THE FIRST FAITH
When Did Faith Become a Factor in the Jesus Tradition?
In my recently published Jesus Remembered,[1] I attempt to engage with the long-running quest of the historical Jesus. I try to highlight what seem to me the key issues, historical, hermeneutical, theological, and the classic expositions of these issues. I note what also seem to me important advances made in the course of the quest, methodological insights that remain valid to this day. But above all I hope that my own contribution will itself constitute some advance in the quest—at three points in particular. Elaboration of these three points will be the purpose and content of the three chapters that follow. In each case it is my contention that the earlier quests have failed because they started from the wrong place, from the wrong assumptions, and viewed the relevant data from the wrong perspective. In each case they forgot what should have been more obvious than it evidently was and so lost the way almost from the beginning.
First of all, they forgot the impact made by Jesus. The disciple-making, faith-creating impact of Jesus should be a fundamental given and an indispensable starting point for any quest for the Jesus from whom Christianity originated. It is this failure to appreciate and to evaluate properly the role of faith from the very first that is the focus of my first line of criticism of earlier quests. Not all questers, of course, are equally open to this criticism; it is the main thrust and consistent emphasis of the various quests with which I find fault.
The Christ of Faith versus the Historical Jesus
If the quest of the historical Jesus is characterized by one feature above all others, it is the contrast between “the historical Jesus” and “the Christ of faith,” or probably more accurately, the antithesis between “the historical Jesus” and “the Christ of faith.”
As is well known, the quest began by way of reaction against the Christ of Christian dogma. The Christ of the Chalcedonian creed, “perfect in Godhead and perfect in manhood, truly God and truly man,” was just too unreal a human being. The Pantocrator, the world ruler, of Eastern iconography was too far removed from the man who walked the shores of the Sea of Galilee. How can we believe in such a Christ when, according to the Letter to the Hebrews, he was able “to sympathize with our weaknesses [and] . . . in every respect has been tempted as we are” (Heb. 4:15)? It is the human Jesus, the one who truly knew and experienced the reality of everyday existence in first-century Palestine, the Jesus who lived among the poor, who counted people like Martha and Mary as his close companions, who was known as “a friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Matt. 11:19), that we prefer to hear about. Is he not a more meaningful Savior than the almost mechanistic God-man or the remote Pantocrator? No wonder the cult of Mary, the mother of Christ, became so popular when her Son was so divine and so remote.[2] The heart yearning for comfort and an inspiring role model needed a mother figure to intercede with this awe-inspiring Christ, needed to rediscover the human Jesus behind the divine Christ.
The contrast between “the historical Jesus” and “the Christ of faith” initially came to prominence in the title of D. F. Strauss’s slashing critique of F. D. E. Schleiermacher’s Life of Jesus.[3] Schleiermacher’s lectures had been given in 1832 and were already seriously behind the times\ when they were published thirty-two years later. In them he had concluded that the Fourth Gospel was written by John the son of Zebedee and therefore gave the most reliable and authoritative connected presentation of the life of Jesus. In the Fourth Gospel Schleiermacher found a Jesus who was the historical actualization of his conceptualization of religion in terms of the “feeling of absolute dependence.” John’s Gospel shows a Jesus who was distinguished from the rest of men by “the constant potency of his God-consciousness, which was a veritable existence of God in him.”[4] “His consciousness of God never failed him, and apart from it he amounted to nothing.”[5] In response, Strauss’s critique was cutting. His opening words are ones of denunciation: “Schleiermacher’s Christology is a last attempt to make the churchly Christ acceptable to the modern world. . . . Schleiermacher’s Christ is as little a real man as is the Christ of the church. . . . The illusion . . . that Jesus could have been a man in the full sense and still as a single person stand above the whole of humanity, is the chain which still blocks the harbor of Christian theology against the open sea of rational science.”[6] And his concluding sentences are equally bleak: “The ideal of the dogmatic Christ on the one hand and the historical Jesus of Nazareth on the other are separated forever.”[7]
The great goal of the first phase of the quest of the historical Jesus, then, was to get behind the Christ of faith in order to recover the historical Jesus. The task was envisaged as though it was equivalent to restoring a great masterpiece: the layers of subsequent dogma were like the layers of varnish and dust obscuring the authentic brush strokes of a Michelangelo; only by stripping the layers of dogma away could the original authentic genius of Jesus himself be uncovered. So the war cry arose: back from the religion about Jesus to the religion of Jesus! Back from the gospel about Jesus to the gospel of Jesus himself! The task was to liberate the real Jesus, the historical Jesus, from the chains and obscurations of later faith.
Not altogether surprisingly, given such a goal, two of the most famous products of the liberal quest of Jesus uncovered a Jesus who was a far cry from the Christ of dogma. In Ernest Renan’s romantic reconstruction, we find a Jesus who promoted “a pure worship, a religion without priests and external observances, resting entirely on the feelings of the heart, on the imitation of God, on the direct relation of the conscience with the heavenly Father.”[8] And in Adolf Harnack’s even more influential version, we find a “historical Jesus” whose gospel centered on the fatherhood of God, the infinite value of the human soul, and the importance of love. For Harnack, “true faith in Jesus is not a matter of creedal orthodoxy but of doing as he did.”[9]
By this time it was already clear that to recover the historical Jesus was not simply a matter of stripping away the faith of creeds and later dogma. It was already the faith of the first Christians that needed to be stripped away. For Harnack, it was Paul who had begun the process of transforming the simple Jewish moralizing message of Jesus into the hellenizing religion of sacrificial cult. Jesus’ gospel focusing on the kingdom of God was transformed by Paul into the gospel focused on Jesus himself.[10] By that time, the end of the nineteenth century, Strauss’s conclusion that in the Fourth Gospel the Jesus of history had already been lost behind the Christ of faith had become the standard consensus. And William Wrede simply completed the circle by insisting that the Synoptic Gospels—not least the earliest of them, the Gospel of Mark—were also products of faith. “The messianic secret” of Mark, which holds the Gospel together, had been contrived in the process of composing Mark’s life of Jesus.[11]
Wrede’s conclusion proved to be of amazing influence and significance throughout the rest of the twentieth century; in the words of Norman Perrin, the Wredestrasse had become the Hauptstrasse.[12] It ensured that the Gospels, every one of the four canonical Gospels, would be regarded as products of faith. It ensured that the starting point for study of any Gospel passage would always be the assumption that the passage expressed the theology of that Gospel’s author. To argue that the passage may afford an insight into Jesus’ own understanding of his mission could never be assumed in the same way. The burden of proof always would lie with those who wanted to find here words that Jesus spoke or actions that Jesus took.[13]
This influence was soon reinforced by the development of form criticism. Form criticism began as an attempt to penetrate behind the written sources of the Gospels to uncover the earlier forms taken by the gospel story.[14] But the more influential aspect of form-critical method was the thesis that each unit of tradition must have had a life-setting, a Sitz im Leben, that explains and determined that form. The corollary was directly in line with the outworking of Wrede’s thesis: the unit of tradition reflects most directly the concerns and faith of its setting in life, its Sitz im Leben Kirche.[15] If the reader wants to maintain that it (also) reflects a Sitz im Leben Jesu, that has to be argued for. However, it is the Sitz im Leben Kirche that can be taken for granted and that may have created the unit, or at least have greatly modified the tradition to make it speak to that setting. Consequently, there can never be any assurance as to how much or how little may go back to the setting of Jesus’ own mission. The Christ of faith continues to obscure the historical Jesus.
Günther Bornkamm, in pleading the case for a new quest of the historical Jesus in the 1950s, well indicates how inhibiting such assumptions were. Almost immediately he observes: “We possess no single word of Jesus and no single story of Jesus, no matter how incontestably genuine they may be, which do not embody at the same time the confession of the believing congregation, or at least are embedded therein.” He continues: “In every layer, therefore, and in each individual part, the tradition is witness of the reality of his history and the reality of his resurrection. Our task, then, is to seek the history in the Kerygma of the Gospels, and in this history to seek the Kerygma.” “Nothing could be more mistaken than to trace the origin of the Gospels and the traditions collected therein to a historical interest apart from faith. . . . Rather these Gospels voice the confession: Jesus the Christ, the unity of the earthly Jesus and the Christ of faith.”[16] So the Christ of faith pervades the Gospels, and pervades them so thoroughly that the quest of the historical Jesus easily loses itself in the mist of post-Easter kerygma and faith, which seeps from every nook and cranny of the Gospel story.
It is this total lack of confidence in our ability to penetrate fully through the layers of post-Easter faith that has undoubtedly been a major factor in persuading many scholars of the past and present generation to shift their attention away from historical questions regarding Jesus to reconstructing the context to which each Gospel bears witness. Each Gospel bears more immediate witness to the situation that gave it birth than to the originating impulse of Jesus’ own mission. The debate about which traditions go back to Christ in, say, Mark’s Gospel, has become lost in confusion, and our hearing has been deafened by competing views, so let us focus rather on what Mark’s Gospel tells us about Mark’s community and its social and cultural setting.[17] Or, why torture our congregations with the grim news that we have so little confidence in our ability to hear and observe through the Gospels what Jesus himself did and said? It is more comfortable to bracket out questions of history and to focus on the closed world of the narrative itself, where discussion can be restricted within narrow and less threatening boundaries and attention can be devoted to highlighting each evangelist’s storytelling genius.[18]
The latest round in the epic contest, the historical Jesus versus the Christ of faith, appears in the work of the Jesus Seminar. Robert Funk, the doyen of the Seminar, makes no secret of his desire to rescue Jesus from Christianity; for Funk, the continuing purpose of the quest of the historical Jesus “is to set Jesus free from the scriptural . . . prisons in which we have incarcerated him. . . . The pale, anaemic, iconic Jesus suffers by comparison with the stark reality of the genuine article.”[19] The logic for this rescue effort is along predictable lines: whatever can be attributed to the communities that used this tradition is to be stripped away—any use or echo of Scripture; any saying that is not aphoristic, parabolic, or a sharp retort; any hint of baptismal practice or of the circumstances of the early Christian mission; anything that smacks of common Israelite or Judean lore or could have been said by any Christian sage; and particularly anything that is apocalyptic in character or hints at a Paul-like theology of the cross; or in a word, any sniff of faith.[20] Not altogether surprisingly, the Jesus who emerges for Funk is “a free spirit,” “a vagabond sage,” “the subverter of the everyday world around him,”[21] a historical reconstruction apparently all the more convincing because it stands at such odds with the traditional picture of Jesus drawn from the Gospels. Funk’s work and that of the Jesus Seminar are presumably intended to mark some kind of triumph of “the historical Jesus” over “the Christ of faith.”
In all this a striking feature is readily apparent: that in the quest of the historical Jesus, faith is a hindrance, faith leads the searcher down the wrong road, faith prevents the searcher from recognizing the real Jesus. Faith is bad, history is good. The Christ of faith is what we need to get behind; the perspective of faith obscures and deceives; we will only attain to the Jesus of history when all the elaborations and distortions of faith have been stripped away, and when all faith has been eliminated from the record and the resulting picture. What started as a protest against the artificialness of the creedal Christ, what began as an attempt to strip away the centuries-old layers of dogmatic and ecclesiastical contrivance, has ended up as a rejection of the Gospels themselves and their portrayal of Jesus and a deep-seated suspicion of the Jesus tradition as a whole. It is all, from start to finish, the product of faith and therefore to be discounted.
It is this whole thrust that I find it necessary to question and challenge—on two grounds: first, we must recognize that the first faith of the disciples is what makes it possible for us to gain any information about or insight into the Jesus of Galilee; and second, we must also recognize the fallacy of thinking that the real Jesus must be a nonfaith Jesus, different from the Jesus of the Gospels.
The Impact of Jesus
An inescapable starting point for any quest for Jesus should be the historical fact that Jesus made a lasting impact on his disciples. It can be regarded as one of the most secure of historical a prioris that Jesus made a deep impression during his mission. No one with any sense of history can dispute that Jesus existed and that he was active in some sort of mission in Galilee, probably in the late 20s or early 30s of the first century, prior to his execution in Jerusalem “under Pontius Pilate.” We know this because he left his mark on history. The historical fact of Christianity is impossible to explain without the historical fact of Jesus of Nazareth and of the impression he left. What he said and did evidently “got home” to many people, and the impact that he made on them has resonated down through history.
In particular, he made disciples; the effect that he had on them in due course gave us the accounts of Jesus in the Gospels. The impact was not a slight one—a memorable epigram, a good story, or an exciting event that caught their attention for a day or two and then sank below the surface of their everyday consciousness. His mission changed their lives. They became disciples. They gave up their jobs. They left their families. They committed themselves to him, to follow him. They were in his company day after day for many months. The impact of his mission turned their lives in a completely new direction; it lasted.
The point I want to make here is that this response was already a faith commitment. They believed what he said; they responded to his challenge by joining his mission and trusting their lives to him; they believed in him. At this point it is not necessary to clarify what this faith consisted of or amounted to. The point is that the way they responded to Jesus can hardly be denied description with words like “faith,” “trust,” and “commitment.” Jesus may have created many different impressions on different people, impressions that we can no longer recover. But in the case of the disciples, Jesus made a faith-creating impact, and it is from that initial disciple-making impact that all else follows.
This is the first point to be noted, then: faith among the disciples of Jesus did not first arise with Easter. Of course, that earlier faith was illuminated and transformed by what happened on the first Good Friday and Easter day. Of course, as Bornkamm observed, it is Easter faith that provides the context for all the traditions about Jesus in their present Gospel locations. The Gospels are clearly intended to preach the gospel. Each of them clearly is designed to build up to the climax of the death and resurrection of Jesus. But the disciples of Jesus did not first become disciples at the cross or on Easter day. They were already believers in Jesus prior to that; the faith was no doubt inadequate in the light of its subsequent fuller version, but it was still faith.
The second point follows. This initial faith shaped the Jesus tradition from the first. It would be possible to argue that the impact made by Jesus was on individual disciples who treasured the memory of what they had heard Jesus say and seen Jesus do; that they treasured that memory in their hearts and only after Easter began to talk about what they remembered. By so arguing some could continue to insist that the faith that shaped the tradition from the first was Easter faith. It would be possible, even, to argue that the individual disciples continued to treasure their memories of Jesus in the secret of their hearts, and only when a Mark or a Matthew appeared, when they were old, did they begin to feed these memories into the newly developing tradition. That way we could be sure that the Jesus tradition was first formulated from a perspective of well-developed Christian faith.
But neither of these possibilities is even halfway plausible. It is scarcely imaginable that what Jesus said and did was not talked about. Gerd Theissen’s Shadow of the Galilean[22] gives a good and fair impression of the way accounts and rumors of Jesus’ teaching and action must have been widely circulated, readily available to even the only faintly interested. And if stories were being told about Jesus on a common interest basis, then it is highly probable that those favorably impressed by Jesus would have had their own accounts of what it was that had impressed them, no doubt in part at least to explain their interest in Jesus to skeptical or inquiring neighbors. All the more so, then, should we expect those who had committed themselves to Jesus’ cause to talk about Jesus’ teaching and actions among themselves, not least to reassure themselves that their commitment to Jesus had not been a mistake.
Such sharing of impressions, such reflecting on the striking things Jesus had said, such retelling stories of Jesus’ doings are the obvious beginnings of the Jesus tradition. In this way, we may say, the initial forms of the Jesus tradition first took shape. The alternative, of disciples staying silent all during Jesus’ mission, with no talk of what had most impressed them, with no sayings of Jesus or memories of his healings to be shared when there was nothing else to do of an evening—the alternative of such hidden memories being suddenly jerked into verbal utterance by the event of Easter is simply too incredible even to be considered. Rather, it is a priori compelling to deduce that the Jesus tradition began as a matter of verbal formulation as the disciples talked together about the impact Jesus had made severally upon them.
Another way of expressing the same point is that such repetition of Jesus’ teaching, such formulation of stories about what Jesus did, about his encounters with others, was itself an expression of the commitment they were already making to the cause of Jesus. I need to put the point quite bluntly. The earliest forms of the Jesus tradition were the inevitable expression of their faith in Jesus, the converse of their commitment to become part of his disciple band. I repeat, the first forms of the Jesus tradition were indeed the expression of faith—of disciple faith—not yet of Easter faith, not yet expressive of the gospel as it came to be expounded by Paul and the other first apostles, but nonetheless born of, imbued with, expressive of faith.
Fortunately this a priori deduction can be substantiated from the data of the Jesus tradition itself. In a very important but unduly neglected article, Heinz Schürmann demonstrated, by following form-critical principles, that the beginnings of the sayings tradition in the Gospels must lie in the pre-Easter circle of disciples, and thus, as he added, with Jesus himself.[23] The claim can be easily documented. Consider only the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5–7) or the parallel material in the Lukan Sermon on the Plain (Luke 6:17–49): the Beatitudes, the call to love the enemy and not retaliate, the demand to give to those who beg from you, the warning against judging others, about the speck in someone else’s eye and the log in one’s own, the tree known by its fruits, the parable of the wise man and foolish man. Which of these has been created and determined by the gospel of Good Friday and Easter? Which evangelist in the Pauline mold would have been content to indicate that future prosperity depended on hearing and doing Jesus’ words, without any reference whatsoever to cross and resurrection? Much the more likely explanation is that such tradition was already treasured and formulated by the disciples before Easter. The form given to the tradition had already become firm and established so that it was simply part of the pre-Easter Jesus tradition which the post-Easter churches took on board and continued to use. Of course, it was from then on recalled and used in a post-Easter context. But it was almost certainly already being used in that form in disciple gatherings before Easter. The faith that it expresses and that gave such tradition birth as tradition was the faith evoked by Jesus during his pre-Easter mission, disciple faith, not yet Easter faith, not yet Christian faith, but nonetheless faith in Jesus.
The importance of the point is well illustrated by the current discussion regarding the Q document, believed by most to be one of the sources, along with Mark, on which Matthew and Luke drew. In the current phase of the quest of the historical Jesus, as much attention is now being paid to Q as was paid to Mark one hundred years ago. Two features have been given especial prominence among those most active in Q research. One is the almost certain absence of a passion narrative from Q, which consists almost exclusively of sayings of Jesus.[24] The second is the Galilean character of the Q material: it appears to have been shaped in Galilee and to evince a Galilean perspective.[25] Added to this is the now fairly standard assumption that a Gospel reflects more clearly than anything else the community within which it originated or for which it was written—hence talk of a “Q community.” In many discussions this quickly becomes the assumption that Q somehow defines this community; it held to this document over against other communities who are similarly defined by their document—Mark’s community in particular.[26] Given such logic, the inference becomes fairly obvious: the Q community must be located in Galilee and must have espoused an understanding of Jesus at odds with or even opposed to the gospel of cross and resurrection presented by Mark. On this reconstruction, the Q community, rather like the old nineteenth-century liberals, believed in Jesus as the great teacher of wisdom, the one whose pungent aphorisms and sharp retorts continued to be a subversive force within Galilee in the 40s and 50s.[27]
The logic behind this reconstruction is fallacious at almost every point. I have commented elsewhere on some of these fallacies, including what I call the “one document per community” fallacy.[28] Here I simply want to draw attention to the more obvious, much the more obvious explanation for the two features of Q that have been drawn into such speculation about the “Q community”—the absence of a passion narrative and the Galilean provenance of the Q material. The most obvious explanation for these features is that the Q material first emerged in Galilee and was given its lasting shape there prior to Jesus’ death in Jerusalem. That is to say, it expresses the impact made by Jesus during his Galilean mission and before the shadow of the cross began to fall heavily upon either his mission or the memory of his teaching.
The whole line of logic, using Q to reconstruct the beliefs of a Q community, illustrates a curious trait in twentieth-century investigation of the Synoptic tradition. Here is tradition, Q, which purports to be tradition of Jesus’ teaching, and which was evidently shaped in Galilee. Yet rather than draw the obvious conclusion, that this is the teaching of Jesus during his mission in Galilee, remembered and put into its present form by those who were with Jesus in Galilee, a quite different conclusion is drawn: that it reflects a post-Easter community of disciples who did not know about or were hostile to the message of Jesus’ death and resurrection. Never mind that we know a good deal about Jesus’ Galilean mission from non-Q tradition, and that the Q material is wholly consistent with that. Never mind that we know virtually nothing about churches in Galilee during the 40s and 50s. Never mind that the probability of Galileans not knowing or caring about what had happened to Jesus, his death in Jerusalem, must be almost zero. When scholarly argument continues to work with such assumptions, about faith corrupting tradition and about the priority of a form’s Sitz im Leben, without realizing that these assumptions should have been put in question long ago, no wonder its further logic demonstrates the negative proof of reductio ad absurdum.
In Q, in short, we see the evidence of the a priori argument mounted earlier. Q demonstrates that Jesus’ teachings had not simply been remembered by his first disciples, but had been put into forms that reflected the local and temporal provenance in which they were delivered, and had endured in that form. The obvious deduction is that the teaching was put into these forms as an expression of the discipleship into which such teaching had called them—that is, to celebrate and share the mutual impact of that teaching, and to make possible further reflection on that teaching as the mission of Jesus and their discipleship developed. In other words, the Q tradition reflects and bears testimony to the faith-creating impact of Jesus’ ministry. It was formulated as an expression of faith, indeed, but of the faith of the disciples that drew them into following him. As such, it takes us back not merely to the 70s or 80s when the Gospels were written, and not merely to the 40s, 50s, or 60s when the Jesus tradition was being circulated round the first churches, but to the late 20s or early 30s, to the time and mission of Jesus himself. As such, it enables us to hear, much more clearly than has regularly been assumed by Jesus researchers, Jesus himself as these first disciples heard him.
This brings us nicely to my second main complaint about the historical quest for the historical Jesus.
The So-Called Historical Jesus
A major problem with the quest of the historical Jesus is the very term “historical Jesus.” It suffers from a split personality. On the one side, anyone who has attempted to define the meaning of the phrase is quite clear about it: “the historical Jesus” is the Jesus constructed by historical research.[29] This is important: on a strict and proper definition, “the historical Jesus” is not the man who walked the tracks and hills of Galilee; “the historical Jesus” is what we know about that Jesus, what we can reconstruct of that Jesus by historical means. As Leander Keck puts it, “The historical Jesus is the historian’s Jesus, not a Kantian Ding an sich (thing in itself).”[30] Despite that, however, on the other side is the fact that “the historical Jesus” began life, as we may say, by being set in antithesis to the Christ of faith. The motivation behind the emergence of the phrase was a concern to cut through the thickets of dogma to discover the real Jesus behind them. Such motivation is not going to be satisfied if it is met instead with the thickets of historical uncertainty; what benefit is it to exchange the dogmatician’s Jesus for the historian’s Jesus? In other words, the phrase itself, whatever the niceties and qualifications of historical method, will not be satisfied to be anything less than a reference to the flesh-and-blood man, Jesus of Nazareth. And so we find, even among those who protest that they wish to stick with the first meaning, the Jesus reconstructed by historical research, that “the historical Jesus” is again and again being used for the man behind the Gospels, the real Jesus, the actual Jesus.
However, such confusion only masked the real problem, the fallacy that subverted the quest of the historical Jesus from the first. This was the assumption that the historical Jesus must be different from the faith-inspiring Jesus. Characteristic of the quest is that it has been searching for a historical Jesus not simply behind but different from the Christ of faith, and different not simply from the Christ of faith but in the end also different from the Jesus of the Gospels. Of course, he must be different. It was the nonhumanity of the Christ of faith that first motivated the quest. It was the suspicion that Jesus of Nazareth has been overlaid and hidden from us by post-Easter faith in Jesus as Lord that has continued to drive forward the quest. So of course, the human Jesus, the historical Jesus, must be different from a Jesus seen through the colored spectacles of belief that Christ was the divine Son of God. Let us by all means get back to the human Jesus, the historical Jesus!
But the point already made undermines that whole project. For the point is that faith colors all the traditions we have about Jesus and has done so from the very first. Not Easter faith, as I have argued, but nonetheless faith. The earliest tradition bears witness in phrase and form to the impact made by Jesus. The formulation of that tradition was itself the expression of the trustful response that Jesus evoked from his disciples. The initial formulation of the tradition, we may say, was itself the impact made by Jesus. That which grasped and shaped their lives is what they put into verbal form in what we now call the Jesus tradition. And as we can tell the shape of the seal from the impression it makes on the page, so we can tell the shape of Jesus’ mission from the indelible impression he left on the lives of his first disciples as attested by the teaching and memories of Jesus that they were already formulating during their initial discipleship. To quote Keck once more: “The perception of Jesus that he catalyzed is part of who Jesus was.”[31]
There are two important corollaries to this insight. One is that we can never succeed in stripping away that faith from the tradition, as though to leave a nonfaith core. When we strip away faith, we strip away everything and leave nothing. We cannot press back through the tradition to a Jesus who did not make an impression, or a Jesus who might have made a different impression. All we have is the impression actually made. And all we can deduce from that is the character and teaching of the mission that produced that impression. This is precisely why I called my book Jesus Remembered—because we have access to none other than to Jesus as he was remembered. The historical Jesus at best can be none other than the Jesus-who-made-the-impact-which-is-the-beginning-of-the-Jesus-tradition. We can see Jesus of Nazareth only through the eyes and ears of these first disciples, only through the impressions embodied in the teaching and stories of Jesus that they put into their enduring forms.
The attempt to understand and perform historical research on the model of scientific research, or latterly on the model of archaeological research, has simply compounded the misunderstanding. The quest of the historical Jesus has been conducted as though it were like Madame Curie’s quest for radium, a process of filtering out all other elements until the final precipitate, the long-sought-for element itself was exposed to view. Or like the archaeologist digging down through layers of historical strata in the hope of uncovering some artifact in the earliest stratum that might explain why so much happened subsequently on that site. As though “the historical Jesus” were a hidden element, an archaeological artifact, a something, a Ding an sich, that could be brought to sight and viewed wholly afresh, wholly independently of anything said about him then or thereafter. But that was never more than fanciful. The only Jesus available to us, I repeat, is Jesus as he was seen and heard by those who first formulated the traditions we have—the Jesus of faith, Jesus seen through the eyes and heard through the ears of the faith that he evoked by what he said and did.
The other corollary is that we really do not have any other sources that provide an alternative view of Jesus or that command the same respect as the Synoptic Gospels in providing testimony of the initial impact made by Jesus. We do not have an independent record of Caiaphas’s view of Jesus or of Pilate’s judgment regarding Jesus; that is, no sources that attest a nonfaith or a hostile response to Jesus. Would that we had; it would at least have enabled some triangulation between quite different reference points. And other mentions of Jesus in nondisciple sources are too allusive to help us much.[32] It is true that several scholars, mainly associated with the Jesus Seminar, but also others, want to argue that some of the later gospels, notably the Gospel of Thomas, provide evidence of a different faith response to Jesus. But while Thomas does indeed contain versions of Jesus’ teaching, some of which are early in formulation, it is the Synoptic tradition that provides the yardstick by which such judgments (early or late) can be made. And the modest enrichment of our knowledge of early tradition that Thomas offers, in the event, attests the same sort of impact made by Jesus as we find, in particular, in the Q tradition. Nevertheless, the distinctive Thomas material in almost every case probably attests the influence of later faith, gnostic faith. In that respect, we may say, the Gospel of Thomas is like the Gospel of John: they both attest the influence of later faith, in the one case gnostic faith, in the other Christian faith; that is, both exemplify in their different ways the Christ of faith in protest against which the quest of the historical Jesus was first undertaken.[33]
Once again, then, we are confronted with the, to some, uncomfortable fact that the only Jesus we can hope to find in any quest is the Jesus of the Gospels, that is, the Jesus who made the impact which was the first phase of the Jesus tradition, but which also gave so much of the Jesus tradition the lasting form still preserved for us in the Synoptic Gospels. And is not this the Jesus we want to recover—the Jesus who made the impact thus embodied in the Gospels? The Jesus we are seeking is not some Jesus who might or might not have been significant, or who might or might not be more meaningful to nineteenth-century liberalism or to twentieth-century modernism or to twenty-first-century postmodernism. That Jesus is a will-o’-the-wisp who draws questers unwittingly into the swampy ground of arguments of infinite regression. In contrast, the Jesus we want to find is the Jesus who was significant, the Jesus who made the impact he did, the Jesus who was the fountainhead from which Christianity flowed, the Jesus who transformed fishermen and toll collectors into disciples and apostles. My point is simply that by recognizing the impact that Jesus made, as attested by the Jesus tradition, we can still hope to experience something of that impact today.
Those of you familiar with the history of the quest will be well aware that I am mounting an argument similar to that pressed home more than one hundred years ago by Martin Kähler in his well-known essay The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historic Biblical Christ.[34] Kähler’s point was that we have no sources capable of sustaining a biography of Jesus. The Gospels are inadequate as sources for a life of Jesus. Consequently, biographers of Jesus can achieve their goal only by drawing upon what Kähler called a fifth gospel, meaning the historian’s own ideals. They fill up the gaps in the Gospel record read as history by reading into the accounts elements of their own faith and priorities. Hence “the so-called historical Jesus.” The many and varied Jesuses of the nineteenth-century quest were the result of the many and varied ideals and principles drawn upon to fill out the scant and uncertain historical data of the Gospels themselves—hardly deserving the title “historical” in the proper sense. In complete contrast, argued Kähler, what we have in the Gospels is “the historic biblical Christ.” The two words translated “historical” and “historic” (historische and geschichtliche) make his point. Historie he understands as merely historical, the bare data, independent of any significance that might be placed on them. Geschichte, on the other hand, denotes history in its significance, historical events and persons that attract attention by reason of the influence they have exercised. The point is that the Gospels present the geschichtliche Christus, Jesus seen in his significance. Yet we see the contrasting attempt to uncover a historical Jesus, stripped of the significance hitherto attributed to him, and now rather like a bare tailor’s dummy ready to be clothed with the significance modern individuals might claim to see in him or choose to clothe him with—a ludicrous nonsense.
The point is obviously similar to the one argued above: that there is no historical Jesus to be found in the Gospels, only the historic figure evident to us through the influence he exercised on his disciples, through the impact he made on them in calling them into discipleship. The difference is that Kähler thought in terms of “the biblical Christ,” the Christ who was preached by the early Christians. In other words, he was thinking in terms of what later would be understood as post-Easter faith. It was in such terms that Bultmann owned the influence of Kähler: what stood at the center for Bultmann was the kerygma, the kerygmatic Christ, the preached Christ.[35] But my reformulation of Kähler’s point in terms of the first faith, the pre-Easter faith of the disciples, still recognizes the force of Kähler’s argument without following Bultmann in discounting all faith other than Easter faith. Thus reformulated, Kähler’s argument is even more effective. To discount the influence that Jesus actually had, to strip away the impact that Jesus actually made, is to strip away everything and to leave an empty stage waiting to be filled by some creative amalgam of the historian’s own imagination and values. If we are unsatisfied with the Jesus of the Synoptic tradition, then we will simply have to lump it; there is no other truly historical or historic Jesus. Only the Jesus whom we can see and hear through the influence he had, through the impact he made on his first disciples, as evidenced by the traditions that they formulated and recalled, only that Jesus is available to the quester. But, and this is my point, this Jesus is available to the quester.
To conclude. Thus far I have made only these two points of protest against the mainstream of the quest of the historical Jesus. First, it has failed to recognize that the faith-creating impact Jesus made on those he called into discipleship is the appropriate and indeed the most obvious and necessary starting point for any attempt to “get back” to Jesus. It has failed to recognize that the Jesus tradition is the direct effect of that impact, expressive of its force and character, and clear testimony of that impact. And second, the quest has been too long captivated by the will-o’-the-wisp of a historical Jesus, an objective artifactual figure buried in the Gospels and waiting to be exhumed and brandished aloft, as different from the Jesus of the Gospels—not fully realizing that the less the reconstructed Jesus owed to the Synoptic picture of Jesus, the more it must be expressive of the agendas of the individual questers.
These are the only two points I want to make here and now. There is more to be said, and my criticisms of the earlier phases of the quest are incomplete. But the fuller critique requires a further two chapters.