Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

James H. Charlesworth is George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature and Director and Editor of the PTS Dead Sea Scrolls Project. He is author of numerous works, including The Historical Jesus, Resurrection, Authentic Apocrypha, and Jesus within Judaism. And his many edited volumes include The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (2 vols.), Jesus and Hillel, and Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls.

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The Historical Jesus

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

3) When did the study of the historical Jesus begin, and what has been learned?

4) Is it important to distinguish between what Jesus said and what the Evangelists reported?

We have seen that Jesus Research is necessary, primarily because the Gospels were composed after Jesus' death and shaped by post-Easter theology and proclamation. This research does not assume that our Gospels are unreliable. It recognizes that we need to sift out Jesus' own actions and thoughts from acts and words attributed to him. No one devoted to discovering what Jesus said and did would be satisfied with what an Evangelist imagined or added. Fortunately, in the twenty-first century we can learn from scholars' past mistakes and insights. For the purpose of discerning the developments in the study of the historical Jesus, the past two thousand years may be meaningfully (if not neatly) separated into five phases (dates are approximate):

1. No Quest (worship of Jesus as the Christ): 26–1738

2. The Old Quest: 1738–1906

3. The Moratorium on the Old Quest: 1906–1953

4. The New Quest and Its Demise: 1953–ca. 1970

5. Jesus Research (Third Quest): 1980–the present

1. No Quest (worship of Jesus as the Christ): 26–1738. Interest in Jesus did not begin as scientific study; it commenced with worshiping him as the Christ, the Son of God, and God. Early Christians had no doubt that the Gospels were composed by Jesus' disciples or the followers of Peter or Paul.

The Evangelists attempted to reveal what had been promised in the Old Testament: God would send the Messiah into the world to save it. In their minds, that had been fully accomplished by Jesus Christ. Further, the differences among the four Gospels were not a problem because they could be harmonized. The productions of harmonies began about the middle of the second century C.E., and the most influential harmony of the Gospels was compiled by Tatian about 175 C.E. Although the original is lost, its significance and missionary power are evident today, since it is preserved in Old Latin, Syriac, Greek, Persian, Armenian, Arabic, Old German, as well as in other languages.

In this period, speculation and study were not focused on the historicity of the Gospels. In the earliest centuries of Christianity such historicity was assumed and affirmed. Instead, thought was focused on Christological issues, such as the relation between Jesus, God, and the Holy Spirit. The first council to discuss these issues was held in 325 C.E. at Nicea. It was attended by Christians who were Greeks and Romans; some were anti-Jewish.

2. The Old Quest: 1738–1906. In The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910 [German: 1906]), Albert Schweitzer attributed the origin of the "Old Quest" to H. S. Reimarus (1694–1768), and this claim is repeated in many handbooks on the historical Jesus. It is misleading. The English Deists are the real precursors of critical Jesus study. The works of John Locke, Matthew Tindal, and Thomas Chubb shaped the world's culture because they sought a "reasonable Christianity." In the year 1738, Chubb published The True Gospel of Jesus Christ Asserted. Chubb "discovered" that Jesus' true message was the imminent coming of God's Rule (the Kingdom of God) and the true gospel was to be found in Jesus' preaching of good news to the poor.

David F. Strauss and other influential biblical scholars developed in Tübingen, a university city east of the Black Forest in Germany, a critical and scientific approach to the Bible. The Tübingen School initiated a new means of studying Christian origins, the Gospels, and the historical Jesus. The worship of Jesus was shifting to a quest for what can be known reliably about this man from Nazareth. In 1835, Strauss composed the first "life of Jesus"; it is his Das Leben Jesu (The Life of Jesus). Strauss was the first to comprehend the importance and complexity of myth and mythological language. Stories, like the Gospels, are possible only because of mythological language. Some myths evolve from poetry, others derive from philosophical truths, and still others develop from actual historical events. The only way to communicate the memorable and eternal is via mythical language. Strauss's insights into myth are fundamental; they would be more influential today if he had not couched his Das Leben Jesu within the threefold Hegelian dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. As many philosophers have indicated, Hegelianism is too simplistic; human development has not developed in a unilateral, and optimistic, direction.

The Old Quest (1738–1906) was clearly motivated by theological concerns. Martin Kähler crafted one of the most influential books, The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic, Biblical Christ (1892; ET in 1964). There Kähler emphasized that the Gospels are post-Easter narratives. Unfortunately, he argued that our gaze should not be on the historical but only on the historic; that is, the historical Jesus should be replaced by the Christ of faith. What is important for the Christian, according to Kähler? It is the historic, biblical Christ. The denigration of historical biblical research and an emphasis on theology made sense in a world dominated and defined by the anti-Christian thoughts of Darwin and Freud, but Kähler's false dichotomy between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith would have been abhorrent to the Evangelists and to the Reformers, especially Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Wesley. Nevertheless, Kähler's dichotomy unfortunately cast a dark shadow on almost all the brilliant Christian theologians of the twentieth century, including the great "B's": Rudolf Bultmann, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, as well as Paul Tillich.

After the conquests, then explorations, of the Middle East by the French and the British at the end of the nineteenth century, much had been accomplished to foster the study of the historical Jesus, especially in philology and lexicography. Indeed, some of our major lexicons originated in the second half of the nineteenth century. But in biblical studies many were creating hidden mines and placing them in the erstwhile peaceful waters of biblical theology.

Three luminaries illustrate this point: Julius Wellhausen, Emil Schürer, and Adolf von Harnack. Each of these professors taught in Germany where almost all scientific and advanced biblical research was centered.

Wellhausen (1844–1918) stressed that four sources defined the compilation of the Pentateuch: literary strata J (the Yahwist), E (the Elohist), D (the Deuteronomic compiler), and P (the Priestly source). Yet along with virtually all biblical scholars, he was swept forward by the times, which were characterized by optimistic evolution, Christocentricity, triumphalism, and "man's invincibility" (recall the story of the "unsinkable" Titanic). No Christian scholar used terms like Hebrew Bible and Tanakh (now well-known terms in many seminaries and universities). They assumed that the Bible was the Christian canon,...