Give Us This Day ...

The Problem of the Historical Jesus

“….we have in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John four accounts of the life of Jesus, and they do not all say the same thing.  Indeed, sometimes they seem to contradict one other.”

“…the problem of the ‘historical Jesus’ does matter, for at least two reasons.”

1.      The Nicene Creed uses the words “and was incarnate”.  “Christian faith rests ‘upon a particular event in history…’ ”

2.      “…observable data, while it cannot lead to theological conclusions, can raise theological questions.”

The Church and the Problem of History:  The First Sixteen Centuries

“…[The Gospels] give the overall sense of Jesus’ words rather than an exact report, and that the order of events occasionally represents general recollection rather than strict historical order.”

“It is a tribute to the church’s honesty that it preserved four Gospels, contradictions and all.”

“In the second half of the second Christian century a man called Tatian produced what became known as the “Diatessaron”….an editing of the four Gospels into a single narrative…[it] fell into disuse.”

“If there seemed to be a contradiction, that must be because the reader had not understood properly.”

“ ‘The doubt felt by some in respect of the articles of the faith,’ Thomas Aquinas said, ‘is not the result of any uncertainty in the thing itself.  It is a result of the weakness of human understanding.’ ”

In the late Roman Empire or the Middle Ages…“they did not regard scientific knowledge as the most important kind of knowledge….According to Aquinas, it is impossible to have exact knowledge about anything that matters.”

The Enlightenment and Critical Study of the Bible

“The spirit of scientific inquiry, once aroused [during the 18^th century Enlightenment in Europe and North America], turned its attention to the Bible, and….began to ask every kind of hard question about its origins, accuracy, and authority.”

“…real faith had nothing to fear from honest questions and that a religion afraid of such questions was not worth having.”

The Quest for the Historical Jesus

Albert Schweitzer showed in 1910 “how each writer’s opinion of Jesus’ message had been determined by the writer’s own philosophical preferences….”

 “…the Jesus they presented was fashioned somewhat in the authors’ own images, which meant, in effect, a Jesus who was reasonably provable.’ It has to be said, however, that is also meant a Jesus who would not have been too out of place in the faculty lounge of a nineteenth-century liberal Protestant university.”

The Quest established much of what we learned in the earlier part of this efm year, such as Mark being the earliest Gospel.  So, “we owe them a great deal.”

Protests about the Quest:  There were protests.

The Abandonment of the Quest

“The Gospels enshrined teachings written by those in the early church….to meet their own needs.  The writers did not enshrine the words or ideas of Jesus.  To begin with, Jesus was a Jew, not a Christian.”

“…in general [Bultmann (in 1934)] thought that ‘we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus, since the early Christian sources show no interest in either.’ ”

“Bultmann agreed with Kahler that the preached Christ of the church had power.  Unlike Kahler, Bultmann did not think that he could accept the New Testament at its face value…”

Historie and Geschichte

So, Bultmann made a distinction between scientific history (Historie) and interpreted history (Geschichte).  “He asserted that we could learn scientific history (Historie) from interpreted history (Geschichte) only by ‘demythologizing’: that is, by stripping away the mythical language and ideas in which interpreted history is always dressed.”

Interpreted history was the only kind of history that actually had value since “scientific history did not lead anyone to the Christ of faith.

“What matters is not only the facts, but what we make of the facts.”

Without Historie, “there is nothing from which to create Geschichte, for there is nothing to interpret…..[Bultmann] wrote, ‘The agent of God’s presence and activity, the mediator of His reconciliation of the world unto Himself, is a real figure of history’ ”

“Bultmann appears to accept Weiss’ and Schweitzer’s main point. ‘There can be no doubt that Jesus like his contemporaries expected a tremendous eschatological drama….He [who?] took for granted as did his contemporaries that the Kingdom of God was to come for the benefit of the Jewish people’ ”

“…Bultmann tells us what Jesus actually meant by this:   ‘The coming of the Kingdom of God is therefore not really an event in the course of time…’ ” 

Reactions to Bultmann

“…Dodd was …responsible for perhaps the most important single response made to Weiss and Schweitzer….The message of Jesus, he suggested, was that the kingdom of God had already come and was even now breaking into history…..The eschaton has moved from the future to the present, from the sphere of expectation to that of realized experience.”

“For the writers of the NT the ancient Jewish hope for something ‘not yet’ is balanced by an ‘already.’  Both are at the heart of the Christian proclamation.”

“ ‘The preaching of the church may be carried on anonymously; the important thing is not the person but the message.  But the Gospel itself cannot be anonymous, otherwise it leads to moralism and mysticism.’ ”

“The Jesus who emerges from [the evangelists] accounts has both originality and consistency – some of the apocryphal gospels, which present by comparison a cardboard figure, offer an instructive contrast.  Unless these authors were the most consummate and imaginative artists, able to create a striking and consistent character out of scanty and unreliable sources, we have every reason to think that in broad outline….the Jesus they portray is the Jesus who actually existed.”

“…we are bound to feel some confidence not only in the broad outline of the kerygma….- the central facts of Jesus’ ministry, his teaching, healings, crucifixion, and victory – but also in many important characteristics of the style of that ministry, such as his regular teaching by parables, his acceptance of the ministry of women, and his keeping company with sinners.”

“A third movement against the historical skepticism of Bultmann sprang from a deepening impulse among scholars to use Jewish sources as a means of understanding Jesus.”

The Present Situation

“ ‘…we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said, and that these two things make sense within the world of first-century Judaism’ ”

“ ‘Yes.  We believe that we can indeed know something of Jesus as he really was.’  To that extent the ‘quest’ of the nineteenth-century critics has been justified.”