A few excerpts from Luke Timothy Johnson, ‘The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation’, Revised edition, Fortress Press, 1999, pp. 627-629…

‘Jesus’ existence and his identity as a first-century Palestinian Jew are overwhelmingly verified both by the literature generated in his name and by the converging lines of evidence provided by the Christian writings as well as the few fragmentary testimonies extant from Greco-Roman and Jewish sources…

‘When historians try to push past the limits imposed by the sources… both the subject of enquiry and the methods of appropriate historiography become distorted. This is the case in particular when the search for a historical Jesus is not really so much about history as it is about theology. Since the Enlightenment, Christians uncomfortable with the witness and interpretation of the Gospels have sought a ‘historical Jesus’ to serve as the measure of genuine Christianity. The main thing that such questers sought was a Jesus from whom any element of the supernatural or miraculous was removed. Only such a Jesus, they thought, could address a world measured by the severe standards of rationality…

‘The classic quest of the historical Jesus described by Albert Schweitzer in his 1906 study advanced by stages: first, to eliminate the miraculous in order to secure that which is truly historical; next, to eliminate the Gospel of John since it disagreed so fully with the witness of the Synoptics; next, to determine which of the Synoptics was earliest in order to secure – it was thought – a source that was neutral and reliable. And when the Gospel of Mark was finally located as the first of the Gospels, it was necessary to decide whether it really was a reliable source or itself a rendering of the church’s faith.

‘The new quest for the historical Jesus, over the last thirty years, has much in common with the first. It is still driven by usually unstated theological premises. Rather than search for a single source, however, the new search proceeds first by deconstructing all the Gospels (canonical as well as non-canonical) as literary compositions, then excavating from all these Gospels pieces of the tradition that are considered to be the authentic voice or deed of Jesus…

Johnson… goes on to talk about ‘the subjective nature of the entire enterprise’: ‘When scholars, all using the same methods and studying the same materials, derive such a variety of “historical” Jesuses – a revolutionary zealot, a cynical radical, an agrarian reformer, a gay magician, a charismatic cult reformer, a peasant, a guru of oceanic bliss – then one may well wonder whether anything more than a sophiticated and elaborate form of projection has taken place…

‘Such efforts require clarification and perhaps even resistance, however, when the “historical” becomes the only measure of truth, or when a “historical” reconstruction of Jesus is proposed as the measure of the church’s identity rather than the Jesus of the Gospels, who is both the Christ of the church and the resurrected Lord of faith.’

(Johnson then adds a quite brilliant three-page bibliography)…

Shalom! Rowland Croucher

December 2004

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