 56-71.

² Paul the Apostle of Jesus Christ 1:108, trans. A. Menzies.

³ The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906).

⁴ Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (1921); trans. J. Marsh, The History of the Synoptic Tradition (1995). Along with Bultmann, other leading proponents of Form Criticism during this period were K. L. Schmidt and M. Dibelius.

⁵ Die Mitte der Zeit: Studien zur Theologie des Lukas (1954); translated into English as The Theology of St. Luke (1960).

⁶ Published in three editions, latest 2006.

⁷ See Paul N. Anderson, “A Fourth Quest for Jesus,” The Bible and Interpretation (July 2010), <Web>; P. N. Anderson and T. Thatcher, eds., John, Jesus, and History Vol. 1: Critical Appraisals of Critical Views (2007); Vol. 2: Aspects of Historicity in the Fourth Gospel (2009); Vol. 3: Glimpses of Jesus through the Johannine Lens (Early Christianity and Its Literature) (2016). See also J. D. G. Dunn, Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making (2003); C. L. Blomberg, The Historical Reliability of John’s Gospel (2011).

⁸ C. L. Blomberg, “The Fourth Quest of the Historical Jesus: Jesus The Purifier,” WBN (4 April 2021), <Web>; also Blomberg’s upcoming Jesus the Purifier: Furthering the Fourth Quest of the Historical Jesus (2023).

⁹ J. P. Meir acknowledges that assessing the criteria of authenticity “is more an art than science, requiring sensitivity to the individual case rather than mechanical implementation” (A Marginal Jew, vol. 1: Mentor, Message, and Miracles AYBRL [NY: Doubleday, 1991]: 184). For a reasonably concise overview from a reasonably conservative perspective, see C. L. Blomberg, Jesus and the Gospels (2nd ed.) 91-107. Blomberg also observes that in the 21st century, German scholarship no longer dominates, Form Criticism is passe, and Redaction Criticism is eclipsed by Critical Realism. Anti-supernaturalism still offers a challenge but not as definitively as in the past (“I. H. Marshall’s View of Redaction and History in Luke-Acts,” ETS 73rd Annual Meeting, 17 Nov. 2021). See also J. G. Crossley, Reading the NT 15-32.

¹⁰ Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2nd ed.) 4.

¹¹ C. H. Dodd candidly observes, “it is the plain duty of the historian to make use of every possible source of information in the effort to learn the facts about an historical episode which on any showing was a significant and influential one” (Historical Tradition in the Fourth Gospel 2).

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