Recent Books on the Historical Jesus
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Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical
Jesus: From Reimarus to Wrede. Johns Hopkins University Press,
1998.
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G.A. Wells, The Jesus Legend. Open Court
Publishing Company, 1996.
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G.A. Wells, The Jesus Myth. Open Court
Publishing Company, 1999.
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Charlotte Allen, The Human Christ: The Search for
the Historical Jesus. The Free Press, 1999.
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
In
the 24th chapter of the Book of Joshua, after the promised land has been
conquered, Joshua leads his people in a ceremony of covenant renewal
before God. To commemorate the occasion he erects a "stone of witness."
Its purpose is to serve both as a monument of great victories won and a
rebuke should the people fall away from faithfulness to the God who gave
them these victories. It strikes me that Albert Schweitzer's great book
The Quest of the Historical Jesus (originally published in German
in 1906) is much like the witness stone of Joshua. It is an
irreplaceable monument capsulizing, and critiquing, a great era of
scholarly enterprise, that of the original quest for the Jesus of
history. It did that job matchlessly well. And it acts as a silent
reproof to much current scholarship which has hastened to forget the
lessons Schweitzer taught. Thus its recent reprinting is an important
event.
Schweitzer's tome not only summarized the major (and often the minor)
scholarly works on the subject; it also set that chronicle in the
context of intellectual history. Tracing trends in the research and
carefully indicating the dogmatic and anti-dogmatic agendas motivating
many of the Lives of Jesus he discussed, Schweitzer charted out, as
Bultmann might say, both the Historie and the Geschichte
of the Jesus quest. That is, he reviewed the facts and set forth their
larger significance. Schweitzer showed how gradually the critical study
of the gospels had forced the delineation of three great alternatives.
First, are the gospel traditions to be taken as historical or
supernatural? Second, should a Life of Jesus be based on the Gospel of
John or the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke)? Third, should Jesus'
mission and message be understood as primarily moralistic or
eschatological? It was a great gain, Schweitzer said, for scholars to
come to grips with the pervasive presence of legendary material in the
gospels (though Schweitzer himself still felt he could discern a goodly
amount of authentic sayings, enough to build on). It was just as
important to decide that to whatever degree the Synoptics might be
historical, John certainly was not, since it contradicts the others so
grossly. And most important of all, it was vital to determine that Jesus
was not a liberal, nondogmatic preacher of morality and generalized
humanitarianism, but rather a prophet heralding the soon-coming end of
the age.
Schweitzer claimed to have exploded the hitherto-regnant "modern" Jesus
of liberal Protestantism, a proponent of the fatherhood of God and the
brotherhood of man. This Jesus was a figment of the Modernist
imagination and a figurehead of liberalism against orthodox
Protestantism and Catholicism. But Schweitzer by no means proposed to
return to the dogmatic myth-man of the Creeds. He still wanted the
historical Jesus. It was just that the liberal Protestant questers
hadn't found him. Schweitzer thought he had. Building on the work of
Johannes Weiss (Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God, 1892),
he was fully prepared to discover a Jesus who would turn out to be an
embarrassment to modern Christianity of all stripes. He did not insist
on a Jesus who would be his own mirror-image. And a strange Jesus is
what he found. It was a Jesus who spearheaded a movement of repentance
aimed at forcing God into granting the messianic age of redemption to
Jewry. When this failed, he decided it was God's will that he himself
die to bear the full brunt of the end-time tribulation in his own
person, so everyone else might escape it. Afterward, he expected, he
would rise as the apocalyptic redeemer and judge the earth. So, unlike
liberal Protestants, the historical Jesus was much interested in dogma,
only it wasn't particularly orthodox or Christian dogma. Schweitzer's
Jesus was indeed an embarrassment to both the liberals and the orthodox.
Schweitzer was still so captivated by what he described as the current
of spiritual force streaming from the shadowy figure of the noble but
delusional Jesus that he was willing to leave everything behind and
become a medical missionary in French Equatorial Africa. Schweitzer,
then, was hardly trying to debunk a Jesus he didn't want to take
seriously, the motive conservatives always ascribe to critical scholars
like the Jesus Seminar.
Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of the Historical Jesus is often
said to have put an end to the original quest. And such was his
intention, by succeeding where his predecessors had failed. And in
general, scholarship followed him in seeing Jesus as an eschatological
(i.e., end-times) preacher. In any case, Schweitzer had declared the old
liberal quest dead as a dinosaur. He revealed its bankruptcy by showing
how un-historical and theologically self-serving it had always been. The
jig was up. In future, he thought, it would have to be Schweitzer's way
or no way. As he framed the alternatives, it was a choice between
"thorough-going eschatology" and "thorough-going skepticism." The major
advocate of the latter was Wilhelm Wrede, author or another pivotal book
of New Testament scholarship, The Messianic Secret (1901). Wrede
was much more skeptical than Schweitzer about the historical value of
Matthew and Mark. Schweitzer had thought both gospels basically
reliable, but Wrede saw that even Mark, the earliest gospel, was
essentially fictive (a conclusion strongly reinforced in recent years by
Werner Kelber, et. al., The Passion in Mark, Frans Neirynck,
Duality in Mark, and Robert M. Fowler, Let the Reader Understand:
Reader-Response Criticism and the Gospel of Mark). Wrede admitted
that little if anything could be reliably ascertained about the
historical Jesus. And Schweitzer raised the spectre of Wrede as if to
scare the reader into accepting his own alternative.
Very little changed after Schweitzer, for all the lip-service paid him.
Lives of Jesus continued to be written, now mostly by Neo-Orthodox
scholars who seized on Schweitzer's demonstration that the historical
Jesus after all held robust dogmatic beliefs but used this discovery as
a trick to sneak traditional Reformed Protestant doctrine back into the
mouth of Jesus. The end of the age he predicted must have been the end
of the Jewish dispensation, that's all. Schweitzer had been hi-jacked by
the apologists for orthodoxy, who used his book as a club to strike back
at liberals who had used their own historical Jesuses to attack
orthodoxy. This trend continues unabated today, especially in the
writings of evangelical apologists N.T. Wright and Ben Witherington III.
On the other hand, the passage of time has produced a backlash to
Schweitzer's eschatological Jesus as well. Many scholars, including
Richard Horsley, John Dominic Crossan, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza,
James Breech, Bernard Brandon Scott, and Robert W. Funk of the Jesus
Seminar, have resurrected the old liberal Jesus, albeit in somewhat new
dress, new idioms, and he is decidedly non-apocalyptic. And he is again
suspiciously reminiscent of each scholar who paints his "historical"
portrait.
But one scholar, while not embracing Schweitzer's own sketch of the
historical Jesus, has at least taken Schweitzer's ultimatum seriously.
G.A. Wells, in a series of erudite studies, has embraced something like
Wrede's alternative: thorough-going skepticism. Wells, emeritus
professor of German language and literature at the University of London,
approaches gospel scholarship as an outsider. Odd thing about outsiders
in this field: Christian apologists always declare them to be
refreshingly objective when they urge conservative positions, but rank
amateurs and cranks when they do not. Wells has suffered much abuse,
falling into the latter category, but he always answers as a gentleman,
as in his two latest books.
All of Wells's books (well, almost all--see below) have in common their
advocacy of the Christ-Myth theory once argued powerfully by Arthur
Drews, Bruno Bauer, James Robertson, B.W. Smith, and others. The theory
came under severe criticism, and scarcely anyone today will take it
seriously. Even the supposed arch-skeptic Rudolf Bultmann once said that
no one in his right mind doubts that Jesus existed. In the face of this
universal disdain, it has taken Wells a good deal of courage to
rehabilitate the theory for our day. And it is important to recognize
that Wells has significantly modified the Christ-Myth theory. First, he
is more modest in his claims than his predecessors. He maintains only
that the notion that Jesus is pure legend is at least as plausible a
reading of the evidence as any of the critical theories that, while
demythologizing Jesus, assume that he did exist as a historical entity.
He does not try to rule out competing views as absurd or incredible.
Second, Wells appeals for the mythic prototype for Jesus not to the
Hellenistic Mystery Religions with their dying-and-rising gods, but
rather to Hellenistic Jewish speculation on the figure of personified
Wisdom. In texts like Proverbs chapter 8, Sirach chapter 1, and Wisdom
of Solomon chapter 7, Wisdom was said to have first assisted God in
creating the world, then to have descended into it to summon foolish
mortals to repent and learn from her, to have been rejected, and to have
returned to heaven. Wells thinks that, just as Philo thought the Word of
God had been personified in the Old Testament patriarchs, so was Jesus a
kind of historicized version of Wisdom. Paul, on Wells's reading,
believed that Jesus, Wisdom incarnate, had in some vaguely conceived
past time, come to earth and been crucified by hostile supernatural
forces (1 Corinthians 2:8), but of a Galilean prophet and teacher, of a
miracle worker born of a virgin and executed by Pontius Pilate, Paul has
nothing at all to say. For Paul, Jesus was barely a historical figure,
little more than Asclepius or Hercules, whom legend also made figures of
the (vague) historical past. It was only subsequent to Paul that the
legend of the (recent) Galilean Jesus began to grow. Sayings became
ascribed to him that Paul would certainly have quoted as germane to many
subjects he discussed, had they been coined already in his day. Only a
scarce few later New Testament writings, mainly the spurious 2 Timothy,
make any reference to gospel-like sayings or episodes.
Wells's case is so shocking to the conventionally religious that many of
them seem unable to entertain his views long enough to understand them
before firing off polemical broadsides. And a major reason Wells has
continued to produce books on the same topic is to keep responding to
his critics, lest his theory become buried in misrepresentation. Each
new defense brings some new facet of the matter to light. The result is
that, while each of Wells's books stands on its own, anyone who has read
one or more of his previous books will still find every new one,
including The Jesus Legend, illuminating. The book spends minimal
time setting forth the case for the Christ-Myth theory and goes on to
consider a fascinating array of allied topics, such as whether the
ethics attributed to Jesus are as noble as even many unbelievers say
they are, and whether the gospels are anti-Semitic. He also provides
case studies on the work of particular apologists like Protestant John
Warwick Montgomery and Catholic John P. Meier.
But there is even more reason for the long-time Wells reader to look
into his latest book, The Jesus Myth, because here Wells proves
once and for all he is no crank riding a hobby-horse. For in that most
rare of scholarly spectacles, we see him changing his mind! In The
Jesus Myth, Wells retreats from the pure Christ-Myth position,
granting that Burton L. Mack (The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and
Christian Origins) has established a credible portrait of Jesus as a
Cynic-like sage whose sayings are contained in the earliest stratum of
the Q Document. Wells is still quite adamant that the full-blown figure
of the Jesus Christ of the gospels is a myth. The case is similar to
that of King Arthur: there may well have been some Romanized British war
chief back in the sixth century, who in some measure gave rise to the
figure of King Arthur, but that hardly means that Mallory's Arthur is a
historical figure. Still, we must not minimize the importance of what
may seem a subtle shift. What Wells now says is not essentially
different from the estimate of Bultmann and other Christian radical
critics who have long admitted that only a largely unknown, minimally
historical Jesus lies somewhere behind the myth-screen of the church's
dogma. With The Jesus Myth Wells has come much closer to the
mainstream.
Should we conclude that the latest Wells has refuted the earlier Wells?
I do not. For it seems to me that Burton Mack's arguments establishing
the Cynic color of the Q sayings actually undermines their value as
evidence for an historical Jesus. The discernible consistency, as well
as the distinctive "tang" of the sayings, are now seen to stem not from
one gifted imagination (that of an historical Jesus) but rather from the
collective style of the Cynic movement. And the sheer number of sayings
imply we are dealing with a collection of sayings from various
originally unnamed sources, later compiled under one name proverbial for
wisdom, like the collections of proverbs ascribed to Solomon in the Old
Testament.
Charlotte Allen, like Wells, is a well-read outsider, and her book
The Human Christ is written for outsiders who are interested in the
historical Jesus debate but lack the time to familiarize themselves with
the ever-expanding body of literature on the subject. Allen has absorbed
a lot of it, and some of her chapters are quite helpful in bringing
Schweitzer's classic up to date. She shows justified skepticism over
many of the most recent historical Jesuses, and one can only cheer her
on in these cases. But there is something amiss here. Just as Luke
apparently sought to supplant Mark and Q (Luke 1:1-4), so does Charlotte
Allen seem to want to supersede Schweitzer, whom she faults for being a
pedantic stringer-together of endless book reviews. This assessment
makes a strength into a weakness as far as I am concerned, since
Schweitzer's book is an invaluable repository of information about a
whole raft of fascinating tomes long unobtainable. She also
underestimates the synthetic dimension of his study and gives no hint of
the ubiquitous wit and gift for brilliant and striking metaphor
Schweitzer displayed.
Where she does supplement Schweitzer, covering much of the same ground,
is to substitute gossipy background information (itself quite
interesting!) about the scholars both discuss. But Allen also makes much
of the supposedly serious neglect by Schweitzer of a handful of English
dilettantes and pamphleteers whose (by her account) amateurish and
sophomoric attacks on the traditional Jesus of Christian faith preceded
the work of the German Hermann Samuel Reimarus, with whose writings
Schweitzer's survey begins. One wonders why, if these Englishmen were
such inconsequential hacks as Allen makes them, she would think it so
significant for Schweitzer to have omitted them? The answer, I think, is
that Allen dismisses virtually all the scholars she discusses as being
on the same level! Throughout her book, Allen, a confessed Roman
Catholic, seems possessed of a notion that any theory, any viewpoint, is
an arbitrary dogma, an unscientific myth (except hers, of course), that
one picks them up by osmosis or by hypnosis if one is not careful, and
that such theories completely bias the outcome of one's research from
the outset. Such researches, by the likes of David Friedrich Strauss,
Alfred Loisy, F.C. Baur, or Rudolf Bultmann, can be smugly dismissed
once their supposedly defining viewpoint is revealed. Allen pays
virtually no attention to the data and the specific arguments these
scholars offered for their views. It is enough for her to know that Baur
was a Hegelian, Bultmann was an existentialist. They must have whittled
down Jesus to size to fit their predilections. In fact, Baur's
particular schema of early Christian history was established in its
essentials before he ever read Hegel, and its validity or lack of it has
nothing to do with any special dogma of Hegel. Similarly, Bultmann did
adopt Heidegger's existentialist framework to demythologize the New
Testament, but was it an arbitrary choice? Hardly: Heidegger had himself
been a Catholic seminarian and got his ideas from demythologizing
Christianity himself in the first place! And to charge that Bultmann
derived his scientific model of the universe as a closed system from his
doctoral studies of ancient Epicureanism--! She makes it sound as if
Strauss's Life of Jesus Critically Examined, no doubt the most
detailed and meticulous book ever written on the gospels even today,
were simply a function of left-wing Hegelianism and German imperialism.
Pity the poor reader who has read Charlotte Allen and is discouraged by
her from reading Strauss's (or Schweitzer's) infinitely superior work.
Loisy she accuses flat out of embracing gospel criticism just because he
"wanted to be thought forward-looking." A single glance at any page of
Loisy's still arresting books will show the absurdity of this libel.
Allen is in the final analysis an apologist of the same stripe as Luke
Timothy Johnson, whose blurb, not surprisingly, appears on the dust
jacket. She employs the standard moves of this school of anti-critical
retrenchers. For instance, she gloats that Baur's theories, as well as
his dating of the New Testament books, were disproved and are just plain
wrong, though, mysteriously, many scholars still seem to be influenced
by them. This is just a spin-doctoring way of saying that though some
have criticized Baur's views, others do not believe Baur has been
refuted at all and thus continue to hold to his opinions. Like James
Charlesworth of Princeton and the late Raymond E. Brown (who nonetheless
was still a little too left-wing for her tastes), she rejoices that we
can now ignore the massive scholarship of the History of Religions
School that interpreted the Gospel of John and the Epistles of Paul in
Gnostic categories. No matter how compelling the Gnostic and Mystery
Religion analogies to the New Testament are, the mere fact that there
exist some Jewish parallels (in the Dead Sea Scrolls), no matter how
remote or incidental, automatically entitles these apologists to leave
early Christian origins right where they belong (according to Christian
theology), in the Jewish (= Old Testament) womb.
Some of Allen's gloating is premature. She delights that Robert
Eisenman's first-century C.E. dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls was refuted
by the Carbon dating he himself urged be performed, but she seems
unaware of more recent tests that have vindicated him. She appeals to
John A.T. Robinson's The Priority of John, as many apologists do,
to vindicate the historical reliability of that gospel, but she ought to
have read Maurice Casey's scathing 1996 rebuttal Is John's Gospel
True? which handily reveals Robinson's last book as the
embarrassment it is.
Books like this one try to smuggle by the reader the outrageous
assumption that everyone has something to prove except Christian
apologists. For Allen, it is the height of philosophical eccentricity to
find miracle stories historically implausible; it is ridiculous and
reductionist, downright superstitious in fact, to make the gospels myth
and legend. There is something Orwellian here. The Human Christ
is one more attempt, with the empty urbanity of a G.K. Chesterton or a
William F. Buckley, to assure the troubled reader that all is well, he
can return to his dogmatic slumber. I think of another such pearl of
smug wisdom from Anglican pundit Dean Inge. Making sport, as Allen does,
of much recent band-wagon theology, Inge wrote: "He who marries himself
to the spirit of the age will often find himself a widower." Maybe so,
but we have to ask, is necrophilia a better option?