1 - Introduction: Jesus Quests and Contexts

Summary

Historical-Jesus research, if it aims to be scientific, must always engage not only in ideological construction but also in ideological criticism… I understand ideology first in the broader sense as a practice and politics of meaning-making.

– Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza

Introduction

An outsider to the discipline of biblical studies might be forgiven for thinking that locating scholarship in cultural contexts ought to be a relatively commonplace enterprise. Not so in historical Jesus scholarship at least, certainly not to any serious extent. As Ward Blanton rightly claimed, ‘most contemporary accounts of biblical scholarship seem to me to be oblivious to the peculiar cultural logics of our own time’. That said, the recent work of Blanton, along with, among others, the work of William Arnal, Shawn Kelley, Halvor Moxnes, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, R. S. Sugirtharajah, and this writer on political, ideological and philosophical readings of the history of scholarship may suggest that things are beginning to change, though there is little sign that traditional New Testament scholarship has taken too much notice of scholarship of such direct relevance. However, we may now be at a point where there is a genuine opportunity for different kinds of historical, political, ideological and philosophical readings of Jesus scholarship to make an impact beyond their niche audiences because it is becoming increasingly clear that the conventional analysis of the quests for the historical Jesus has failed in providing a coherent and convincing contextualization of scholarship, particularly in the numbering of distinct chronological quests.