Chapter 4
In This Chapter
● Understanding the responses to the earliest questions about Jesus
● Showing the impact of the Enlightenment
● Discovering the many quests for the historical Jesus
The historical Jesus has been important for 2,000 years, but often in different ways. When Jesus’s companions preached about him, for example, they told stories of his life, teachings, deeds, death, and resurrection. They cared about who he had been as well as who they believed he still was. Later, people wrote these stories down. And later still, others put some of these stories in the Bible. The earliest Christian controversies were about how Jesus could be historical and eternal — or to put it another way, human and divine — at the same time. But even though the historical Jesus has been important throughout Christian history, it has only been in the last couple of centuries that his earthly life has come under close scrutiny.
In this chapter, I help you discover the early questions about Jesus.
I show you the causes of recent interest in the historical Jesus and guide you through the scholarly debates about who Jesus really was.
Responding to the First Critical Questions about Jesus
Some people think that the quest for the historical Jesus started with the Enlightenment in the 18th century. That’s a natural place to start the story, because during the Enlightenment, rationally minded folks began to subject all supposed “truths” to scientific scrutiny.
But the truth is that Jesus had been subjected to scrutiny of one kind or another from the moment he first began to preach. As one of my professors used to say: Just because people lived in antiquity doesn’t mean they were stupid!
In the following sections, I explain the ways in which Christians responded to the earliest questions and rumors about Jesus.
Gospels galore: Which of the gospels are true?
When some of Jesus’s better-educated followers sat down to write the story of Jesus, they called their stories evangelia (or “good news,” which became “gospel” in Old English). About two dozen gospels have survived from the first few Christian centuries. By the mid-to late-second century, four of these gospels had emerged as widespread (though not universal) favorites. By and large they’re also the earliest, dating from the late first century.
One of the main reasons that the gospels were written was to provide explanations that Christians could use to defend their beliefs. As you can imagine, the sheer number of stories quickly became part of the problem. These stories didn’t always agree with one another, so no one was sure which ones were true. (Flip to Chapter 5 for more on these many gospels, and to Chapter 3 for tips on weighing their reliability).
Some groups of Christians decided that the confusion was too much, so they picked one gospel as the gospel. Tatian, a Syriac Christian, took the four main gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (see Chapter 2) and fused them into one continuous Greek account called the Diatessaron (which is Greek for “[one] out of four”). When these gospels were fused, the contradictions among them were removed. However, the mainstream or orthodox church opted as early as the 180s CE to keep the four gospels.
In 313 CE, when the Roman Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity, he did so in part to help unify the large number of Christians in his empire. Different groups of these Christians were reading different stories and believing different things about Jesus. So, in 325 CE Constantine set out to solve this problem. He called together the bishops — the leaders of the regional Christian churches — to get their stories straight. They had the authority to decide on behalf of their churches what counted as orthodox (or true faith and tradition). To solve the problem of competing traditions, these bishops created a canon (an official list of books in the Bible). This meeting of the minds also led to the large-scale production of complete manuscripts of the Bible.
Divine or not divine: What's the true nature of Jesus?
The earliest followers of Jesus were often on the defensive as they preached about Jesus’s life, death, and divine identity. For instance, when the apostle Paul told his Jewish and Greek audience in Corinth that Jesus was God’s messiah and son and was crucified, he was met with a lot of criticism. The Jews found the cross to be a stumbling block and the pagans found it foolish (1 Corinthians 1:10-31). In other words, Jews weren’t expecting a messiah who would fail, and the pagans couldn’t imagine that a god would become human, let alone die as a common criminal.
As for the story that Jesus had risen from the dead, rumors circulated in the first 50 years after Jesus’s death (30-80 CE) that his followers had stolen his body so that nobody could disprove their claim that he was alive. In fact, Matthew mentions this rumor in his gospel (Matthew 27:62-66; 28:11-15). Clearly the early Christians had a lot of explaining to do!
The following sections offer a sample of the arguments that later groups had regarding the divine nature of Jesus.
The pagans’ thoughts on the matter
Despite the earliest doubts of Jesus’s divinity, by the second and third centuries CE, Christianity was spreading and pagan critics in particular began to be alarmed. These critics called the Christians atheists because they didn’t worship the Roman gods.
As Christianity spread in the second and third centuries CE, Greco-Roman philosophers like Celsus (second century) studied the Christian story and raised all kinds of doubts. For example, Celsus wanted to know whether Jesus was born to a virgin or whether he was just a bastard whose birth story was made over into something nobler. He also questioned how he could be God, or even just an effective leader of men, when his own followers admitted to abandoning him in his hour of need. In the end, they wanted to know whether he was a miracle worker or a magician, a god or a fraud.
Origen (185-254 CE) was a philosophically minded Christian who carefully responded to each of Celsus’s critiques in his not-so-creatively titled book, Against Celsus (248 CE). Regarding Jesus’s humble roots, Origen replied that it only makes his influence that much more amazing. To Jesus’s betrayal by his own followers, Origen countered that Jesus knew in advance that this would happen and that he allowed it out of obedience to God.
Debates among Christians in the 1500s
Some of the fiercest debates that Christians had historically were with each other. As they studied their Bibles in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (especially from about 1200-1500), they began to realize that Jesus’s community of disciples and Jesus’s teachings were quite different from what the European Catholic Church had become. Some wanted to restore the Church to what they thought it had been in the beginning. This impulse would later give rise to the quest for the historical Jesus himself. But in the short term, it spawned the Reformation in the 16th century and two centuries of bloody religious conflicts among Protestants, Catholics, and the governments allied with them. This bloodshed and the competing claims of Christian groups fostered a profound distrust of religious authority, a distrust that would help give rise to the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment's Impact on the Perception of Jesus
The 16th-and 17th-century discoveries by Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo that the earth was not the center of the universe disrupted the notions that had been held since the time of Aristotle and that many took to be revealed in the Bible (see Joshua 10:12-14, where the sun is stopped in its presumed orbit around the earth).
The discovery of the so-called “New World” at about the same time presented some problems, too. The Bible said that Adam was the father of all people (Genesis 5-11) but inconveniently failed to mention the Aztecs (and Incas and Mayans and so on). How could the Bible be divine revelation if it was incomplete or, worse yet, wrong? All these discoveries challenged the notion that the Bible was true or accurate in an absolute sense and opened the door for questions about its portrait of Jesus.
The rise of the universities, the Reformation and its bloody aftermath, and new discoveries in the world and in the sciences gave rise to the Age of Reason and the Enlightenment (1600-1800 CE). What characterized these movements was the shift to reason as the basis for authority. Imagining themselves to be freed from blind tradition, religious superstition, and political tyranny, scientists and philosophers sought to use rational inquiry to discern the laws of nature apart from divine revelation and develop a more progressive society.
In the following sections, I discuss the effect that all these discoveries had on understanding the historical Jesus.
Applying science to Jesus
During the Enlightenment, biblical scholars worked in the same universities with scientists. They were reading one another’s work. It was just a matter of time before these theologians began applying the scientific method to the biblical texts and to Jesus himself. After all, Christianity has always been a religion about a man. So, Jesus’s life should be able to be studied in the ways you would study any human being. The results of such a study might not exhaust his significance for all people, but they should be vital to a religion that privileges humanity and history the way Christianity does.
Going after the gospels: The birth of deism and reactions to it
A new form of religious faith, called deism, came to birth in the Enlightenment. Deists believed in a supremely rational God who didn’t intervene in this world. He created a universe that operated by immutable laws and then he left it to run on its own. Deists didn’t approve of anything that smacked of divine intervention, such as miracles, resurrections, or divine prophecies supposedly fulfilled in history. As you can imagine, this didn’t leave them with much of a gospel (see the nearby sidebar “Thomas Jefferson’s gospel” for more information). For them, Jesus was at most a teacher of universal morality; he wasn’t God and performed no miracles.
In the following section, I introduce you to the most important deist in historical Jesus studies — H. S. Reimarus — and the reaction he provoked in the 19th century.
H. S. Reimarus and the deceiving disciples
As a German deist, Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) wasn’t the first to dispute Jesus’s miracles and resurrection. But he was the first to imagine who Jesus could have been if he wasn’t the risen savior that Christians had “mistaken” him for. For Reimarus, Jesus was fully human and only human. He thought that Jesus was a Jew who could only be understood within the context of Judaism. Reimarus believed that Jesus’s message of repentance, the coming kingdom of God, and the end of this world proved to be wrong. In his eyes, Christian doctrine had completely misunderstood Jesus by making him a divine savior of the world.
Reimarus traced this apparent deception to the disciples themselves. He said that they had expected that Jesus would establish God’s kingdom and that they would be his right-hand men. When Jesus was executed instead, the disciples invented the claim that he had risen and would soon return. So, according to Reimarus,
Christianity is based on two failed ends: the one that Jesus predicted and the one that the disciples expected. The disciples, Reimarus believed, perpetrated a fraud in their preaching and in the gospels, and Christians bought it.
Reimarus decided not to publish his thoughts while he was still alive (gee, can you guess why?). His student, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, published some of them in Germany just after Reimarus’s death (1774-1778). But to protect Reimarus’s reputation, Lessing wouldn’t reveal his teacher’s name. In fact, nobody knew who the author of the fragments was for another 40 years.
Many late 18th and early 19th century scholars were troubled by Reimarus’s ideas. They couldn’t imagine that the disciples’ claims were really fraudulent and that they were using the good news as a cover for Jesus’s failed political mission. But if the disciples weren’t trying to deceive people, what in the world were they trying to communicate through their miracle stories? Some scholars thought that they were telling the literal truth, that divine agency was at work in Jesus (these folks were called “supernaturalists”). On the other side were scholars who thought that the gospels were reporting something amazing that was nevertheless completely natural (these folks were called “naturalists”). For example, in the story of Jesus feeding a huge crowd (Mark 6:34-52), the supernaturalists said that God multiplied the few loaves of bread, while the naturalists said that Jesus prompted everyone to share what they’d brought.
Thomas Jefferson's gospel
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), a founding father of the United States and its third president (1801-1809), is well known as the principal author of the Declaration of Independence. But, what you may not know is that he also wrote a gospel of his own called The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth.
Jefferson was a deist, so he considered the official gospels to be subpar. All the stories about miracles and prophecies, the virgin birth, and the resurrection flew in the face of nature and reason. Jefferson judged these stories to be corruptions introduced by unlettered disciples. So, in 1803, he set out cutting up copies of the gospels (in Greek, Latin, French, and English) until he had made "a wee little book" excerpting Jesus's clearest teachings and parables. He completed the book in 1819, which is the year he founded the University of Virginia. But he didn't publish the book, fearing the inevitable "swarm of insects, whose buzzing is more disquieting than their bite." After all, during his run for the presidency in 1800, several clergymen called him an infidel, a materialist, and an atheist — and that was before he ever wrote this book (and might be precisely what prompted it). The book was first published in 1895.
D. F. Strauss's reaction to Reimarus
In 1835, a theologian and philosopher by the name of David Friedrich Strauss (1808-1874) offered a resolution to the controversy between the supernaturalists and the naturalists (see the previous section). Like a good Enlightenment thinker, Strauss believed that God didn’t intervene in nature, so he rejected the supernaturalists’ view of miracles. But he didn’t accept the naturalists’ explanations either (check out Chapter 12 for more on modern views of miracles). In Strauss’s eyes, Jesus didn’t multiply the loaves and fish and nobody shared theirs, either. In his view, no historical event gave rise to this story.
So does that mean that Strauss saw the miracles as the disciples’ fraudulent invention, like Reimarus? Not at all. Instead, Strauss offered a new way to look at the miracles. They didn’t arise from historical events in Jesus’s life, but rather from the worldview of the gospel writers. He argued that the disciples’ beliefs in Jesus’s divinity unconsciously colored their stories about him. Strauss said that the language available to the disciples at the time wasn’t language that makes sense to rationalistic minds. Instead, it was mythological language. By using the term “myth,” Strauss meant that the stories were spontaneous, unreflective acts of poetic imagination. In other words, strip away this mythological language in the gospels and you’re left with a historical Jesus who’s an ideal human being. According to Strauss, Jesus is no more divine than you or me; he isn’t unique.
Unfortunately for his career, Strauss published under his own name in 1835 at the age of 27 and was subsequently shunned by theologians for rendering so much of the gospels fiction, denying the divinity of Jesus, and drawing such a firm line between history and faith. After publishing his ideas, he wasn’t able to get a job teaching theology, and by the time he died he had completely disavowed his Christian faith. But his work couldn’t be ignored, and, in fact, it spawned the first quest for the historical Jesus.
The First “Liberal" Quest for the Historical Jesus
The ideas of deist historian Hermann Samuel Reimarus and the Christian theologian David Friedrich Strauss (which I discuss earlier in this chapter) spawned the following three different responses, one of which led to the first quest for the historical Jesus:
On one end of the spectrum were the skeptics who thought Christian belief should be abandoned entirely.
● On the opposite end of the spectrum were those people who held fast to their convictions that Jesus was the divine son of God who worked miracles and rose from the dead. For them, the gospels were accurate, historical records of his life.
● In between the two ends of the spectrum were the folks who wanted to renew Christian belief by discovering the historical Jesus who existed before the Christian Church made him God. These folks were called “liberal” theologians because they didn’t start with the assumption that biblical statements were true simply because they were revealed. Instead, they viewed the gospels as human witnesses to revelation that could only be understood in their original historical and cultural contexts.
In the following sections, I discuss the major principles and practices behind the “liberal” quest, the quest’s collapse, and how that collapse led to the two more recent quests.
Outlining the principles and practices of the liberal quest
The first scholars involved in the liberal quest sought to view Jesus in his historical context. If these liberal truth-seekers were going to discover the historical Jesus, they would have to embark on a quest through the four biblical gospels, and they would have to separate the earliest tidbits of history from the later faith additions.
So, various scholars set out to discover the life of Jesus and to provide 19th century Christians with believable portraits of his life. Unlike Reimarus, these scholars didn’t take the gospels to be frauds, and unlike Strauss, they thought they could squeeze out some historical juice from the mythological miracles and dogmatic teachings about Jesus’s divine nature. They sought the “true” life of Jesus by breaking the gospels down into their components — their sources and episodes — and then they painted their portraits of Jesus from these earliest pieces. These scholars also often infused a lot of imagination into their portraits because of their interest in the psychology and personality of Jesus.
A good example of this imaginative approach comes from Ernest Renan. His 1863 book, The Life of Jesus, was written with romantic flourish and was extremely popular. But it was also condemned by many Church officials and Christian scholars because in his effort to make Jesus universally relevant, Renan emphasized Jesus as a great moral teacher rather than God.
Two other scholars, Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (1832-1910) and Johannes Weisse (1863-1914), worked carefully on the gospel evidence and presented their findings, arguing that Mark’s gospel was earliest and presented the most historical portrait of Jesus, the eschatological preacher. But they discovered too little historical evidence to write a biography of Jesus, so they hesitated to fill in the blanks.
A lot of good, careful work was done during this time. Scholars came to appreciate that the four biblical gospels weren’t entirely the creation of their authors, but were faithful attempts to pass on traditions from the oral preaching of the earliest Church. They developed rules to test which passages were earlier than others (see Chapter 3), and on this basis, they judged Mark’s gospel to be the first one written (and most scholars still agree with that idea).
Facing facts: The flawed quest collapses
The first “liberal” quest began to fall apart at the end of the 19th century (1892-1906). It was brought down by other biblical scholars who, like you, were curious about the historical Jesus but found the quest flawed. The errors these scholars noted were clear:
● The earliest gospel isn’t historical. According to William Wrede’s The Messianic Secret, published in 1902, the earliest gospel is Mark’s gospel, but that doesn’t mean it paints a picture of the historical Jesus. It incorporates beliefs about Jesus that developed after his historical life, just as the later gospels do. It’s a faith statement, not a history book.
● The gospels don’t preserve the historical sequence of Jesus’s
life. In his The So-Called Historical Jesus and the Historical Biblical Christ (published in 1896), Martin Kahler noticed that the episodes inside the gospel stories are arranged differently by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. There’s no way to figure out whose sequence of events corresponded best to Jesus’s actual life, apart from the obvious birth-ministry-death framework.
● Jesus’s message was particular, not universal. According to Johannes Weiss’s book, Jesus’ Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, published in 1892, Jesus wasn’t simply a moral teacher; he was a Jewish prophet of the end-times. His message wasn’t about universal morals, as so many 19th-century scholars thought, but about an imminent end of the world. That made his message particular and time-bound, not universal and timeless.
● Jesus’s teaching is irrelevant to the modern world.
In The Quest of the Historical Jesus, published in 1906, Albert Schweitzer said that Jesus thought God’s kingdom was coming soon. So, he preached a really tough “interim ethic” for that short time before the end (prohibiting divorce, encouraging followers to leave their families to follow him). Because he was wrong about the timing, the tough “morals” of the great moral teacher are irrelevant for subsequent generations.
● Any life story of Jesus is hopelessly subjective. Schweitzer noted that the many “lives” of Jesus made him look like a 19th century rationalist, not a first-century Jewish man. The modern authors have just projected what they wanted or needed Jesus to be in the gospels.
Responding to the collapse
After the collapse of the first “liberal” quest, some of those who still considered themselves Christian biblical scholars contented themselves to continue close scrutiny of the component parts of the gospels so they could reconstruct Jesus and the earliest Church. Others admitted that the gospels told more about the late first century and so they put their energies into imagining those years.
Another important response to the collapse of the first “liberal” quest was to disavow the need for the historical Jesus altogether.
A great example of this response came from the German New Testament scholar Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976). After years of carefully stripping mythological elements from the earliest component parts of the gospels, Bultmann concluded that he couldn’t recover the historical Jesus from them. But he also believed that it wasn’t necessary to do so. For this good Lutheran, it mattered less what the historical Jesus did than what God accomplished through Jesus’s death and resurrection. Bultmann believed that it was God’s grace, not Jesus’s works, that mattered — the “Christ of faith” was more important than the “Jesus of history.”
Bultmann’s position made some people nervous, including his own students and a lot of liberal Protestant scholars who were convinced that Jesus’s historical life mattered. To them, it sounded like he was erasing the human dimension of Jesus, which was so central to Christian faith. So, they broke with his preference for the Christ of faith and returned to the Jesus of history to see what they could find.
Venturing Out on the Second Quest
After a hiatus in the first half of the 20th century, the second quest began with the renewed belief that some historical material could be gleaned from the gospels, and that a historical tradition like Christianity had to grapple with it. Ernst Kasemann (1906-1998) started the new quest for the historical Jesus in Germany in the years just after World War II (1953-1970).
Kasemann reasoned that the historical Jesus was important enough to the earliest Church that its members wrote stories about him. So the historical Jesus should be important for Christians now as well. And because the gospel authors cared enough to describe Jesus as the man rather than just the risen man, Kasemann figured that some continuity must exist between the Church’s preaching and Jesus and between the gospels and history. So he and others set out on the second quest (sometimes called the “new quest”).
In this effort, Kasemann was joined by several other scholars, including Herbert Braun (1903-1991), Ernst Fuchs (1903-1983), Ghnther Bornkamm (1905-1990), Gerhard Ebeling (1912-2001), Hans Conzelmann (1915-1989), and Walter Schmithals (1934- ) in Germany, and James M. Robinson (1924- ) in the United States.
In the following sections, I explain how second questers applied the rules of historicity to gospel texts, and I also note how certain ideas and events shaped the second quest.
Applying the rules of historicity
The folks on the second quest systematically exposed and applied the rules of historicity to the gospel texts (these are rules for figuring out how likely something is to have happened; you can find these rules in Chapter 3). For them, the most important rule was “discontinuity”: the principle that when Jesus did something in the gospels that was different from prior Jewish tradition or later Church teaching, these traditions are likely authentic. They based this on the belief that Jesus must have stood out from human culture in order to have been memorable, compelling, and original.
Reshaping the second quest
The second quest viewed Jesus as completely dissimilar from human culture, contemporary Judaism, and early Christian teaching. This dissimilarity struck a lot of scholars as pretty implausible. They wondered how anyone could have understood Jesus if he was so unusual. And, how could a tradition have developed after him that had so little continuity with his teachings? So, scholars began to shift their assumptions. They started to imagine another scenario: That Jesus was best understood as a Jew, not as a sort of alien offspring of Judaism, and that his teachings could be perceived in early Christian teaching.
Along with the problems regarding Jesus’s dissimilarity, two other factors also reshaped the quest: the Holocaust and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
The Holocaust
More than six million Jews were targeted for slaughter in Nazi Germany from 1939-1945 (the “Holocaust” or “Shoah”). They were killed on the basis of their supposed racial inferiority. This racial inferiority theory was secular, not religious, but it depended for its widespread popularity on a long-standing Christian prejudice against the Jews.
This prejudice had been present in historical Jesus studies from at least the 19th century. For example, when Reimarus and Schweitzer said that Jesus was not God but simply was a Jewish prophet and was therefore irrelevant to modern minds, the teaching that marginalized Jesus also diminished the significance of Judaism. More blatant and insidious were the attempts of Christian biblical scholars in some of the great theological schools of Nazi Germany to transform Jesus into an Aryan whose mission had been to destroy Judaism. That piece of the historical Jesus quest has only begun to be explored; you won’t usually find it mentioned in books about the historical Jesus.
The horror of the Holocaust awakened Christians to the fact that their own ideas about Jesus and Christian origins fed (and fed off of) anti-Semitism — even while some of the historical Jesus scholars had opposed the policies of Nazi Germany at great personal risk (for example, Bultmann). As the reality of the Holocaust became clear in the 1950s and 1960s, Christian and Jewish scholars began to work more closely together to appreciate Jesus the Jew.
The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls
Just two years after World War II ended and on the eve of the creation of the state of Israel, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. While none of the over 800 manuscripts mentions Jesus, there are scads of information about the group that wrote and gathered the scrolls (you can read about this group, the Essenes, in Chapter 7). This discovery provided a sudden infusion of sources other than the gospels for building a picture of Jewish society in Jesus’s time.
With this new information, the gospel portraits began to look too simplistic because they lumped together groups as Jesus’s enemies who in fact had very different interests, ideas, and beliefs. The assumption that Jesus must have been dissimilar from Judaism also began to fall apart. In fact, Jesus was looking more and more Jewish. More importantly, scholars realized that the backdrop of Judaism against which they had painted Jesus was colored more by their assumptions than by actual evidence. They had to eat some major humble pie and repaint the backdrop, and when they did, they discovered that Jesus fit in quite nicely. And that’s when a new, third quest began.
The Third Quest: Plural Portraits of a Preacher
The third quest, which began in the 1970s, continues today and attempts to understand Jesus in the historical and cultural context of first-century Judaism, using all the available archaeological, historical, and textual evidence. So, instead of looking for Jesus’s discontinuities with Judaism, early Christianity, and human culture, the third-quest scholars seek the opposite: continuities. For them, the goal is to create a plausible portrait of Jesus. In other words, they want to create a portrait that best explains all the evidence, fits Jesus into his time and place, and accounts best for what happened.
Because the goal is plausibility, a final portrait depends on what a third quester thinks Jesus’s chief activities and concerns were and how that quester understands the society and politics of Jesus’s time. Given that and the sheer variety of sources available, no uniform portrait of Jesus has emerged yet. Instead, different scholars have developed different portraits or images of the Palestinian Jewish preacher. According to several different scholars today, Jesus was
● A wandering philosopher, preaching parables and pithy sayings
● An anti-Temple wisdom teacher
● A charismatic holy man and miracle worker/shaman
● A spirit-filled exorcist
● A prophet of the end-times
● A radical social reformer
● A rebel against Rome and a social bandit
You’ll find these portraits of Jesus filling books on the bookstore shelves written by scholars such as Burton Mack, F. Gerald Downing, Marcus Borg, Geza Vermes, Stevan L. Davies, Graham H. Twelftree, E. P. Sanders, Bart D. Ehrman, Paula Fredriksen, John P. Meier, Dale Allison, N. T. Wright, Gerd Theissen, John Dominic Crossan, and Richard A. Horsley, among others.
You also may have heard of a group of scholars called “The Jesus Seminar” who have been engaged for a couple of decades in their own quest for the true words and actions of Jesus (see the nearby sidebar “The Jesus Seminar”).
The Jesus Seminar
In 1985, Dr. Robert Funk gathered a group of 30 North American biblical scholars in northern California to renew the historical Jesus quest. They call their meeting "The Jesus Seminar." Meeting twice a year since 1985, the group has set as its task the reconstruction of the actual words and deeds of Jesus. They have published the results of their votes in several books, including The Parables of Jesus (1988), The Five Gospels (1993), and The Acts of Jesus(1998). In these books, they differentiate four levels of a text's likely historicity through color-coding (red equals historical, pink equals probable, gray equals unlikely, and black equals unhistorical).
However, The Jesus Seminar has come under a lot of fire from other scholars and clergy for a variety of reasons, including the following:
● The Fellows of the seminar aren't all trained scholars, and those who are don't represent a very broad array of backgrounds, institutions, or countries.
● Their technique of voting doesn't allow much room for nuance or persuasion, even if they discuss arguments in advance of the vote.
● They consider as most historical the sayings of Jesus that occur in Q (passages that Matthew and Luke share) and the gospel of Thomas (a sayings gospel), but there may be material in other sources that's arguably earlier and would make Jesus look a bit different.
● They rely on the criterion of dissimilarity more heavily than other third questers.
● The resulting portrait of a modest wise man doesn't jibe with the fact that Jesus was executed.
The Jesus Seminar has generated a lot of debate because it finds little historical evidence for certain Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and the resurrection.
For all their differences, these various portraits all try to understand Jesus in the context of first-century Judaism (the first portrait, which views Jesus as a kind of Greek philosopher, is a little different; it depends on a view of his home region, the Galilee, as a heavily Hellenized Jewish territory). And, secondly, these portrait creators all look beyond the Bible to all the gospels, sources of gospels (like “Q”), and other texts that were written in the first couple centuries (you can read about these in Chapter 5).