THE DEBATE OVER THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE
CHRIST OF FAITH
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THE DEBATE OVER THE HISTORICAL JESUS AND THE CHRIST OF FAITH
By Ira Rifkin
Christianity is the largest religious movement the world has
ever known, claiming at least 1.7 billion followers around
the globe. On every continent in hundreds of languages,
believers proclaim their faith in the man known to history
as Jesus of Nazareth and to the church as Jesus Christ
(Greek for Jesus the Anointed One). But just who is it that
Christians worship?
Was Jesus the Son of God, the promised Messiah of the Hebrew
Bible (commonly referred to as the Old Testament) who is
portrayed in the New Testament as having died on the cross
to redeem human sin, only to rise from the grave and
reappear to his disciples? Or was he simply a man, an
extraordinary one perhaps, but a man nonetheless, who was
proclaimed to be something more than that by others acting
out of their own subjective faith experiences?
Scholars and clergy have long debated these compelling
questions, which go to the core of Christian beliefs. But
never before has the debate --commonly referred to as the
quest to separate the Jesus of history from the Christ of
faith-- caught the attention of so many ordinary people as
it has today.
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.
But to understand the popular media's fascination with the
workings of the Jesus Seminar and why the quest for the
historical Jesus has become so compelling to so many today,
one cannot overlook the cultural setting in which this is
occurring. Seen in its cultural context, the debate over the
historical Jesus reflects the larger religious currents and
conflicts sweeping the Christian world today.
Large numbers of people have rejected traditional church
doctrine and authority. Their preference for a scientific,
verifiable understanding of the world makes it difficult, if
not impossible, for them to unquestioningly accept as
factual truth what for hundreds of years after Jesus' death
was accepted on faith by the vast majority of ordinary
Christians.
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.
That Jesus lived in the 1st century BC in Palestine, that he
was a Jew and that he stirred a segment of the Roman-ruled
Jewish society and was crucified --a mode of punishment
reserved for common criminals in his time-- is agreed to by
both these camps. But beyond that, almost everything about
Jesus has become a matter of dispute.
HISTORY OF THE QUEST
Debates over who Jesus was developed early in the life of
the nascent Christian church as its leaders struggled to
establish a core set of common, correct beliefs. These
debates, however, did not involve the historical details of
Jesus' life. Instead, these early controversies generally
centered on Jesus' nature, his divinity versus his humanity.
Christology is the term applied to the study of Jesus'
divine and human aspects.
For example, the Gnostics --members of a variety of related
movements that surfaced in the first centuries of the
Christian era and who claimed to possess a secret gnosis, or
knowledge of God-- generally rejected the notion that Jesus
had an ordinary human body. This rejection of the body was
part of the Gnostic belief that the body was impure and that
spiritual salvation required breaking loose from the bonds
of material existence.
Elsewhere, the priest Arius of Alexandria postulated that
Jesus, although the Son of God, was not equal in status, or
nature, with God the Father. And the religious patriarch
Nestorius taught that within Jesus existed two separate
natures, one divine and one human.
In AD 451, this debate over Jesus' nature was largely put to
rest for believers when leaders of the Christian church
meeting at the Council of Chalcedon --not far from modern
Istanbul, Turkey-- declared that united within Jesus were
both a fully human nature and a fully divine nature. All
other notions of Jesus' nature were declared unorthodox,
heresies to be avoided at peril to the soul, as they largely
were by the general population of Western Christians.
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.
Not long after, in the 19th century, several German
Protestant and French Catholic writers also published books
challenging the historical accuracy of the Gospels. The
appearance of these books gave birth to what scholars
generally consider the start of the modern quest for the
historical Jesus.
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.
Voting in this manner, the Jesus Seminar has concluded that
only about 18 percent of the words attributed to Jesus in
the Gospels can accurately be assumed to be his own. Other
votes rejected the virgin birth, biblical statements that
have Jesus proclaim himself the Son of God or the Jewish
Messiah, and --the cornerstone of the Christian faith--
Jesus' physical Resurrection from the dead.
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.
Gerd Leudemann, a German New Testament scholar, summed up
the Jesus Seminar's approach to the Resurrection at a
meeting of the group in 1995 when he said: "The Resurrection
happened in the hearts and minds of the first disciples. It
was an ecstatic event that did not involve the body."
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
Some of these traditional Christian critics of the Jesus
Seminar scholarship agree that the Gospels do not represent
a strictly historical account. Nevertheless, they also
criticize the seminar for what they regard as its bias
toward naturalistic explanations that categorically dismiss
belief in the mystical --the power of God to perform
unexplained miracles.
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.
Critics such as Edwards agree that looking at the social
conditions of Jesus' day and his place in 1st century AD
Palestinian Jewish culture can add important insights to the
Gospel story of Jesus. But those factors can also be said to
bolster the traditional Christian view of Jesus, he argues.
Jesus, for example, came out of a monotheistic Jewish
religious tradition, as did his early followers, who
comprised the membership of the nascent Christian church.
For his followers to claim that Jesus was divine flew in the
face of the Jewish monotheism that so influenced them and
their fellow Jews, who they sought to convince of the
rightness of their religious cause.
Edwards points to this as an example of historical inquiry
and social context strengthening, rather than weakening, the
church's claim to Jesus' divine status. "It is hard to
imagine the early church knowingly creating such a tension
(between itself and Palestinian Jewish society) by elevating
Jesus to divine status --unless that status was inherent in
who Jesus was," Edwards wrote in the American evangelical
Protestant magazine Christianity Today.
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 Qumran,
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.
But Edwards and others --such as Luke Timothy Johnson, a New
Testament professor at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia,
and one of the more celebrated critics of the Jesus Seminar;
Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong of Newark, New Jersey;
and the Rev. John P. Meier, a Roman Catholic priest and New
Testament professor at Catholic University of America in
Washington, D.C. --also take issue with the Jesus Seminar
from yet another perspective.
For these critics, what is most important about Jesus is not
the details of his life but the impact of that life. While
historical research can assemble bits and pieces of Jesus'
life, the "real Jesus," they say, cannot be discovered
through speculating about the whole person on the basis of
these disparate fragments.
Jesus, they maintain, could not have had the huge impact on
humanity that he undeniably has had unless he was more than
the social critic, sorcerer, charismatic preacher, and
rabble-rouser that Jesus Seminar fellows claim him to be.
To Meier, this is the "real Jesus." Referring to the central
event of the Christian claim to Jesus' divinity, Meier says
what is most important about the New Testament's account of
the Resurrection, to which the Gospel names no eyewitness,
is not whether Jesus rose from the dead in a physical sense.
Rather, it is that through God, Jesus came to a "different
life" from what human beings know as earthly life.
From this perspective, the entire debate over the historical
Jesus is an ultimately futile intellectual pursuit. All that
is important, Meier and others would argue, is how the life
of Jesus transforms the lives of those who believe in the
Jesus of religious faith.
Outlook for the Debate
Under the best of circumstances, as Schweitzer said,
historical biography is an imperfect art, subject to the
availability of sources that are difficult to separate from
their human biases because of the passage of time. To engage
in historical biography when the subject lived 2000 years
ago in a premodern culture is far more difficult. Even Jesus
Seminar representatives will admit that the group is more
about raising questions than providing definitive answers.
Religious faith, on the other hand, is a deep-seated human
trait known to virtually every culture that has ever
existed. Such belief, religious philosophers say, springs
from an innate longing for connection with and understanding
of the power that creates and sustains life. Fed by cultural
memory and familial ties, such faith is not easily shed over
the near term.
In short, the current argument over the Jesus of history
versus the Jesus of faith is not about to radically change
minds in the near future. Those inclined to doubt will do
so; those inclined to believe are also likely to follow the
dictates of their hearts and minds. Only over the broader
sweep of history does one see a change in religious belief
impact the millions of ordinary souls born into a particular
faith, be it Christianity or otherwise.
More susceptible to short-term change, however, are the
closely related worlds of scholarship and publishing. It
remains to be seen whether the current stage of inquiry into
the historical Jesus and the movement's leading edge, the
Jesus Seminar, will continue to command the broad public
attention they now receive. But there are signs, say
publishing experts, that their current popularity may well
soon dissipate, just as the "God is Dead" phenomenon of the
1960s ran its course.
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.
As compelling as all this may be to scholars, theologians,
and church authorities, Carrigan, for one, believes the
general public will not share that interest and that the
current phase of the search for the historical Jesus will
wane.
"Nothing for Christians, or non-Christians, for that matter,
is as interesting about Christianity as the person of
Jesus," he says.
Ira Rifkin is a national correspondent for Religion News
Service based in Washington, D.C.
The Institute for Christian Leadership's Guide to Early
Church Documents contains the text of dozens of documents,
canonical information, and other writings of the early
church.
The publisher HarperCollins recently sponsored an E-mail
debate entitled "Jesus at 2000: E-mail Debate on the
Historical Jesus," transcripts of which include entries by
John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and Luke Timothy Johnson.
A privately maintained site contains articles and links
relating to the Jesus Seminar and its critics, as well as
other topics relating to the historical Jesus.
For further reading:
Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus
and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, Marcus J. Borg
(Harper San Francisco, 1994)
The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish
Peasant, John Dominic Crossan (Harper San Francisco, 1991)
Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, John Dominic Crossan
(Harper San Francisco, 1994)
The Essential Jesus: Original Sayings and Earliest Images,
John Dominic Crossan (Harper San Francisco, 1994)
Honest to Jesus, Robert Funk (Harper San Francisco, 1996)
The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of
Jesus, Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar
(Macmillan, 1993)
Consider Jesus: Waves of Renewal in Christology, Elizabeth
A. Johnson (Crossroad, 1990)
The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus
and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, Luke Timothy
Johnson (Harper San Francisco, 1996)
The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins, Burton
L. Mack (Harper San Francisco, 1993)
A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, John P.
Meier (Doubleday, 1991)
The Quest for the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its
Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, Albert Schweitzer
(Macmillan Co., 1948)
Resurrection: Myth or Reality: A Bishop's Search for the
Origins of Christianity, John Shelby Spong
(Harper San Francisco, 1994)
The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth,
Ben Witherington III (InterVarsity Press, 1995)
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