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Reconstructing and Deconstructing the Quest of the Historical Jesus

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 February 2009

Stephen Fowl
Stephen Fowl
Affiliation:
Department of Theology, Loyola College, 4501 N. Charles Street, Baltimore, MD 21210-2699, USA
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Extract

Those scholars who have assiduously ignored the quest for the historical Jesus because it was unintelligible, incoherent or just uninteresting must now take notice. With the publication of Jesus and Judaism [SCM, 1985] E. P. Sanders has taken a bold (though not unprecedented) and programmatic step towards making historical Jesus study intelligible, coherent and interesting. My aim here is to explore the program represented by Sanders' work and then to show how this work may actually lead to the demise of the quest of the historical Jesus.

Type
Research Article
Information
Scottish Journal of Theology , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , August 1989 , pp. 319 - 333
Copyright
Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1989

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References

1 See, for example Smith, M., Jesus the Magician (London: SCM, 1978)Google Scholar and Harvey, A., Jesus and the Constraints of History (London: Duckworth, 1982)Google Scholar.

2 Runciman, W. G., A Treatise on Social Theory vol. 1 (Cambridge: CUP, 1983)Google Scholar.

3 It is not necessary that Sanders agree with the way I reconstruct his program for approaching the historical Jesus, although I think he would do so. The strengths or weaknesses of my reconstruction depend solely on the adequacy of my correlation of the program outlined in Jesus and Judaism with Runciman's program.

4 This emphasis on Jesus' speech seems to be the result of the scholarly desire to uncover Jesus' self-consciousness. I am sure there are numerous reasons for this interest, most of them theological. Further, it is clear that to uncover Jesus' self-consciousness one would have to make recourse to the things Jesus said. (The ability to move directly from Jesus' speech to a reconstruction of Jesus self-consciousness might be seriously questioned by contemporary psychoanalysis, but that is another issue.) In any case, the comprehensive failure of scholars to come up with a convincing and useful list of the actual words of Jesus may indicate that we have to give up the desire for Jesus' self consciousness.

5 See Smith, , Jesus The Magician, pp. 8ff.Google Scholar

6 Runciman discusses some common types of disagreements and how they might be resolved on pp. 168ff. For a similar account see Maclntyre, A., ‘Epistemological Crises, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science’, The Monist 60 (1977), 453–472.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 This seems to be what Harvey, A. E. tries to do in the beginning pages of Jesus and the Constraints of History, pp. 2ff.Google Scholar

8 See, for example, Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things (London: Tavistock, 1970; French, 1966)Google Scholar, and The Archaeology of Knowledge, tr. Smith, A. M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1972; French 1969)Google Scholar. Aside from this particular point, the primary value of Foucault's work for biblical studies lies in its ability to push us into questioning the necessity of the practices which constitute our disciplines, revealing the powers served by such practices and, perhaps, refusing to comply with such practices and the configurations of power they serve. For an excellent introduction to Foucault's work see Rajchman, John, Michel Foucault: The Freedom of Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985)Google Scholar.

9 This is one of the ways Maclntyre proposes for resolving epistemological crises. ‘When an epistemological crisis is resolved, it is by the construction of a new narrative which enables the agent to understand both how he or she could intelligibly have held his or her original beliefs and how he or she could have been drastically misled by them’. See ‘Epistemological Crises …’ p. 455.

10 This point was made as long ago as 1905 in Wellhausen's Einleitung in die erstern drei Evangelien (Berlin: Reimer)Google Scholar.

11 While this seems to be a logical requirement for intelligibility, it may in the end turn out to be a trivial point. This is because it is virtually impossible to specify what amount of correspondence to reality is necessary to make a particular piece of invective a successful speech-act for a particular group.

12 See, for example, J. Neusner's contributions to the debates in this area.

13 At this point there is no fundamental difference between the old quest and the new. The new quest merely cast the psychological language of the old quest in existential terms: See Robinson, J. M., A New Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: SCM, 1961), pp. 66ffGoogle Scholar. This point was first made by Harvey, Van A. and Ogden, Schubert, ‘How New is the “New Quest of the Historical Jesus”?’ in The Historical Jesus and the Kerygmatic Christ, eds. Braaten, C. and Harrisville, R. (Nashville: Abingdon, 1964), 197–242.Google Scholar

14 Marcus Borg's contribution to the volume in memory of G. B. Caird is just one of several recent studies which question whether Jesus really did believe the ‘end of the world’ was imminent. See ‘An Orthodoxy Reconsidered: The “End-of-the-World Jesus”’ in The Glory of Christ in the New Testament edited by Hurst, L. D. and Wright, N. T. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1987), pp. 207–217CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The very existence of strong positions such as Borg's undermines the usefulness of Sanders' limited claims to reportage about the speech of Jesus.

15 See Güttgemanns, E., Candid Questions Concerning Gospel Form Criticism, tr. Doty, W. (Pittsburgh: Pickwick Press, 1979)Google Scholar and Kelber, W., The Oral and the Written Gospel (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983).Google Scholar

16 See Meyer, B., The Aims of Jesus (London: SCM, 1980), p. 38Google Scholar for a similar statement. In fact, those acquainted with Danto's, A.Analytic Philosophy of History (Cambridge: CUP, 1965)Google Scholar might go on to assert that the earliest account is the least likely one to be accurate.

17 See, for example Morna Hooker's comment, ‘My plea is that we should stop pretending to know the answer when we do not. My argument is that the tools which are used in an attempt to uncover the authentic teaching of Jesus cannot do what is required of them.’ (‘On Using the Wrong Tool’, Theology 75 (1972), p. 570.CrossRefGoogle Scholar) This is not to say that one could not make ad hoc arguments for the authenticity of any particular saying. The point here, however, is that such a result will be, at best, probable. Further such results could not then provide a standard to which other authentic statements must be compatible. There is no reason to expect that a popular preacher such as Jesus would have only uttered statements which are compatible with one another. The application of such a standard in the past has given us a list of authentic sayings which is implausibly weighted towards the eschatological to the exclusion of, for example, wisdom material. For a more thorough explication of this view see A. P. Winton's forthcoming JSNT Supplement.

18 Sanders, p. 132, makes a similar observation.

19 Hooker's conclusion — while the tools we have are inadequate to the task, they are the best we have and we will have to make do (p. 580) — is unsatisfactory. There is no necessary reason for us to continue these practices, particularly when they do not yield the results we are seeking. It begins to be more and more apparent that the persistence of these practices in NT study is merely a disciplinary activity that no one has had the will or the power to stop.

20 At this point, however, the vegetarians among us may well point out that neither steak nor hamburger is particularly appealing.

21 New York: Crossroad, 1983.

22 Of course, historians of this period (particularly those outside the Christian tradition) can avoid this paradox simply by taking up other historical projects. The quest is by no means an essential or necessary endeavor for scholarship. For such scholars the most responsible course of action may be to ignore the quest and pursue other historical tasks.

23 E.g. Phyllis Trible's work on various narratives in the Hebrew Bible — God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978)Google Scholar; and Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984).Google Scholar

24 If one wanted then to incorporate this sort of work into a larger theological program, it would have to be in the form of an intratextual theology. On intratextual theology generally, see Lindbeck, George, The Nature of Doctrine (London: SPCK, 1984)Google Scholar. For a roughly similar approach directed precisely at the issue of the historical Jesus and christological belief see Morgan, R. ‘Non Angeli sed Angli: Some Anglican Reactions to German Gospel Criticism’ in New Studies in Theology 1, eds. Sykes, S. and Holmes, D. (London: Duckworth, 1980), 1–30.Google Scholar

25 From her comments in Feminist Interpretation of The Bible ed. Russell, Letty (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985)Google Scholar I assume that it is not a solution to which Schussler Fiorenza herself would agree.

26 I am grateful to Mark Brett and Alan Winton for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I am particularly grateful to Professor Sanders for his comments.