Accordingly, emphasis has been placed on such factors as the religious, political, economic, and social influences in the land of Palestine. Recent archaeological findings have fueled a debate concerning the amount of Hellenistic and Roman influence in the Galilee of Jesus’ day.
A few brief examples will perhaps reveal some threads that tie together this loose-knit group of studies. For Geza Vermes, himself a Jew, Jesus was a popular Jewish rabbi and Galilean holy man.25 A treatise by Ben Meyer portrays Jesus as preaching to Israel, God’s chosen people, with a renewed offer of community.26 E.P. Sanders centers on Jesus’ cleansing of the temple, which, seen in the context of the Judaism of Jesus’ day, was an act that seriously offended his Jewish audience and eventually led to his death.27 Richard Horsley interprets Jesus as favoring nonviolent social dissent.28 Other important volumes add to the emphasis on Jesus and the Jewish background of his thought.29
A notable exception to this fairly positive trend is the position taken by the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar. While agreeing with the need to research the historical Jesus, these scholars follow more in the tradition of Strauss and Bultmann, and favor a return to a mythical approach to the Gospels.30
Summary and Conclusion
It would appear that, for at least the last two hundred years, there has usually been a keen interest in studying the life of Jesus. Although there have also been times (such as a few decades earlier this century) when this interest has waned among scholars, it seems to reassert itself periodically.
It is within such a contemporary context, then, that studies in the life of Jesus proceed. And like so many other areas, there are those scholars who will defend the biblical accounts, those who will deny their authority, and those who line up somewhere in between.
But not all interpretations of Jesus’ life attempt to pay strict attention to historical detail. Some, like the fictitious lives earlier in this chapter, have admittedly set out to construct rather imaginary portrayals of his time on the earth. But in spite of the fact that scholars deny the validity of such efforts, they have arguably played an influential role in the popular understanding of Christianity. In the last few decades, many popular lives of Jesus have appeared, and are quite similar in many respects to the fictitious works of about 150 years ago. We will discuss several in subsequent chapters.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, there is still a conclusion to be gained from all of this variety. As in so many other matters, the question is not how many scholars hold such-and-such a view, or what trends have dominated intellectual thought, or even how surveys tell us the majority of people think.
The real issue is what the data tell us about the Jesus of history. What sources do we have at our disposal? Is there any material from non-Christians? When did Jesus live? What did he do? What did he teach? How did he die? Is there any truth to the New Testament contention that Jesus was raised from the dead? It is our purpose to pursue the answers to many of these questions both by addressing critical challenges and by ascertaining what sources support a traditional understanding of Jesus.
1See Schweitzer’s classic treatment, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, transl. by J.W. Montgomery from the first German edition of 1906 (New York: Macmillan, 1968), pp. 38-39.
2Ibid., p. 38.
3Ibid., pp. 39-44.
4Ibid., pp. 44-47.
5Ibid., pp. 161-166.
6For a detailed analysis and critique of several versions of the swoon theory, see Chapter 4.
7Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, transl. by John Oman (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958).
8An example of deistic diatribe against Jesus’ miracles is Thomas Woolston’s “A Defence of the Discourses on Miracles” (1729), included in Peter Gay, ed., Deism: An Anthology (Princeton: Van Nostrand, 1968).
9Schweitzer, Quest, chapter V.
10David Strauss, A New Life of Jesus, 2 vol. (Edinburgh: Williams and Norgate, 1879).
11Karl Barth, Epistle to the Romans, transl. by Edwyn C. Hoskyns (London: Oxford University Press, 1933).
12For one early discussion of such matters, see Karl Barth, The Resurrection of the Dead (New York: Revell, 1933), pp. 130-145.
13Karl Barth, How I Changed My Mind (Richmond: John Knox, 1966), p. 69.
14Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” in Kerygma and Myth: A Theological Debate, ed. by Hans Werner Bartsch (New York: Harper and Row, 1961), pp. 3-8 for example.
15Ibid., pp. 9-16; Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribner’s, 1958), pp. 16-18.
16Barth and Bultmann had a famous disagreement over the reason for Paul’s citation of the resurrection appearances in 1 Cor. 15:3ff. Bultmann’s conclusion that Paul’s chief purpose was to present proof for Jesus’ resurrection (even though Bultmann thought that such was misguided) is important for our purposes. A brief synopsis of Bultmann’s response is found in his Theology of the New Testament, transl. by Kendrick Grobel (New York: Scribners, 1951), vol. I, p. 295. Barth registered his complaints against Bultmann on several occasions. One interesting claim is that, apart from the problems that he perceived in Bultmann’s program of demythologization, Barth thought that Bultmann’s agenda was a return to the old Liberal emphasis (How I Changed My Mind, p. 68), a claim that Bultmann vehemently denied. We will return to a critique of Bultmann’s views in Chapters 3-4.
17Käsemann’s essay is included in Essays on New Testament Themes, transl. by W.J. Montague (Naperville, IL: Allenson, 1964), pp. 15-47.
18Günther Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth transl. by Irene and Fraser McLuskey with James M. Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1960), chapter I.
19James M. Robinson, A New Quest of the Historical Jesus, Studies in Biblical Theology, First Series, 25 (London: SCM, 1959), pp. 85-92; cf. pp. 9-22.
20Ibid., pp. 99-100.
21For the seminal work written by a group of theologians sometimes called the “Pannenberg circle,” see Wolfhart Pannenberg, ed., Revelation as History, transl. by David Granskou (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1968).
22Ibid., chapter IV; cf. also Wolfhart Pannenberg, Jesus — God and Man, transl. by Lewis Wilkins and Duane Priebe (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1968), pp. 88-105.
23Jürgen Moltmann, Theology of Hope: On the Ground and the Implications of a Christian Eschatology, transl. by James W. Leitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1967).
24This designation was probably first given by Stephen Neill and Tom Wright in The Interpretation of the New Testament: 1961–1986, Second Edition (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988). The best treatment and evaluation is that by Ben Witherington III, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1995). For a popular overview of recent works on Jesus, see Tom Wright, “The New, Unimproved Jesus,” Christianity Today, vol. 37, no. 10, September 13, 1993, pp. 22-26.