Theology: The New Search for The Historical Jesus

Theological trends in Protestant divinity schools seem to come and go almost before laymen have time to find out what they are all about. Hardly was liberalism enthroned in the seminaries when neo-Orthodoxy came along to elbow it out of the way—and neo-Orthodoxy soon surrendered before Paul Tillich's ontological theology and the method of Scriptural study known as Form Criticism.

The newest theological emphasis is still virtually unknown to the church-going public, but it has become well entrenched in the universities of Central Europe in the last decade, and now, according to Theologian James Robinson, it is creating "quite a ground swell of interest" in U.S. seminaries. Robinson, of the Southern California School of Theology, calls this latest vogue "a new quest of the historical Jesus." Surprisingly enough, the quest has been undertaken not by Christian conservatives eager to save Jesus from scientific attack, but by the radical, skeptical disciples of a German Lutheran scholar whom many regard as an arch-heretic: Rudolf Bultmann, 78, retired professor of New Testament studies at the University of Marburg.

"Realistic" Biographies. Most Christian believers have been content to accept the Gospels as an accurate, pious record of the life and times of their Saviour. Others have wondered. Inspired by the rationalism of the Enlightenment and by the development of scientific historiography, German and French scholars between 1775 and 1900 tried to write "realistic" biographies of Jesus. They stripped the Gospels of miraculous and dogmatic elements, and used new materials gleaned from non-Christian literary sources and from archaeology. Out of such efforts came such portraits as David Friedrich Strauss's Jesus as a Jewish sage, and Adolf von Harnack's Jesus as an ideal ethical humanist.

These efforts to write miracle-free biographies of Jesus—summed up in 1906 by Albert Schweitzer in his classic The Quest of the Historical Jesus—ended in failure. For one thing, explains Bultmann Disciple Günther Bornkamm, "it became alarmingly and terrifyingly evident how inevitably each author brought the spirit of his own age into his presentation of the figure of Jesus." For another, such turn-of-the-century theologians as Johannes Weiss and Wilhelm Wrede proved conclusively that the Gospels were not simple historical accounts but highly sophisticated theological works in which the oral tradition preserved by Christ's early disciples was considerably expanded. This oral tradition consisted almost exclusively of Jesus' sayings; thus his actions as recounted in the Gospels, and the geographical circumstances of his words—for example, the mountain of the Sermon on the Mount—were almost certainly the additions, based on extrapolation or invention, of a later tradition or of the Evangelists.