From the perspective of Christian faith, is it not a living Jesus who is of concern it is the Christ of faith. The message of Christ's death on the cross and his resurrection is the core of the Christian message. What more can detailed information about Jesus' life offer Christian believers anyway? Paul is an impressive example of someone who could set forth the heart of the Christian message without apparently having much knowledge of the early ministry of Jesus and, at least in his letters, showing next to no interest in such detail. From a literary point of view it might be argued that the attempt to use gospel texts as windows through which to imagine Jesus, to try and peer across too many years to the historical Jesus, is to misuse the texts. They are their own reality and in themselves contain a world where it is only possible to meet the Jesus of faith.
Behind such responses are serious theological issues which have dogged attempts to pursue historical questions about jesus. Martin Kähler was one of the first to expose the fragility of faith founded on the historical enterprise. He found his echo in Bultmann, who faced with realism (and today we would say with the pessimism characteristic of the early part of the century) the attempt to recover the words and deeds of the historical Jesus. Schweitzer, in early post modernist mode, exposed the fallibility of nineteenth century lives of Jesus. The issues he raised about the propensity of authors to fashion Jesus according to the pre-suppositions of their age are just as pertinent today.
Sectional interests are as much likely to fashion their Jesus as a warrant for their own ideology today as they were then, some with more, some with less sophistication. Jesus is a likely candidate where people seek an authoritative basis for their views. Christians of all kinds will want to find justification in Jesus for cherished values. Sometimes this will be as part of a serious attempt to counter other moods and movements within Christianity. The "brokerless kingdom" which Crossan sees at the heart of Jesus' message stands in contrast to the brokering institutional authority which the Church has become for many.
The Jesus Seminar set itself up deliberately to offer an alternative to the fundamentalism and fundamentalist portraits of Jesus in American society. It has been long popular to play off Jesus against Paul, usually on the basis of false assumptions about Paul. An Australian variant is the extraordinary enterprise upon which Barbara Thiering has embarked in developing a new Jesus story borne of speculation about Qumran connections and secret gospel codes. Its appeal is that it offers an alternative image of Jesus to the established church view which many find so alienating.
Growing appreciation of the complexity of the gospel traditions and their development has led to attempts to favour one or the other early stream, if not to side with the historical Jesus against all or much of what emerged in the development of Jesus historiography. Burton Mack has isolated the lost gospel of Q, giving prior weighting to its earliest layer (according to Kloppenborg's analysis) and its close relative, Thomas, and throwing out Mark as an imaginative construction. The Jesus Seminar has decided for a non-eschatological Jesus who emerges as a more comfortable radical (stirrer ?) in an age of questioning (stirring) established structures.
Pulpits and pressure groups have witnessed a wide range of Jesus figures. Jesus' encounter with the Samaritan woman in John 4 is sometimes held up as modelling the counselling interview: Jesus, the counsellor (an absurdity at many levels). More recently there have been serious appeals to Jesus as a liberation theologian, feminist, radical egalitarian, liberal humanist, champion of social justice. There is some justification for each of these, although it is anachronistic to impose on Jesus the sophisticated social analysis which they pre-suppose. The temptation is then to let faith cover over the huge historical gaps and explain away the silences to preserve a Jesus who could make it with the sophisticated ideas of modern Christianity. This is a form of docetism which too often fails to let Jesus be a first century human being. It is no better than more traditional efforts to find Christ on the streets of Jerusalem in some literal sense.
It would be easy for any or all of the above reasons for scholars to have abandoned the search for the historical jesus. In response to Bultmann - Käsemann re-asserted the legitimacy of the historical question in 1953, but did so, fully in touch with the extraordinary historical difficulties and potential self-deception of his own faith. There is value in examining the connection between the historical Jesus and what subsequently emerged. Some things are unlikely to be invented, like Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist. Käsemann's first tentative use of the criterion of dissimilarity which identified what appeared distinctive of Jesus prised open the door. As a principle applied more generally it had severe limitations; identifying what is distinctive is far from identifying what is characteristic about a person. The important thing was that, at least in circles convinced of the rigours of Bultmann's method, the cautious reconstructions recommenced.
At a broader theological level, people were also acknowledging that faith cannot be satisfied with making historical claims and then surrendering them to uncertainty. It became a matter of how much is claimed. For Bultmann the simple fact of the Christ died on the cross, that God acted, sufficed. Paul needed little more. But such a stance crumbled on a number of sides. Paul's understanding of Jesus’ death on the cross, especially as a model of vicarious suffering, faced major hurdles. One now gets the ‘faith’ impression that Jesus himself was only the saviour because he died and was raised. It has become increasingly clear that this was not a view shared by gospel writers. At least Jesus' brief ministry could be seen as a momentous event. John's gospel fitted Bultmann's model best, since it consists of variations on the theme that, in Christ, God encountered the world.
Substance mattered as much as the titles. There had to be content to Jesus Christ beyond the mere fact of his happening. Early forms of this development focused on Christ as the suffering servant. It was not just the dying for the world’s sins, but the particular attitude towards suffering and towards life which preceded it. Studies of the kingdom of God as Jesus' message produced too often a history which stalled at Easter, after which the proclaimer became the proclaimed. Luke's version of what early preachers might have proclaimed indicates that this was only half true. Easter meant the vindication of Jesus' message which therefore remained the central content of the message. In particular many features of the early church, whether reconstructed on the basis of the gospels or the teachings of Paul, revealed a continuity between pre-Easter and post-Easter expectations which made sense against a background of eschatological expectation, in particular: resurrection, the gift of the Spirit, (meals, baptism) and the continuing expectations of God's imminent intervention. The reconstruction of the earliest community beliefs also pressed backward asking about the connection with Jesus and his disciples before Easter. Against the background of such developments it has been inevitable that people have seen research on the historical Jesus as not only demanded by historical inquiry but also desirable in the process of coming to terms with modern theology and modern faith.
No comments:
Post a Comment