At the beginning of the 20th century the most-influential authorities on the New Testament were engaged in the quest for the essence of Christianity and for the Jesus of history. But that quest led in the early decades of the 20th century to a revolutionary conclusion regarding the teachings of Jesus—namely, that he had expected the end of the age to come shortly after his death and that his teachings as laid down in the Gospels were an “interim ethic,” intended for the messianic community in the brief span of time still remaining before the end. The effort to apply those teachings in modern life was criticized as a dangerous modernization. This thesis of the “consistent eschatology” in Jesus’ message was espoused by Johannes von Weiss (1863–1914) and gained wide circulation through the writings of Albert Schweitzer.
The years surrounding World War I also saw the development of a new theory regarding the composition of the Gospels. Because of its origin, that theory is usually called “form criticism” (German Formgeschichte). It stressed the forms of the Gospel narratives—parables, sayings, miracle stories, Passion accounts, and so on—as an indication of the oral tradition in the Christian community out of which the narratives came. Whereas the attention of earlier scholars had been concentrated on the authenticity of Jesus’ teachings as transmitted in the Gospels, this new theory was less confident of being able to separate the authentic from the later elements in the Gospel records, though various proponents of it did suggest criteria by which such a separation might be guided. The studies of form criticism made a life of Jesus in the old biographical sense impossible, just as consistent eschatology had declared impossible the codification of a universal ethic from the teachings of Jesus. Some adherents of form criticism espoused an extreme skepticism regarding any historical knowledge of Jesus’ life at all, but the work of scholars such as Martin Dibelius and even Rudolf Bultmann showed that such skepticism was not warranted by the conclusions of this study.
Influenced by those trends in New Testament study, Protestant theology by the middle of the 20th century was engaged in a reinterpretation of the Christology of the early church. Some Protestant churches continued to repeat the formulas of ancient dogma, but even there the critical study of the New Testament documents was beginning to call those formulas into question. The struggles of the evangelical churches in Germany under Adolf Hitler caused some theologians to realize anew the power of the ancient dogma of the person of Christ to sustain faith, and some of them were inclined to treat the dogma with less severity. But even they acknowledged that the formulation of that dogma in static categories of person, essence, and nature was inadequate to the biblical emphasis upon actions and events rather than upon states of being. Karl Barth for the Reformed tradition, Lionel Thornton for the Anglican tradition, and Karl Heim for the Lutheran tradition were instances of theologians trying to reinterpret classical Christology. While yielding nothing of their loyalty to the dogma of the church, Roman Catholic theologians like Karl Adam were also endeavouring to state that dogma in a form that was meaningful to modern men and women.
The doctrine of the work of Christ was receiving less attention than the doctrine of Christ’s person. In much of Protestantism, the concentration of the 19th century upon the teachings of Jesus had made it difficult to speak of more than the prophetic office. The priestly office received least attention of all. Therefore, despite the support accorded to efforts like that of Gustaf Aulén to reinterpret the metaphor of the Atonement as Christ’s victory over his enemies, Protestant theology in the middle of the 20th century was still searching for a doctrine of the Atonement to match its newly won insights into the doctrine of the person of Christ. By the end of the 20th century, theologians such as Rita Nakashima Brock were rejecting the doctrine of the Atonement altogether. Some scholars, such as those of the Jesus Seminar (e.g., John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg), rejected most of the traditional portrayals of Jesus, focusing more on the social dimensions of Jesus’ ministry.
In a curious way, therefore, the figure of Jesus Christ has become both a unitive and divisive element in Christendom. All Christians are united in their loyalty to him, even though they express their loyalty in a variety of doctrinal and liturgical ways. But doctrine and liturgy also divide Christian communions from one another. It has not been the official statements about Christ that have differed widely among most communions. What has become a sharp point of division is the amount of historical and critical inquiry that is permitted where the person of Christ is involved. Despite their official statements and confessions, most Protestant denominations had indicated by the second half of the 20th century that they would tolerate such inquiry, differ though they did in prescribing how far it would be permitted to go. On the other hand, the exclusion of modernism by the Roman Catholic Church in 1907–10 drew definite limits beyond which the theological use of the methods of critical inquiry was heretical. Within those limits, however, Roman Catholic biblical scholars were engaging in considerable critical literary study, at the same time that critical Protestant theologians were becoming more sympathetic to traditional Christological formulas. Jaroslav Jan Pelikan The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Citation Information
Article Title: Jesus
Website Name: Encyclopaedia Britannica
Publisher: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.
Date Published: 02 August 2019
URL: https://www.britannica.com/biography/Jesus
Access Date: August 27, 2019
Additional Reading Texts, translations, and synopses
The principal source for the life and teachings of Jesus is the Greek New Testament, and the most useful edition is Eberhard Nestle et al. (eds.), Novum Testamentum Graece, 26th new rev. ed. (1979). The best edition of the synopsis of the first three Gospels, which prints the text in parallel columns, is Albert Huck, Hans Lietzmann, and Frank Leslie Cross (eds.), A Synopsis of the First Three Gospels, 9th ed. (1936, reissued 1976); and the best translation of Huck is Burton H. Throckmorton, Jr. (ed.), Gospel Parallels: A Comparison of the Synoptic Gospels, 5th ed. (1992). E.P. Sanders and Margaret Davies, Studying the Synoptic Gospels (1989), examines the difficulties of using the Synoptic Gospels. There are also numerous translations of the Bible, and among the better are Wayne A. Meeks et al. (eds.), The HarperCollins Study Bible: New Revised Standard Version, with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books (1993); and Herbert G. May and Bruce M. Metzger (eds.), The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocrypha: Revised Standard Version, Containing the Second Edition of the New Testament and an Expanded Edition of the Apocrypha (1977).