4 - ‘Not Made by Great Men’? The Quest for the Individual Christ

Summary

The one who is more powerful than I is coming after me; I am not worthy to stoop down and untie the thong of his sandals.

(Mk 1:7)

In this chapter I want to establish a general context for analysing understandings of the historical Jesus in contemporary contexts. In particular, I hope to show that a dominant feature of the quest for the historical Jesus – Jesus as Great Man – works in harmony with a dominant capitalist understanding of causality, particularly the importance of a freely acting autonomous individual with little concern for material conditions as a historical mover. The peculiarities of New Testament studies will mean that theological concerns also have to be factored in. This will supply the general scholarly context for the rest of the book. In the following chapter, I will narrow the chronological range further by looking at more specifically contemporary manifestations of liberal capitalism, particularly, of course, the contexts of neoliberalism and postmodernity, as well as multiculturalism.

Great Men

Georg Lukásc argued that atomized and individualized (bourgeois) history, including the ‘Great Man’ view of history, with its emphasis on establishing facts over historical development, not only avoids a more totalized view of history and explanations of historical change, but effectively justifies the normality of capitalism as part of the mysterious or eternal laws of nature. As a useful generalization, this argument still stands today.