Veritas Christi: how to get from the Jesus of History to the Christ of Faith without losing one’s way
FRANCIS WATSON
A paper prepared for the working group on the Identity of Jesus, Center for Theological Inquiry, Princeton NJ, September 2004
“You are the Christ”, Peter replies to Jesus’ question. The simplicity of the confessional statement corresponds to the divine simplicity of the truth it acknowledges. It represents the moment of disclosure in which the light of truth appears and is recognized as such.
Yet the moment of disclosure cannot be made into a permanent dwelling place. When Peter proposes that the experience of the transfiguration should be given permanent form by the construction of three tabernacles (one for Moses, one for Elijah, and one for Jesus), his proposal is not even rejected; it is simply ignored, and it is left to the evangelist to apologize for his foolishness (Mk.9.5-6). On the way down the mountain, a theological difficulty comes to light. Jesus’ three disciples engage him in debate about how the figure of the suffering and rising Son of man relates to Elijah, whose coming to restore all things they have learned of from the scribes (Mk.9.9-13). Theological debate is not silenced for long even by a voice from heaven.
For Christians, Jesus’ true identity is established above all by the fourfold canonical gospel.[1] It is within this sacred textual space that we discover who Jesus is, and who we are in relation to him. Yet, here too, scribes have uncovered problems that we might otherwise have overlooked. For these scribes, the way from the sacred text to a firmly grounded belief in the crucified and risen Son of man is anything but straightforward. Rightly – that is, critically – understood, the texts speak of someone else: “the Jesus of history”, whom we are to differentiate from “the Christ of faith”.[2] This scribal distinction cannot and should not be ignored. Once it has become lodged in a disciple’s mind, the problem of the gospel’s apparent twofold referent has to be addressed.
How are we to understand this distinction between a Jesus of history and a Christ of faith? Do we have to accept the distinction at all? Is it perhaps the product of some theological or methodological error, diagnosis of which will reveal our problem as a pseudo-problem?[3] If the problem turns out to be real, can the distinction somehow be transcended so that we can continue to confess “one Lord Jesus Christ” rather than two (or more)? These are the questions that I shall address in this paper, with two opposing scepticisms in view: scepticism about the viability and value of the historical Jesus project, and scepticism about the fourfold canonical gospel as a truthful rendering of the identity of Jesus. These two scepticisms share the assumption that historical and theological discourses on Jesus are simply incommensurable, and that no communication between the two is possible or desirable. The purpose of this paper is to see if communication can be re-established.
1. The historical Jesus: a qualified endorsement
It was presumably the English translator of Albert Schweitzer’s survey of life-of-Jesus research who coined the phrase, “the quest of the historical Jesus”.[4] In doing so, his immediate concern was simply to find a marketable title for the English translation. Had the book gone out into the English-speaking world ponderously entitled, From Reimarus to Wrede: A History of Research into the Life of Jesus, its success would hardly have been assured. Schweitzer himself no doubt intended this title, or its German equivalent, to ensure a hearing for the book within the German academy. In contrast, the romantic English title echoes the medieval legend of the quest of the holy grail, familiar to Schweitzer’s potential English-speaking readership through Tennyson’s popular Arthurian cycle, Idylls of the King, and perhaps also through Wagner’s Parsifal. Like the holy grail, the historical Jesus is the infinitely valuable yet elusive object which promises nothing less than the redemption of humankind. Like Galahad, Percival and Launcelot, New Testament scholars set forth on an arduous and perilous journey which is also a pilgrimage, and which is fraught with significance for all. To this day, the imagery is almost irresistible.
Yet we live in unromantic, prosaic times. It will serve the interests of clarity if we conceive of modern historical Jesus research as a scholarly project operating within a shared paradigm – that is, a set of assumptions, priorities and methodological tools that inform and direct the process of research. Other related projects also operate within this paradigm. Alongside historical Jesus research there is also source criticism, form criticism, redaction criticism and narrative criticism – or rather, there is the study of literary relationships, the history of tradition, and the individual gospels in their final forms. Historical Jesus research is closely although not unproblematically related to these other scholarly projects, which together constitute the modern, wissenschaftlich study of the gospels. This is a tightly integrated nexus of concerns relating to Jesus himself, the traditions about Jesus, and the first literary embodiments of those traditions.
The working hypothesis underlying the entire scholarly paradigm is this: that the historical Jesus is other than the figure(s) we encounter in the fourfold canonical gospel. In Martin Kähler’s terminology, there is a “so-called historical Jesus” and there is a “historic, biblical Christ”.[5] Practically speaking, we can study the historical Jesus or we can study the images of Jesus constructed by each of the four canonical evangelists – but we cannot do both simultaneously. The two forms of research are concerned with fundamentally different objects, whatever the area of overlap between them. In contrast, it is said, “pre-critical” study of the gospels normally assumed that the Jesus of whom they tell is maximally identified with Jesus as he really was. If the Johannine Jesus turns water into wine and speaks of himself as the light of the world, then so too did Jesus himself: the text is a window onto the historical reality. Within “critical” scholarship, on the other hand, the text loses its transparency and becomes increasingly opaque. In the creative imagination of the early church (it is now claimed), Jesus becomes the object not only of historical reminiscence but also of dogmatic construction and legendary elaboration: and the gospels attest this complex process. We must distinguish the historical Jesus from the early Christian images of him. Modern gospels scholarship is based on that fundamental disjunction.
The disjunction is not just a scholarly construct, divorced from the experience of ordinary readers of the gospels. It does not require any advanced scholarly training to find oneself asking whether a particular gospel story really recounts an event in the life of Jesus. The involuntary inward question, “Did that actually happen?” is hardly an uncommon response to a gospel story. The question may be a naïve one, presupposing a watertight distinction between fact and fiction that is vulnerable to some rather obvious criticisms. Yet anti-positivistic critique goes beyond its remit if it tries to outlaw every attempt to distinguish factual occurrence from legendary elaboration. Ordinary readers and trained scholars are not wrong to assume that some such distinctions may be ventured. There is nothing incoherent or implausible about routine scholarly judgments such as the following:
On the one hand, Jesus clearly did address God as “Abba”. On the other hand, he probably never uttered the words, “I am the bread of life”. Jesus grew up in Nazareth, but in reality he was presumably not visited in infancy by magi guided to his Bethlehem residence by a star. Jesus was actually baptized by John, but no descending dove or heavenly voice would have been directly ascertainable on that occasion. Jesus gained a reputation as a healer and exorcist, but he did not really stride across the Sea of Galilee during a storm. Jesus and his disciples came to Jerusalem for the Passover, yet (pace Matthew) he did not really enter the city seated on two animals simultaneously. Jesus was indeed arrested, tried, tortured and crucified, but the darkness at noon, the rending of the temple veil, the splitting of the rocks and the resurrection of the saints do not belong to the realm of empirical reality. These judgments reflect not just rationalistic dogma but a sensitivity to the dynamics of the gospels’ textuality – their relation to each other, to antecedent texts and traditions, and to the world from which they derive. If such judgments are accepted, then in each case we have a de facto distinction between a “historical Jesus” (for want of a better expression) and legends or legendary motifs created by early Christian story-tellers.[6]
Is this disjunction based simply on a mistake? It is argued in some quarters that the road that leads from Reimarus to Wrede and beyond is actually heading away from the reality of Jesus, since its direction has been determined in advance by dubious rationalistic presuppositions that do not stand up to philosophical scrutiny. On this account, to diagnose the presuppositions – above all, that bad old “prejudice against the supernatural”, so characteristic of the Enlightenment – is conclusively to refute the modern critical paradigm. When the inappropriate presuppositions have been removed, the historical Jesus can be reidentified with his images in the gospels. In this way, the gospels’ transparency onto historical reality is restored – instantly and with minimal effort; in spite of their differences of presentation, the four gospels are united in telling the story of Jesus the way it was. This line of reasoning claims to offer a way out of the dilemma posed by the modern critical paradigm. It asks us to see this as a false dilemma, created by the arbitrary presupposition that the gospels’ story of Jesus simply cannot be true at certain crucially important points (water just does not turn instantly into wine, people do not return physically from death). Yet, the argument runs, how do we know that what is normally the case also holds true in the unique case of Jesus? Christian faith itself strongly encourages us to think otherwise. Those held in thrall by the critical paradigm must undertake an act of epistemological repentance.[7]
Should we follow this line of reasoning, or something like it, so as to mitigate the disjunction between the historical Jesus and the fourfold gospel image? There are three main reasons why we should not take this route – in spite of its apparent attractiveness from the standpoint of Christian faith. First, the critical paradigm has shown itself to possess remarkable explanatory power in its analysis of the realities of the gospel texts. While this claim cannot be demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction, it will be self-evident to anyone who has ever worked seriously with a gospel synopsis. Second, it is not at all clear that to identify a gospel story as a legend is to be guilty of an act of wilful unbelief. As Origen already knew, recognition of a narrative’s historical implausibility may actually help the interpreter to draw out its underlying theological meaning.[8] Third, it is one thing to confess God’s final, definitive saving action in Christ, but quite another to claim that this divine saving action is such as to be empirically verifiable in principle or in practice. This claim tends to imply a certain apologetic strategy, which is (arguably!) out of keeping with the dynamics of the Christian gospel.
At some points, the distinction between a “historical Jesus” and the Jesus of the fourfold gospel testimony is virtually inescapable. While the scope and significance of this distinction still need to be clarified, the distinction itself is not the product of incoherent thinking or of wilful unbelief. The New Testament scholarly consensus on this point is grounded in the realities of the texts, and should not be lightly dismissed by those who aspire to follow the “historic biblical Christ”. The goal of the present argument is to show how the scholarly construct known as the “historical Jesus” can be reintegrated into the canonical image of the historic biblical Christ. But it is necessary first to grasp and to acknowledge the rationale for the distinction. If we accept that, at any point, a gospel writer says x about Jesus but that the historical reality was probably not-x, then we have begun to identify gospel material whose relationship to empirical reality seems tenuous or oblique, and to distinguish it from material where this relationship is probably more direct. The systematic investigation of this distinction is the starting-point of the project known as the “quest of the historical Jesus”.[9]
This project sets out from a more or less radical attempt to sift out “secondary” material, whose origin is held to postdate Jesus’ own lifetime. Secondary material is identified not only by invoking general criteria of credibility (which do not necessarily deserve the pejorative epithet “rationalistic”), but above all by way of an intricate comparative analysis of the gospels, normally based on the source critical theory of Marcan priority. The residue of primary or “authentic” material then provides the basis for the attempt to reconstruct the main outlines of Jesus’ life and ministry, typically organized under a series of headings relating either to specific events (the baptism by John, the incident in the temple) or, more commonly, to broad themes (the kingdom of God, the inclusion of the marginalized). Also relevant here is the mass of surviving literature from the Second Temple period, which, under critical interrogation, can yield crucial insight into the historical and religious milieu within which Jesus lived and acted.
It is notorious that scholarly work in the “historical Jesus” idiom has been beset by serious difficulties. The criteria for differentiating primary from secondary material have often proved hard to define and to apply, and this has resulted in major interpretative differences. For much of the twentieth century, Schweitzer’s triumphant announcement that eschatology was the sole key to Jesus’ activity seemed virtually beyond dispute. At the start of the twenty-first century, it is again an open question whether Jesus was even interested in eschatology; those who argue that he was are forced into the “conservative” role of defending an older consensus.[10] Broadly similar criteria seem to produce quite different results. Another persistent problem is the distorting effect of the ideological motivations often perceptible in historical Jesus research. For many scholars, there must be a sharp dividing-line between the real, authentic, historical Jesus and the later spurious Christ-images that shaped the course of Christian dogmatic development. This imperative stems not from considerations of historical plausibility but from a projection of contemporary concerns back into the first century. A Jesus who lends his prestigious support to our own anti-ecclesial leanings or political preferences is sure to attract wide public notice. From a purely historical point of view, the problems encountered in trying to distinguish primary from secondary material have a simple explanation: they reflect the considerable area of overlap between what mattered to Jesus and what mattered to the early communities of his followers over the next few decades. In the last resort, a historical Jesus who diverges from his earliest followers at most key points will be historically implausible. But such a figure may well seem highly attractive. If he underwrites our religious and political biases, we will want to believe in him. And if we want to believe in him, then, most likely, we will believe in him.
It is tempting to regard these deficiencies – lack of consensus, ideological distortion – as fatal to the entire historical Jesus project. Yet this temptation should be rather firmly resisted. All major historical figures continue to generate an interpretative disagreement that reflects conflicting ideological investments. Far from undermining the debate, the disagreement just is the debate. We can choose to join it or not to join it, but we cannot sensibly argue that the debate should be wound up and that historical Jesus scholarship should find some better use for its time. If there are deficiencies needing to be addressed, then they can only be addressed from within the debate, not by holding piously aloof from it. If there is poor scholarly practice, slipshod argumentation or dubious methodology, none of that gives any pretext for rejecting the project itself.
The question is whether this project can allow any room for the distinctive concerns of Christian faith, for which Jesus is (or has been taken to be) the embodiment of a divine saving action addressed to the whole of humankind, and not just one historical figure among many. If, for Christians, it is this relation to God and God’s agency that makes Jesus theologically significant, can this conviction be asserted in a historically responsible manner? One possibility is that the theologically significant Jesus should simply be identified with the historical Jesus – that is, with the modern scholarly reconstruction of a historically plausible figure from the “authentic” material in the gospels and from the extant literary and archaeological material relating to Jesus’ various religious, social and political contexts.[11] Within such a reconstruction, a variety of potentially significant motifs is to be found: Jesus’ sense of his own relation to God and of his mission, his overturning of conventional wisdom, his attitude towards the marginalized, his recourse to parable, his announcement of the kingdom of God, his critique of Pharisees and Sadducees, the ethos he created among his followers – and so on. Theological significance is surely to be found in this material. The question is whether theological significance is to be found exclusively within these “authentic” strands of the gospels, and whether those strands of the gospels deemed “inauthentic” can simply be set aside as of no further significance. The conventional distinction between “authentic” and “inauthentic” material has a certain value in distinguishing the material that can be used for historical Jesus research from that which cannot be so used; but it is quite another matter to elevate this distinction into a criterion for theological significance.
If the theologically significant Jesus is identified with the historical Jesus, then the narrative framework of the gospels would have to be set aside. In particular, the beginning and the end of the fourfold gospel narrative would be deprived of significance; there would no longer be anything much to say at Christmas or at Easter. Historical research is unlikely to confirm an incarnation, or a risen Lord.[12] And what of the eucharist, in its relation to the gospel narrative of institution? The members of the “Jesus Seminar” report that they “found nothing in this narrative that could be traced directly back to Jesus”.[13] Of course, there might be room for debate about that. Yet, if “authenticity” is the criterion of theological significance, the significance of the eucharist itself will be open to question. Eucharist, Easter and Christmas may be a matter of profound indifference to secularized scholars who maintain a wary distance from Christian faith and its social embodiments. For participants in Christian faith and community, however, such indifference is impossible. It is precisely at the beginning and end of the gospel story of Jesus that its “vertical” dimension – its rendering of the relation between Jesus and his God – comes most fully to expression. To eradicate that beginning and ending is to deny God’s own identity, constituted as it is for Christians by the single though complex divine act in which God gives, gives up, and raises God’s son.[14] Outside that context, a “historical Jesus” who projects fatherhood into the unknowable realm beyond empirical experience can hardly be the object of unconditional commitment. The reconstructed historical Jesus of modern scholarship is a figure of some significance, but he cannot be identified with the Christ of faith. So much the worse for the Christ of faith? Christians are not obliged to think so.
On theological but also on historical grounds, we cannot remain content with a historical Jesus who is complete in himself, detached from his own reception by his first followers in the decades following his death. Their reception of him is also his impact on them. In the discussion that follows, we shall try to analyse that reception in historically and theologically responsible ways.[15] The transition from “Jesus” to “Christ” need not be a transition from fact to fantasy. It could be a transition from a partial truth to a comprehensive one.
2. The dynamics of reception
At this point, we may venture the following thesis: that the theologically significant Jesus (the Christ of faith) is the Jesus whose reception by his first followers is definitively articulated in the fourfold gospel narrative.[16] The thesis seeks to break down the wall of incommensurability dividing historical Jesus research from a theology that regards the fourfold gospel narrative as a given. Various explanations and elaborations are required: readers will note that I am striving for succinctness, in order to map out as clearly as possible the main contours of a complex and contested terrain.
(1) The thesis assumes that there is such a thing as a “theologically significant Jesus” (a “Christ of faith”). This is a Jesus set in the context of a theo-logy (a discourse about God) which finds in Jesus the hermeneutical key to the divine relation to the world and the world’s relation to the divine. This discourse about God has a specific social location. It is an ecclesial discourse, a language-game in which some participate while others do not. It has its own characteristic term for such participation – “faith”. The Jesus of faith comprehends the historical Jesus, but is not to be reduced to him; as we have seen, a historical Jesus is far too limited a figure for the ultimate concern of faith. This ultimate concern represents a fundamental challenge to the assumption that final decisions about Jesus’ identity can be reached on the neutral ground of historical research. Historical research may illuminate a range of significant issues, but it will not tell us whether Jesus’ person and mission is truly from God, definitively embodying the divine saving action on the world’s behalf. Within the Christian community, however, everything hangs on whether Jesus is confessed to be from God. The Christian community has its own compelling reasons to resist and reject any limiting of Jesus’ reality to what is historically verifiable.
(2) The thesis acknowledges the historical process in which Jesus’ living, acting, speaking and dying was assimilated and reconfigured within the earliest Christian communities. In the post-Easter period, the remembered human figure was subjected to an interpretative process inspired primarily by scriptural texts that were now understood to point specifically to him. That this interpretative process is original to the Easter faith is explicitly acknowledged in the Emmaus Road story, which is itself both a testimony to that process and a product of it. For the communities that first shaped the Jesus tradition, scripture was the interpretative matrix within which Jesus’ full significance could be brought to light. That is why, again and again, early Christian legend proves to be midrash. Even “authentic” recollections of Jesus’ life and death had to be relocated within a particular construal of scripture and of Jesus as scripture’s fulfilment. The first Christians recollected how Jesus had died, but they spoke not of his death per se but rather of the fact that “Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures” (1 Cor.15.3). Naturally, scripture was mediated to them by a Jewish, postbiblical interpretative tradition that was also open to influences from elsewhere. The first Christians did not reflect on scripture in a social and cultural vacuum, and Hellenism’s profound impact on other Judaisms of the time affected them also. Yet, in their own self-understanding, it was scripture reread in the light of the resurrection that authorized their reconfiguring of Jesus’ story.
(3) The term “reception” points to the dialectic of preservation and innovation within the process of tradition. At one point, an authentic saying of Jesus is handed down, in a form close to the ipsissima verba; at another, a new legendary motif is created. Yet the preserved saying may now function within an entirely new context, assigned to it by an evangelist or some other early Christian story-teller. A gospel synopsis discloses how even the most stable and best attested elements in the tradition can move from one context to another with remarkable ease. If this is still the case with the canonical evangelists, it was surely also the case in the earlier period. Conversely, a later legend may articulate a conviction that is deeply embedded in the older tradition: the Emmaus Road story is a case in point. In the process of reception, a fluid relationship between older and newer elements in the tradition comes to light. Indeed, the term “reception” enables us to overcome the division between “authentic” and “inauthentic” material – a distinction pragmatically useful in historical Jesus research, but not to be absolutized if Paul is right to confess that there is “one Lord Jesus Christ” rather than many (cf. 1 Cor.8.6). The point is that everything in the gospel’s portrayals of Jesus comes to us through the mediation of the earliest Christian communities, and represents their reception of him. At every point Jesus is filtered through early Christian tradition; at no point do we encounter him face to face. Let us imagine that, in a Christian community in Jerusalem or Galilee in the early 30s CE, one of the twelve recalls a saying that he heard from Jesus’ lips a year or two earlier, and introduces it into circulation so that it is added to the growing stock of Jesus material. The saying may preserve Jesus’ ipsissima verba, but already it bears the marks of its later usage. The fact that it has been recalled and circulated at all implies that it is seen to possess enduring significance, illuminating some aspect or other of the community’s ethos or worldview. In other words, the saying that is preserved is specially selected for preservation. The selection process occurs within the life of the early communities, for it is there that the criteria for the survival or otherwise of recollections about Jesus are established. We hear of Jesus only what the first Christians want us to hear. That is the grain of truth in the claim that the gospels give us direct access only to the early Christian communities, and not to Jesus himself. But it would be better to say that the gospels give us direct access to Jesus as he was received within the early communities.
(4) If the theologically significant Jesus is the Jesus received by the early church, the “quest of the historical Jesus” has nevertheless performed an invaluable service. Above all, it has demonstrated that, at a certain level of generality, the gospel story remains rooted in empirical historical reality. In all four gospels, Jesus’ story unfolds within a consistent set of geographical and historical co-ordinates. One thinks for example of locations such as Galilee and its Lake, Nazareth and Capernaum, Judea and Jerusalem, and of figures or groups such as Pilate and Caiaphas, Antipas and Philip, Pharisees and Sadducees. Historical research has shown beyond doubt that co-ordinates such as these anchor the story of Jesus in empirical reality. For those familiar with this research, it is hard to take seriously the persistent though marginal claim that Jesus may never have existed. This empirical reality exercises a degree of control over the developing tradition about Jesus – although not an absolute control, for the tradition seeks to portray a Jesus who is more than a merely empirical figure of history. Yet Jesus is not less than an empirical figure of history. He is not a virtually fictional character in a narrative;[17] he is not a disembodied voice uttering contextless aphorisms (as in the Gospel of Thomas). It is a merit of historical Jesus research that it makes it difficult to be a docetist. The Jesus received by the early church is a figure of flesh and blood who shares our own existence within time and space.
(5) Equally valuable, in principle at least, is the identification of major parts of the gospel testimony as “non-historical” or “legendary”. Here some qualifications are necessary. First, the simple, pragmatically useful distinction between “historical” and “non-historical”, “fact” and “fiction”, has often served to conceal the far more complex range of relations between gospel text and empirical reality. There are fictive elements in history-writing; and facts may be indirectly attested in legends.[18] Second, understanding of the gospels has been severely damaged by the rationalistic assumption that to label a narrative as a “legend” is to discredit it. For early Christian story-tellers, legend seems to have functioned as a way of communicating non-empirical theological truth, and there is no reason why it should not continue to do so. Third, the theological truth that legend attests is never anything other than the truth about Jesus. Unlike myth, legend does not risk sacrificing the concrete particular to some timeless universal. Early Christian legend seeks to articulate God’s act in Jesus, but it knows of no divine saving action other than that which is embodied in Jesus.
(6) The term “reception” is virtually synonymous with “tradition”. Yet not much is known about the development of tradition, oral or written, prior to the composition of the canonical gospels. We must assume that this tradition was developed initially within the “churches of God in Christ Jesus which are in Judea” (1 Thes.2.14), in which “the twelve” appear to have been active, and in which the three so-called “pillars” attained their reputation from their close relationship to Jesus (Gal.2.9). Yet we know next to nothing about those churches, and traces of the Jesus tradition in the Pauline letters are relatively scarce. The concept of “tradition” is needed in order to bridge the gap between the death of Jesus in around 30 CE and the canonical gospels, none of which appear to predate the final quarter of the first century.[19] But we have no direct access to the early tradition; its complex dynamic is perceptible only in the evidence of literary development found within the gospels themselves.[20] Thus, it is the gospels that definitively articulate the early Christian reception of Jesus, giving the prior tradition (oral and written) its normative, canonical form. That does not mean that everything in the gospels had a direct precedent in the tradition. Yet even where the evangelists innovate, the new stories or motifs derive their form and their rationale from what is already present within the tradition; they are not created out of nothing.
(7) The canonical status of the four gospels rests on a collective decision that took place during the mid- to late second century. In that sense, it is only at around the time of Irenaeus that the tradition in its written form achieves even a relative stability, and begins to fulfil its role as the normative testimony to Jesus as he was received by his first followers. The claim that Jesus’ true identity is articulated in the fourfold canonical gospel is not a neutral one, but is valid only within the context of the “holy catholic church” – the social reality of which is acknowledged every time the Apostles’ Creed is recited. Outside this context other gospels can continue to flourish, and there is no historical reason to overlook them. While it is conventional to date the four canonical gospels to the first century and the non-canonical ones to no earlier than the second, it is a mistake to assume that canonicity is tied up with historically demonstrable early datings; as a matter of fact, it is not clear that the Gospel of Thomas must have been written substantially later than John or even Luke. The selection of four out of a multiplicity of gospels can be justified only on theological grounds internal to the church’s faith. From this standpoint, it can be argued that it was theologically appropriate to include Luke or John in the canonical collection, and to pass over Thomas or the Protevangelium of James. Although the fourfold canonical gospel rests on the church’s collective decision, that decision should not be understood as a mere historical accident or as an authoritarian ruling lacking a theological rationale.
(8) Within the church, there are therefore four gospels, not five (or more); and it is also important that there are four gospels and not three. Historical Jesus research normally gives priority to the synoptic gospels, and finds little in the Gospel of John that is usable for its purposes. It is in this gospel that we seem to be furthest removed from empirical historical reality – although it should be emphasized that this telling of Jesus’ story presupposes much the same set of historical and geographical co-ordinates as the others. This gospel seems to derive from a time and place in which Jesus’ actual patterns of speech have become no more than distant echoes. Instead, the Johannine Jesus speaks a distinctive language of his own, in which the central theme is his own total identification with God:
The words that I speak to you I speak not on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me performs his works. (Jn.14.10)
I came from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father. (Jn.16.28)
In this vertical, Godward emphasis, the evangelist discloses what is most fundamentally at stake in the story of Jesus in all its canonical retellings. In the gospels, Jesus’ story unfolds as it must on the horizontal, historical plane; and yet, if it is to have any final and ultimate significance, it must also be presented as the point of intersection between the horizontal and the vertical.[21] Jesus’ life must be seen in its totality as God’s act. In the life of Jesus, it is God who is the agent no less than Jesus, and God’s act is both complex, in that it incorporates all of Jesus’ words and works, and simple, in that it is oriented towards a single goal: the salvation of humankind. It is the entire life of Jesus, from beginning to end, that is summed up in the statement that “God loved the world like this [houtōs] – that he gave his only Son, so that whoever believes in him might have eternal life” (Jn.3.16). Here the life of Jesus is set within its own proper context, originating as it does in the God whose love takes the concrete form of an act of giving, and intending as it does the incorporation of humankind within the eternal divine life. The Gospel of John differs from the synoptics precisely because of its single-minded attempt to disclose the final theological context within which Jesus’ life is set. To that end, even the ipsissima verba of the historical Jesus can be sacrificed.[22]
(9) As we have seen, the theologically significant Jesus is the Jesus whose reception by his first followers is definitively articulated in the fourfold gospel narrative. Yet Jesus is ultimately significant for us only if we believe this canonical testimony to be true, and we must therefore consider how the testimony itself enables us to reflect on the question of its own truthfulness. It does not encourage us to identify its theological truth-content with its empirical historical veracity. At point after point, the gospel narratives cannot be satisfactorily harmonized, and this is a result of each evangelist’s decision to retell the story of Jesus in his own way, without being constrained by his predecessors. A degree of non-correspondence to empirical reality is, as it were, built into the fourfold testimony from the outset – for the very good reason that the story it tells is not concerned with a purely empirical reality but with God and God’s saving action in the world. In Johannine language, the demonstration of its truth lies not in our own power but in the power of the “Spirit of truth”, the divine revelatory dynamic immanent within the Christ-event and its aftermath. That is simply to say that the promise of the Spirit is not marginal to the story that the gospels tell. The promise does not only relate to the story of the church – as though the Spirit were the protagonist in the story of the church just as Jesus is the protagonist of the gospels, as though Jesus and the Spirit were independent agents. Rather, the coming of the Spirit of truth is – from a Johannine perspective – the precondition for grasping and being grasped by the truth incarnated in the gospel story. The story intends its own recognition as a true story, as the truth itself. The revelatory dynamic that occasioned the first tellings and retellings of this story continues to secure a hearing for it. We do not find out the truth, from our own resources; rather, the truth finds us.
The “quest” continues to make a necessary and important contribution to the critical study of the gospels. It is an antidote to the docetism for which Jesus exists only in textual form; it makes the process of reception visible as such. And yet it suffers from a tendency to identify the products of its own interpretative paradigm with reality itself: the real Jesus is simply and solely the historical Jesus, and all else is just pious fantasy. As a result, it tends towards a kind of de facto atheism. Even from a historical point of view, however, it is not at all easy to detach Jesus from his first followers. Their reception of him is also his impact on them. The concrete traits of the historical Jesus belong within an account of the “historic biblical Christ”, and should not be allowed to take on an independent life of their own. The distinction is inevitable, but it exists only in order to be transcended. The gospels assume that we are to speak not of Jesus alone but of Jesus in relation to God and of God in relation to Jesus; and there is no good reason not to take that assumption seriously.
[1] On this see Hans W. Frei, The Identity of Jesus Christ, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975.
[2] The terminology goes back to the title of D. F. Strauss’s polemic against Schleiermacher’s lectures on the life of Jesus, Der Christus des Glaubens und der Jesus der Geschichte (1865), ed. H.-J. Geischer, Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1971.
[3] See for example Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1997. In this trenchant critique of recent American historical Jesus scholarship, Johnson argues that this scholarship is not only defective in practice but also misguided in principle. The Jesus of the gospels is “not simply a figure of the past but very much and above all a figure of the present… Christians direct their faith not to the historical figure of Jesus but to the living Lord Jesus” (p. 142).
[4] The translator was W. Montgomery. F. C. Burkitt already speaks of “the great Quest” in his preface to Schweitzer’s work (The Quest of the Historical Jesus, Eng. tr. London: A. & C. Black, 1910; p. xviii). The German title was Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 19061).
[5] We note in passing that the German sogenannte need not have the dismissive connotations of the English “so-called”.
[6] The classic statement of the case for disjunctions of this kind is D. F. Strauss’s Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835-36), Eng. tr. repr. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972.
[7] For a sophisticated version of this argument, see C. Stephen Evans, The Historical Christ and the Jesus of Faith: The Incarnational Narrative as History, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996; pp. 184-202, 331-55.
[8] See the brief discussion of Origen’s position in my Text, Church and World: Biblical Interpretation in Theological Perspective, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1994; pp. 230-31.
[9] For an alternative to this model, see N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, London: SPCK, 1992; Jesus and the Victory of God, London: SPCK, 1996. Wright argues that the correct starting point is to reconstruct Jesus’ Jewish context, and to ask how far the gospel presentation looks plausible within that context.
[10] See Dale C. Allison, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet, Minneapolis: Fortress, 1998: “Many of us have, since Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer, been persuaded that Jesus was an eschatological prophet with an apocalyptic scenario. Our judgment is consistent with the Synoptics’ testimony” (p. 34).
[11] For a popular presentation of an argument along these lines, see Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1995.
[12] Pace N. T. Wright, for whom (it seems) all things are possible for historical research; see his The Resurrection of the Son of God, Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003, pp. 685-718.
[13] The Five Gospels: New Translation and Commentary, by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar, New York: Scribner, 1996; p. 260.
[14] On this point, see Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology 1, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997; pp. 42-44, 59-60. For Jenson, God is identified by Jesus’ resurrection but also identified with this event (p. 59).
[15] The concept of “reception” here is dependent on Paul Tillich, who argues that “[t]he event on which Christianity is based has two sides: the fact which is called ‘Jesus of Nazareth’ and the reception of this fact by those who received him as the Christ” (Systematic Theology, 2: Part III, Existence and the Christ [1957], London: SCM Press, 1978; p. 97). “Without this reception the Christ would not have been the Christ, namely, the manifestation of the New Being in time and space” (p. 99). Thus the New Testament itself “is an integral part of the event which it documents” (p. 117).
[16] In place of “the fourfold gospel narrative”, the thesis might have referred to “the New Testament” or to “the Christian Bible”. The more limited formulation reflects the decision to focus in this paper on the special problems posed by the gospels.
[17] Hans Frei seems to me to stray too close to this position, in his emphasis on “the story as story” and on “the storied Jesus”, about whose being prior to his literary embodiment we are not to enquire (The Identity of Jesus Christ, Philadelphia: Fortress, 1975; pp. 102, 114). Frei tends to assimilate the gospels to the genre of the modern realistic novel, which is “the special vehicle for setting forth unsubstitutable identity in the interplay of character and action” (p. 82). It does not occur to Frei that a range of relations to the real can co-exist within a single narrative (also in a realistic novel), and that judgments about these relations may be integral to the act of reading.
[18] See my Text and Truth: Redefining Biblical Theology, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark; pp. 33-69.
[19] I assume that Mark 13.2 is vaticinium ex eventu.
[20] J. D. G. Dunn has recently argued that an “oral paradigm” should be substituted for the “literary paradigm” in the study of the synoptics (Jesus Remembered, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003; pp. 173-254). While Dunn may be right, lack of evidence makes it impossible to know whether he is right.
[21] This image is derived from Barth’s Römerbrief. Commenting on “Jesus Christ our Lord” in Romans 1.4, Barth writes: “In diesem Namen begegnen und trennen sich zwei Welten, schneiden sich zwei Ebenen, eine bekannte und eine unbekannte. Die bekannte ist die von Gott herausgefallene und darum erlösungsbedürftige Welt des ‘Fleisches’, die Welt des Menschen, der Zeit und der Dinge, unsre Welt. Diese bekannte Ebene wird geschnitten von einer andern unbekannten, von der Welt des Vaters, der Welt der ursprünglichen Schöpfung und endlichen Erlösung. Aber diese Beziehung zwischen uns und Gott, zwischen dieser Welt und der Welt Gottes will erkannt sein. Das Sehen der Schnittlinie zwischen beiden ist nicht selbstverständlich. – Der Punkt der Schnittlinie, wo sie zu sehen ist und gesehen wird, is Jesus, Jesus von Nazareth, der ‘historische’ Jesus…” (Der Römerbrief, Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1922; p. 5). Incidentally, T. S. Eliot seems to derive the phrase, “The point of intersection of the timeless / With time” (“The Dry Salvages”, V, ll.18-19) from E. C. Hoskyns’ English rendering of Barth’s imagery here (The Epistle to the Romans, London: Oxford University Press, 1933, p. 29: “… the point at which the hidden line, intersecting time and eternity… becomes visible”).
[22] See the still insightful discussion in E. C. Hoskyns, The Fourth Gospel, ed. F. N. Davey, London: Faber & Faber, 1940; vol.1, pp. 65-92. The evangelist “insist[s] that the tradition… has a meaning peering out of it at every point, a meaning which is ‘beyond history’, and which alone makes sense of history. To disclose this underlying meaning of the tradition he wrote his gospel. The freedom with which he did so is nothing less than staggering to us who have been brought up within the strait fetters of the ‘Historical Method’, who have almost completely lost the sense for the Problem of Theology, which is to set forth the non-historical truth that underlies all history… We continually demand that an evangelist should narrate nothing but observable history, which means that we are demanding of him that he should not be an evangelist” (p. 90).
