Debate Over the Historical Jesus

The following report is from a November 1996 article in the Encarta Yearbook.

The Debate Over the Historical Jesus and the Christ of Faith

By Ira Rifkin

The degree of popular interest the subject now commands was underscored just prior to Easter 1996, when the three leading weekly news magazines in the United States—Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News & World Report—all featured cover stories documenting the increasingly contentious argument over scholarly efforts to paint a portrait of the historical Jesus. Fueling the interest are the dozens of books that theologically liberal scholars and clergy have published in recent years taking a critical look at the life of the Jesus of the Gospels. That has prompted their more conservative academic colleagues to publish a like number of books defending the Jesus of tradition.

The Jesus Seminar and the Modern Quest

Much of the current impetus for this public discussion can be traced to the group that calls itself the Jesus Seminar, an iconoclastic array of some 200 biblical and religion scholars who for more than a decade have met twice yearly to pass judgment on the words and deeds of Jesus as stated in the New Testament. With its flair for garnering publicity in a media age, the Jesus Seminar has arguably done more to bring the debate to the public's attention than any previous attempt to shed critical light on the person of Jesus.

At the same time, a segment of Christianity—fundamentalist and evangelical Protestant and traditionalist Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox believers—has responded to the challenge posed by the increasingly secular, dominant culture by becoming more firm in its belief that the Gospels and the Jesus contained therein are to be understood as presented. It is, in effect, a conservative backlash directed against scholars who are seen as threatening long-cherished beliefs. The result is a theological argument that underscores the conflict that exists at the close of the 20th century between the worldview put forth by scientific inquiry and the competing one proclaimed by religious faith.

History of the Quest

However, the bonds of orthodoxy began to loosen with the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, in which the German theologian and religious reformer Martin Luther stressed that every Christian needed to establish his or her own relationship with Jesus by studying the Bible. Study led to reflection and, for some, a questioning attitude. The 18th-century move toward rational thought, known as the Age of Enlightenment, further accelerated biblical criticism. In 1778 the publishing of The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples by Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a German biblical scholar and philosopher, caused a stir by presenting Jesus as entirely human and the authors of the Gospels as deceivers.

Friedrich Schleiermacher, a German theologian who lived during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, postulated Jesus as having been divinely inspired, but not God incarnate as tradition held. David Friedrich Strauss, another 19th-century German theologian, in his 1835 book Life of Jesus Critically Examined, called the Jesus presented in the Gospels little more than myth intended to further a religious viewpoint. Joseph Ernst Renan, a 19th-century French historian and biblical scholar, added to this radical redefinition of Jesus by describing him as a gifted preacher, but nothing more.

But the scholar who is generally thought of as having brought the 19th-century quest for the historical Jesus to a close was, in fact, more a man of the 20th century. Albert Schweitzer, perhaps more popularly known for his work as a medical missionary in French Equatorial Africa (present-day Gabon), was also a theologian who wrote in The Quest for the Historical Jesus (1906) that Jesus was an apocalyptic-minded 1st-century bc Jew who preached the imminent arrival of God's kingdom within a wholly Jewish context—that is, he was someone who believed fully in Jewish messianic prophecies and who did not intend to launch a new religion. However, Schweitzer also concluded that it was impossible to say with certainty what is and what is not historically accurate about Jesus and that all efforts to do so, including Schweitzer's own, ultimately say more about the author's beliefs than the life of the subject. Despite that judgment about the impossibility of scholarly objectivity, the quest for the historical Jesus has continued to excite scholars.

Rudolf Bultmann, another German theologian and biblical scholar, reignited the debate laid temporarily to rest by Schweitzer and two world wars with his 1953 book, Kerygma and Myth. Bultmann, as had Strauss and others, claimed the Gospels to be sermons (kerygma in Greek) that were by no means historically accurate. But Bultmann did not reject the idea that God had acted through Jesus. Instead, he maintained that mere humans wrote the Gospels, employing mythic language in a vain attempt to express their experience of God.

Historical Jesus Seekers vs. the Christ of Faith

Twice yearly, in the spring and fall, several dozen liberal theologians, biblical scholars, conservative critics, journalists, and other interested onlookers gather in a ballroom at the Flamingo Hotel in Santa Rosa, California, to debate what Jesus said and did. Retired religion professor Robert W. Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar and a past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, acknowledges that, given the long history of the quest for the historical Jesus, the group has made few startling revelations in its conclusions. What sets the seminar apart from past scholarly looks at the Jesus of the New Testament is the manner in which it operates.

The Jesus Seminar broke the mold of past academic investigation by using the mass media to draw attention to the findings they had arrived at by consensus. Funk says this direct assault on tradition was intended to force universities, churches, and seminaries to deal with the seminar's findings. His stated desire was to stir up public discussion about the historical Jesus to such a degree that even the ordinary churchgoer with little interest in biblical scholarship would be compelled to pay attention to the debate.

In addition to Funk, some other more prominent Jesus Seminar participants—who refer to themselves as seminar “fellows”—include John Dominic Crossan, a former Roman Catholic priest who now teaches at DePaul University in Chicago, and Marcus Borg, a professor at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Crossan's most irritating conclusion for traditionalists is that Jesus could not have physically risen from the dead because his body was likely thrown to the dogs after being taken down from the cross. Borg has depicted Jesus as a kind of charismatic shaman (an expert in the spiritual world who practices healing and magic) who attempted to heal the sick and wounded just as the shamans of many traditional societies have tried.

In its early years, the Jesus Seminar used colored beads to vote on whether the Bible's claims about what Jesus said and did were historically accurate. More recently, the seminar has switched to less dramatic but more easily counted paper ballots. In voting on what Jesus said according to the New Testament, for example, a red bead meant Jesus said it or something very similar; pink meant Jesus probably said something like this; gray meant Jesus did not say this although the ideas conveyed are close to his own; and black meant Jesus did not say this and the ideas or content represent a later or different religious tradition. The Gospel's language about Jesus was accepted or rejected as historical truth based on the consensus of the balloting. Before voting, the fellows of the Jesus Seminar say they examine the many historical factors that might have influenced Jesus and those who wrote the Gospels after his death.

In his latest book, Honest to Jesus (1996), Funk sums up the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar. Funk writes that Jesus was probably born in Nazareth, not Bethlehem as the biblical tradition claims; that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist who, writes Funk, “was almost certainly a historical figure;” that Jesus apparently had four brothers and may also have had sisters but no father named Joseph; that his public career as a preacher lasted from one to three years; and that he was crucified in Jerusalem.

The story of Jesus' arrest, trial, and execution as recounted in the New Testament, states Funk, was suggested by prophecies in the Hebrew Bible “that early Christian storytellers arranged to have fulfilled as they told and retold the story.” What broadly emerges from Funk's book and the writing of other Jesus Seminar participants is a Jesus who was an itinerant social critic and sage in the Jewish wisdom tradition that concerned itself with ethical and philosophical matters. He was, they believe, a rebel who led an egalitarian revolution against a repressive established social order but who harbored no divine pretensions.

The fellows of the Jesus Seminar say they arrive at their conclusions by scrutinizing the social, literary, linguistic, political, and religious environment in which Jesus lived, as well as that of the decades after his death during which the Gospels were written. Rather than relying solely upon the Bible, they also cite the so-called Lost Gospel Q, a hypothetical source for material common to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke but which has never been found. Q comes from the German quelle, meaning source. Scholars such as Marcus Borg believe Q to exist. They think it is an early compilation of Jesus' sayings, as well as some of those of John the Baptist, which the writers of Matthew and Luke independently drew upon decades later. Rejecting supernatural explanations, the Jesus Seminar fellows instead subscribe to psychological ones—such as explaining the Resurrection as the internal experience of Jesus' disciples that was later misunderstood to be historical truth.

The Jesus Seminar's Rationale

In pressing their case, Jesus Seminar fellows say that what is at stake is the “honesty” of the Christian message. Crossan believes that the church needs to admit that what it teaches as historical fact is really an act of faith and that writings taught to be understood literally were really meant to be read metaphorically. He and other seminar fellows maintain that given Western culture's current disposition toward critical thinking, such honesty is required to keep the church from becoming completely irrelevant to the majority of contemporary Christians.

As evidence, the Jesus Seminar fellows point to the continued numerical decline of long-established, mainline Protestant churches—such as the Methodist, Anglican/Episcopal, Lutheran, and Presbyterian denominations—in Europe and North America, and the widespread disregard within the Roman Catholic world of Vatican dictates and pronouncements. It is a case, seminar fellows say, of salvaging something of Christianity before all of it is lost to the modern mind-set. Theologically conservative, or traditional, critics of the Jesus Seminar dismiss the group's conclusions as the misguided rantings of secular humanists (supporters of a philosophy that advocates secular rather than religious values) whose lack of faith and cynicism renders them incapable of comprehending the New Testament's emotional, nonrational message and account of Jesus.

Seminar Critics Say Believers Must Have Faith

James R. Edwards, a religion professor at Jamestown College in Jamestown, North Dakota, indicts the Jesus Seminar for its “lack of openness to, or even interest in, the possibility that Jesus was God incarnate.” He chides the seminar fellows for only accepting as admissible that evidence deriving from sources other than the Bible, and of which there is little, while evidence “from above,” as he refers to the church's Apostles' Creed and other such statements of faith, is rejected out of hand.

Although modern scholarship has correctly shown that the Gospels are not historically accurate in all aspects, Edwards says, it does not necessarily follow that the Gospels have distorted the historical Jesus. Many eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus still lived when the Gospels were composed in the decades that followed Jesus' death. These witnesses, say Edwards and other seminar critics, would have served to ensure that Jesus' life story was accurately retold, particularly since the word-for-word transmission of information, or oral tradition, was a hallmark of the time in which Jesus lived.

Similarly, the Dead Sea Scrolls—written, most scholars agree, by members of the Essene sect of Jewish ascetics who lived in the Judean Desert roughly between the end of the 3rd century bc and ad 70—have been cited by traditionalists to undercut the seminar's argument that Jesus never spoke of himself as being the Messiah or having any other similar exalted status. The Dead Sea Scrolls, first discovered in 1947 in a series of caves at Qumrān, Jordan, on the western edge of the Dead Sea, refer to a leader known as the Teacher of Righteousness who singularly pointed out his status as the one member of the group through whom God spoke—setting a precedent for Jesus to regard himself in similar tones.

Outlook for the Debate

Part of the reason for this, goes the thinking, is the glut of books produced in recent years on the subject. Henry Carrigan, religious book review editor for Publishers Weekly, the industry trade publication, says interest in the debate has leveled off among general readers who have become satiated. The Jesus Seminar's The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, published in 1993 and a religion book bestseller for more than nine months, selling more than 60,000 hardcover copies, may well have been the high point of public interest, says Carrigan.

Part of the reason also lies with the material having been pretty well exhausted. Having scrutinized Jesus' New Testament sayings and activities, even the Jesus Seminar is now looking for new fields to plow. At its meeting in October 1996, seminar fellows decided to formally extend their joint endeavor to a study of the life and Gospel letters of Paul, the history of early Christian communities, the development of the Christian creeds, and the decisions that led to the inclusion of particular texts in the church's official biblical canon. By the end of 1999, seminar fellows say they will produce a new work that will amount to a rewriting of the New Testament.