The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (29 page)

The Second Quest

The second quest began in 1954 and was, ironically, spawned by the students of R. Bultmann (see “Abandoned Quest” above). One of Bultmann's students, E. Käsemann, at a reunion of former students of Bultmann, delivered a paper in which he contended that something of the historical Jesus could be, and should be, recovered using Bultmann's methods. Käsemann proposed that a Christ divorced from history could be invoked to support almost any theological or political agenda. Many of these second questers had, all too starkly, seen the results of a Christ separated from his historical moorings as pre-World War II Nazi Germany created “a largely unJewish Christ.”
⁴⁶

Thus, a new or second quest was quickly underway. These scholars held that Jesus must be connected in some way to early Christianity and that the church's preaching could
provide information about that Jesus.
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The second quest moved away from the canonical gospel proclamation and placed a higher value on other ancient sources such as the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of the Hebrews, and other noncanonical Gospel fragments. In the end a picture of Jesus was gleaned from glimpses of the earliest church's proclamation—an enterprise Bultmann would have disavowed.

Although a third quest has been launched (see below), the second quest has not passed off the scene. Modern advocates of its methods and conclusions are still working in the field, although the edges are blurred between second and third questers. The controversial Jesus Seminar is, in essence, a manifestation of the “second quest.” The major figures of the Jesus Seminar, B. Mack and J. D. Crossan, illustrate well the directions taken by the second quest. Mack has promoted a Jesus who is a Cynic, nonapocalyptic, culturally and socially subversive, and who advocated a social experiment that was perceived as transformation.
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For Mack, earliest Christianity did not hold to the deity of Christ, nor did it view Christ as Savior but considered him to be a social reformer. The epithets of “deity” and of “Savior” were added subsequently by early Christians represented by the Gospel writers. Similarly, J. D. Crossan also held Jesus to be a Cynic, though he viewed Jesus at the same time as a Jewish peasant. Jesus' aim was to get all to rely on God, thus destroying the patron-client system in his day, announcing what Crossan calls “the brokerless kingdom of God.”
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The modern second questers have yet to win over the majority of scholars, but they remain a vocal minority in Jesus studies today.
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The Third Quest

The third quest
⁵¹
had precursors as early as 1965 with G. B. Caird's
Jesus and the Jewish Nation
.
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This quest is characterized by a desire to place Jesus in the context of first-century, Second Temple Judaism. The scholars representing the third quest have in essence built on previous Jesus scholarship as they embark on a different type of quest. Their desire is to engage in serious historical research into first-century Judaism and to place Jesus within this cultural context. For many, the difference is that this investigation is separate from Christology; that is, it is conducted apart from traditional confessions regarding Jesus by the historic church. Instead, the goal of the historical research in the third quest is to
locate Jesus as an actual historical figure.
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N. T. Wright, an active advocate of the third quest, provided the following apt description of this quest:

The Old [First] Quest was determined that Jesus should look as little like a first-century Jew as possible. Bultmann was determined that, though Jesus was historically a first-century Jew, his first-century Jewishness was precisely not the place where his “significance” lay. The renewed “New Quest,” following this line, has often played down the specifically Jewish features of Jesus, stressing instead those which he may have shared with other Mediterranean cultures; it has also downplayed to a large extent the Significance of Jesus' death, stressing that we know very little about it and suggesting that the earliest Christians were not particularly interested in it.…The present “Third Quest,” by and large, will have none of this. Jesus must be understood as a comprehensible and yet, so to speak, crucifiable first-century Jew whatever the theological or hermeneutical consequences.
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Two caveats should be registered here. First, if anyone were to claim that he or she is simply following where the evidence leads, this would be tantamount to asserting that it is possible to assume a truly neutral, objective stance as a researcher. But hermeneutical scholarship of the past century has shown that presuppositionless exegesis and even unbiased historical research are in fact themselves myths.
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No one is completely without preconceived notions as to who Jesus was, and to claim otherwise is either ignorant or naïve. This calls for caution in evaluating the claims of those engaging in Jesus research.

Second, the idea that Jesus should be understood in keeping with his first-century environment is not original to the third (or any) quest for the historical Jesus. Conservative scholars have generally sought to understand Jesus in this way as an outgrowth of their conviction that the Gospels' portrait of Jesus is historically accurate. In fact, this is why some evangelical scholars are drawn to the third quest in the first place. This is not to say that third questers are by and large conservative exegetes. They are not. Many of these authors have different theological and political agendas with widely divergent views of first-century Judaism and Jesus.

Wright identifies five crucial questions that third questers seek to answer: (1) How does Jesus fit into Judaism? (2) What were Jesus' aims? (3) Why did Jesus die? (4) How and why
did the early church begin? (5) Why are the Gospels what they are?
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How one answers these questions determines one's view of Jesus, and third questers differ in this regard. G. Vermes described Jesus in terms of a
hasid
, a Jewish holy man; E. P. Sanders and M. Casey, an apocalyptic prophet; B. Witherington, a sage, the embodiment of wisdom; J. P. Meier, a “marginal” Jew; Brandon, a Jewish revolutionary; and others, such as P. Stuhlmacher, hold that Jesus considered himself to be the Messiah of Israel.
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Table 3.1: The Quests of the Historical Jesus
^*

^*
Adapted from Tatum,
In Quest of Jesus
, 109.

^**
See the discussion of some of these various methods later on in this chapter; cf. chaps. 1–2 in Carson and Moo,
Introduction to the New Testament.

CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO THE NEW TESTAMENT PORTRAYAL OF JESUS

Introduction

Sensational and unorthodox portrayals of the historical Jesus of Nazareth have become commonplace in the twenty-first century. One new account of the life of the “real Jesus” after another is hitting the shelves of bookstores and generating a heated controversy that quickly gains lucrative media attention.
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Although they are often based on scanty evidence, soon these portrayals of Jesus become a part of urban legends about Jesus' identity that are propagated by the uninformed. Many Americans, whose knowledge of Jesus sometimes does not extend beyond the latest conspiracy theory that they read about in the newspaper or a recent best-selling novel, assume that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, left a royal bloodline that still exists today, and lived temporarily in Western Europe.
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Unbiblical portrayals of Jesus are not only the work of novelists and conspiracy theorists. Many scholars who are engaged in serious historical Jesus research have proposed reconstructions of Jesus' life and teachings that are very different from the descriptions of Jesus in the NT. Views of Jesus affirmed by various scholars are nearly as diverse as the scholars who affirm them. This section briefly explores a few of the recent challenges to the NT portrayal of Jesus.
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What several of these characterizations of Jesus have in common is that the canonical Gospels are set aside as primary historical sources in favor of other allegedly more pristine—and thus more authentic—writings, most commonly one or several of the gnostic Gospels. Thus it should come as no surprise that such writers arrive at depictions of Jesus that are at variance with the NT Gospels.

The Traveling Cynic Philosopher

Scholars such as F. G. Downing, B. Mack, and J. D. Crossan have portrayed Jesus as a wandering Cynic philosopher.
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Crossan in particular has argued in great detail that Jesus preached and practiced a radical egalitarianism that abolished all social hierarchies and
distinctions.
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In keeping with this radical egalitarianism, Jesus taught that the kingdom of God had no human broker and that a relationship with God required no human mediator. All people had equal and direct access to God. For Crossan, Jesus' death did not accomplish atonement for sin. Jesus was tragically crucified because he threatened to destroy the temple that he viewed as the seat of Jewish hierarchical authority, a symbol of the human inequality he had come to despise. Thus, Jesus' agenda was a social rather than a spiritual one, and his teachings consisted of a few wise sayings and parables that taught far more about human equality than about sin, judgment, forgiveness, or his own identity.

As mentioned, Crossan could paint this portrait of Jesus only by dismissing large amounts of material about Jesus in the canonical Gospels and by preferring material in noncanonical sources. Yet his reconstruction of Jesus' life is only as good as the sources that he used. As shown below, Crossan's preference for the noncanonical sources is unjustified since his favorite sources are either late revisions of material from the canonical Gospels, speculations about Jesus from second-century Christians, or even outright forgeries.

The Charismatic Faith Healer

M. Borg and G. Vermes have portrayed Jesus as a charismatic figure who had visionary or mystical experiences of God and somehow functioned as a channel of God's power for others.
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Although these portraits are an improvement on views of Jesus that deny any supernatural activity by him due to modernist presuppositions, both reconstructions fail to comport with the fuller picture of Jesus presented in the NT.

Borg's Jesus had too much compassion for others to demand moral purity of them. Moreover, the “god” that this Jesus mediated was also more of an impersonal force than a personal deity. Borg claimed:

God does not refer to a supernatural being “out there.”…God refers to the sacred at the center of existence, the holy mystery that is all around us and within us. God is the non-material ground and source and presence in which…“we live and move and having our being.”
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Vermes' Jesus was a Galilean holy man (Hb.
hasid
) who performed miracles and operated outside the proper channels of normal religious authority. Vermes compared Jesus to two similar holy men who were described in the Talmuds, Hanina ben Dosa and Honi the
Circle Drawer.
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Just as these men performed miracles, Jesus healed the sick and conquered the forces of evil in individuals.

However, Vermes made the mistake of emphasizing similarities between Jesus and these figures and ignoring some important differences. For example, according to Vermes, the marks of a
hasid
included using prayer to produce cures for the sick and calling down rain. But the Gospels never describe Jesus as making rain. The Gospels portray Jesus as one who was more than just a mighty man of prayer and as one who had the personal power to heal directly.

The Apocalyptic Prophet

E. P. Sanders and M. Casey have written treatments of Jesus in which they argue that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet who expected the climax of human history during his lifetime or shortly after his death. Sanders argued that Jesus anticipated “the imminent direct intervention of God in history, the elimination of evil and evildoers, the building of the new and glorious temple, and the reassembly of Israel with himself and his disciples as leading figures in it.”
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Jesus prepared for God's judgment on the temple and the restoration of his people by offering unconditional forgiveness to even the most obdurate of the Jews. Jesus offered this forgiveness without requiring repentance. Sanders avoided the titles ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels but did identify Jesus as God's last envoy. Sanders tended to dismiss Jesus' miracles by arguing that they were cures of psychosomatic illnesses, intentional deceptions, and in a few cases mysterious manipulations of natural causes that are not presently understood by science. Sanders denied that Jesus experienced any serious conflict with the Pharisees.
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