Jesus in History and Interpretation

This is an essay about Jesus, about the significance of who he was and what he said and did. Any interpretation of Jesus’ significance is based primarily on the narrative interpretations of his ministry, death, and resurrection in the four canonical Gospels in the New Testament. The operative word here is interpretation. The Gospels interpret the significance of Jesus’ words and actions for his followers in order to shape the practices and beliefs of communities of faith, and hence they presume a faith commitment from the intended audiences. Although the Gospels recount select events in Jesus’ life, they do not purport to be objective accounts of what happened. Therefore, reading them as straightforward historical reports of what Jesus did and said not only misconstrues the nature and purpose of the Gospels but also obscures the fact that history is itself always a matter of interpretation.

That there are four canonical Gospels and several Gospels that are not in the canon indicates that the memory and early traditions about Jesus were interpreted in various ways. A close comparison of the birth narratives in Matthew and Luke, the chronology of Jesus’ ministry in the Gospels of Mark and John, or the resurrection narratives in all four canonical Gospels demonstrate how key events were interpreted differently. Not everything the Gospels depict Jesus saying and doing happened exactly as reported. Later in this essay, we will explore the character and purpose of the Gospels and various approaches to interpreting them in ancient and contemporary contexts. First, however, we investigate how these narrative interpretations of Jesus’ significance have been used by modern scholars for historical reconstructions of the figure of Jesus based on critical analysis of the Gospels.

In 1906, Albert Schweitzer wrote a book that evaluated the works about the historical figure of Jesus that had been written in the previous two centuries. The English translation of the title of Schweitzer’s book was The Quest of the Historical Jesus. The first quest began in the late eighteenth century, when a German scholar by the name of H. S. Reimarus, a philosopher who maintained that reason could arrive at knowledge of God and ethics from the study of nature, questioned the historicity of the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ miracles. He was followed by David F. Strauss and others who sought to distinguish what they regarded as purely historical accounts of the life of Jesus from the faith perspective that originally shaped the Gospels. This first quest for the historical Jesus was influenced by Enlightenment-era rationality, which rejected certain aspects of the Gospel accounts of Jesus as problematic because they contradicted the laws of nature.

Schweitzer’s review of this historical scholarship of Jesus demonstrated that the lives of Jesus produced during this era using historical-critical methods were themselves not objective, factual accounts. Rather, they reflected the interests and ideals of those who wrote them. In other words, the portraits of Jesus that emerged during the first quest betrayed the worldview and outlook of their authors. Just as the depictions of Jesus in the Gospels were conditioned by the cultural milieu in which they were written and by the faith convictions of their authors, so were the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century accounts of Jesus invariably shaped by the Zeitgeist of that historical period. Schweitzer’s critique of historical Jesus research marks the close of what is often referred to as the first quest. However, Schweitzer’s own contribution to the endeavor would have an enduring effect on historical Jesus studies. His interpretation of the Gospels in the context of early Judaism led him to conclude that Jesus was an apocalyptic figure who, along with his followers, expected the imminent arrival of God’s kingdom. Unlike the liberal portraits of Jesus of the previous two centuries, which preserved his ethical message even as they stripped away the elements that were not consistent with a worldview that discarded the supernatural, Schweitzer’s Jesus belonged more to the first-century world of apocalyptic Judaism and was therefore less familiar to Christians at the turn of the twentieth century. Schweitzer concluded that Jesus expected the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God. He wrote that Jesus “in the knowledge that he is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and he throws himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes him” (Schweitzer, 369).

The first quest for the historical Jesus resulted in a number of important developments that significantly shaped subsequent study of Jesus and the Gospels. First, Mark came to be regarded as the earliest Gospel by scholars and hence was used as a primary historical source in historical Jesus scholarship. However, in 1901, Wilhelm Wrede’s book The Messianic Secret contended that the secrecy motif was a literary device created by the author of Mark’s Gospel to project the apostolic post-Easter faith in Jesus as Messiah back onto the Jesus of history. Although, according to Wrede, Jesus himself had actually made no claim to be messiah, Mark had incorporated this postresurrection belief into his narrative. Wrede’s work highlighted the fact that the early Jesus traditions were creatively adapted to convey particular theological convictions. It also called attention to the literary quality of the Gospel, that is, the artistry of constructing such a narrative. These insights resulted in the development of new approaches to studying the Gospels. Redaction criticism, on the one hand, concentrated on how the Gospel writers used and edited source materials, and what this disclosed about the theological perspectives of the respective Gospels. The aim of form criticism, on the other hand, was to ascertain the earlier forms of the oral traditions used to craft the Gospel narratives. It asked questions about the function of the oral traditions in their original contexts and was interested in tracing the development of the Gospel tradition.

Another important consequence of the first quest for the historical Jesus was the distinction made between the “Jesus of history” and the “Christ of faith.” One reaction to Schweitzer’s historical reconstruction, which made Jesus as apocalyptic prophet less theologically relevant, was for others increasingly to emphasize the Christ of faith. Martin Kähler’s book The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historical Biblical Christ, published in German in 1892, claimed that the true Christ is a Christ of faith detached from the Jesus of history. However, the most important champion of this perspective, and one of the most famous New Testament scholars of the twentieth century, was Rudolf Bultmann. For Bultmann, Christianity begins with Easter, and so he downplayed the importance of the Jesus of history for theology. From Bultmann’s perspective, it was God’s action in the death and resurrection of Jesus that was decisive rather than what Jesus had said and done (Theissen and Merz, 6–7).

The “new quest for the historical Jesus,” initiated by Bultmann’s students, was interested in establishing a continuity between the Christ of faith and the historical Jesus that Kähler and Bultmann had so persuasively distinguished. In contrast to the first quest, which sought to strip away the theological elements of the traditions about Jesus used by the Gospels, the new quest was interested in supporting the connection between the Christ of faith and the historical Jesus (Theissen and Merz, 7). It was guided by the conviction that the Gospels presuppose the identity of the earthly Jesus and exalted Christ. Bultmann had made the case that presuppositions always influenced the interpretation of New Testament texts. This new quest was intentional in being guided by what they regarded as a foundational presupposition of the tradition, namely, the continuity between the earthly Jesus and the risen Christ. This more explicitly christological approach put history in the service of theology and resulted in representations of Jesus that were more Christian and therefore less Jewish.

In the early 1980s, a third quest for the historical Jesus, catalyzed by new approaches to the study of Judaism, used a variety of ancient Jewish sources. This produced a revitalized picture of early Judaism as much more diverse and nuanced than the caricature of the Pharisees in the Gospels that had been operative in much previous scholarship. Scholars such as E. P. Sanders, John Dominic Crossan, Géza Vermes, Marcus Borg, and many others in the last three decades have written books about the historical Jesus that depict him as thoroughly embedded and engaged in the Judaism of his day. One of the main insights that has emerged from this third quest is that Jesus was the leader of a renewal movement within Judaism (Sanders 1985). The debate has focused on the question of what kind of Jew Jesus was, and the relationship between his particular interpretation and embodiment of Jewish tradition to other forms and expressions of Judaism. This quest has been characterized by greater methodological variety and sophistication, including the use of social-science and anthropological models and, in many instances, greater awareness of the Roman Empire as an important part of the context to which Jesus was responding.

Inasmuch as there continues to be a proliferation of scholarly books on Jesus, we are still in the midst of this third quest. Although no consensus about the historical Jesus is forthcoming, a much more richly textured understanding of the Jewish and Greco-Roman contexts of Jesus and the Gospels has advanced the conversation. Nonetheless, what Schweitzer observed about earlier lives of Jesus reflecting the interests and biases of their authors is also true of more recent scholarship. Historical investigation is always guided to some extent by the presuppositions of those interpreting these texts and traditions. The Gospels are not objective historical accounts of what Jesus said and did. Jesus probably spoke Aramaic, lived in an oral culture, and never wrote anything himself. Remembrances of his teaching and activity were profoundly influenced by the belief that God had raised from the dead this Galilean Jew who had been crucified, and had made him both Lord and Christ. The task of reconstructing from the Gospels a purely historical account of Jesus, unencumbered by the perspectives and presuppositions of those who composed and preserved the traditions about him, seems unattainable. Nonetheless, there are important reasons not only for historians but also for those interested in the importance of Jesus for contemporary life to preserve the connection between the Christ of faith and what can be known about the significance of what Jesus said and did in his own historical context.