Theology: The New Search for The Historical Jesus

Theological trends in Protestant divinity schools seem to come and go almost before laymen have time to find out what they are all about. Hardly was liberalism enthroned in the seminaries when neo-Orthodoxy came along to elbow it out of the way—and neo-Orthodoxy soon surrendered before Paul Tillich’s ontological theology and the method of Scriptural study known as Form Criticism.

The newest theological emphasis is still virtually unknown to the church-going public, but it has become well entrenched in the universities of Central Europe in the last decade, and now, according to Theologian James Robinson, it is creating “quite a ground swell of interest” in U.S. seminaries. Robinson, of the Southern California School of Theology, calls this latest vogue “a new quest of the historical Jesus.” Surprisingly enough, the quest has been undertaken not by Christian conservatives eager to save Jesus from scientific attack, but by the radical, skeptical disciples of a German Lutheran scholar whom many regard as an arch-heretic: Rudolf Bultmann, 78, retired professor of New Testament studies at the University of Marburg.

“Realistic” Biographies. Most Christian believers have been content to accept the Gospels as an accurate, pious record of the life and times of their Saviour. Others have wondered. Inspired by the rationalism of the Enlightenment and by the development of scientific historiography, German and French scholars between 1775 and 1900 tried to write “realistic” biographies of Jesus. They stripped the Gospels of miraculous and dogmatic elements, and used new materials gleaned from non-Christian literary sources and from archaeology. Out of such efforts came such portraits as David Friedrich Strauss’s Jesus as a Jewish sage, and Adolf von Harnack’s Jesus as an ideal ethical humanist.

These efforts to write miracle-free biographies of Jesus—summed up in 1906 by Albert Schweitzer in his classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus—ended in failure. For one thing, explains Bultmann Disciple Günther Bornkamm, “it became alarmingly and terrifyingly evident how inevitably each author brought the spirit of his own age into his presentation of the figure of Jesus.” For another, such turn-of-the-century theologians as Johannes Weiss and Wilhelm Wrede proved conclusively that the Gospels were not simple historical accounts but highly sophisticated theological works in which the oral tradition preserved by Christ’s early disciples was considerably expanded. This oral tradition consisted almost exclusively of Jesus’ sayings; thus his actions as recounted in the Gospels, and the geographical circumstances of his words—for example, the mountain of the Sermon on the Mount—were almost certainly the additions, based on extrapolation or invention, of a later tradition or of the Evangelists.

“We Can Know Nothing.” During the 1920s, Bultmann sealed the doom of the old quest, as far as Europe was concerned.* He argued that the Gospels were interested not in presenting a dispassionate portrait of Jesus but in expressing the kerygma—the proclamation of the early church’s faith in a Risen Christ. This meant that although the New Testament might be a primary source for a study of the early church, it was only a secondary one for a life of Jesus. Since the faith of later generations was really based upon the shining faith of the first Christians and not upon Jesus himself, theologians should forget about seeking the earthly Jesus and analyze the formation of the kerygma. “We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus,” Bultmann wrote in one of the shaping dicta of modern theology.

Bultmann himself later moved a step farther to the theological left and argued that to become credible for modern man, the kerygma must be “de-mythologized”—stripped of such unbelievable elements as its heaven-above, hell-below framework. But demythologizing, Robinson points out, threatened to end up with “the conclusion that the Jesus of the kerygma could well be only a myth.” Deprived of its link with the historical Jesus, Christianity might end up as some kind of existentialist philosophy, of which Christ was little more than a mythological symbol.

Inevitably, the reaction set in. In 1953, at the annual seminar of Bultmann’s “Marburg Disciples,” Dr. Ernst Kasemann argued that it was time for theology to relate the Jesus of history to the proclaimed Christ of the kerygma. The proposal quickly found supporters, largely among Bultmann’s students and disciples, who hold many top professorships in Biblical studies: Bornkamm and Erich Dinkier at Heidelberg, Käsemann at Tübingen, Herbert Braun at Mainz, Hans Conzelmann at Göttingen, Gerhard Ebeling at Zürich, Ernst Fuchs at Marburg’s Institute of Hermeneutics. Initially open to the idea of the quest, Bultmann himself soon became skeptical, and freely criticizes his disciples’ work.

Answers to Problems. Recently published in the U.S. is a layman’s lucid study of this new quest, by German Protestant Journalist Heinz Zahrnt, called The Historical Jesus (Harper & Row; $3.50). Zahrnt points out that the Marburgers differ among themselves about the scope and validity of the quest, but share certain assumptions as to how it ought to be carried out. For them, biography is not simply a record of “what happened when,” but an explanation of how a person understood himself in the context of history. “Our existential experience is the condition for our interest in the historical Jesus,” says Theologian Fuchs.

To many Protestants, the Jesus of the Marburgers will seem rather dim and unfamiliar. For example, they reject the childhood narratives in Luke as fictitious and myth-laden, deny the accuracy of any of the Evangelists’ chronologies. Of the detailed Passion narratives, they accept as historically sound the bare facts that Jesus went to Jerusalem at the end of his ministry, supped with his disciples sometime toward Passover, stood trial before Pilate and was crucified. Bultmann’s disciples also reject, as a creation of the post-Easter church, any saying of Jesus that refers to his filial relation to God. The disciples unanimously regard the Trinitarian formulations of the early church as later, metaphysical interpretations of Christ’s relationship to God, and not as anything claimed by Jesus himself.

Messianic Claims. Undiscouraged by the amount of chaff that they feel obliged to winnow from the Gospels, the Marburgers are delighted that they have so much left of Jesus that even the most skeptical historian must accept. Moreover, the sayings of Jesus that they believe to be his in whole or part—rather than creations of the church—are of such a quality, says Zahrnt, that “a single, absolutely distinctive picture of the person and work of Jesus emerges.” This person was a prophetic rabbi who taught the imminence of the Kingdom of God and who dared to act in God’s place by warning of the need for repentance. The Marburgers deny that Jesus explicitly claimed to be the Messiah, although Dinkier and Käsemann argue that he was conscious of his unique mission from God. It was in the light of the Resurrection—an event that Marburgers exclude from study as an event beyond the comprehension of scientific history—that the early church saw him as Messiah, and as the Christ, and so proclaimed him to the world.

The new quest of the historical Jesus has raised almost as many Christian hackles as the old one did. Non-Bultmannite Biblical critics, such as William Albright of Johns Hopkins, contend that the Marburgers are too skeptical in rejecting so much of the New Testament as unhistorical. Other theologians complain that in place of the humanist Jesus produced by the old quest, the new quest is shaping an existentialist one. Karl Earth grandly dismissed the quest as an irrelevant project.

The Marburgers are unswayed by such arguments. They argue that the Jesus of their studies is considerably more coherent than the part-man, part-superman, part-God image served UD by most sermons. “Our effort,” says Conzelmann, “is to make that image more precise.” The disciples also charge that most of their critics misunderstand the purpose and methodology of the new quest. Far from destroying faith, it is meant to confirm it by establishing the facts about the earthly Jesus that even the most critical scientific historian would have to accept. More important, the quest seeks to prove that there is a historic continuity between the preaching of the earthly Jesus and the early church’s proclamation of the Risen Christ. For with their enemies, the Marburg Disciples faithfully accept Christ as Lord and Savior of mankind.

* Since U.S. theology lags behind Germany’s, the old quest was pursued in such works as Harry Emerson Fosdick’s The Man from Nazareth (1949) and Morton Enslin’s The Prophet from Nazareth (1961).