NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Quest for the historical Jesus

The quest for the historical Jesus is the attempt to use historical rather than religious methods to construct a verifiable biography of Jesus. As originally defined by Albert Schweitzer, the quest began in the 18th century with Hermann Samuel Reimarus. The quest is commonly divided into stages, and it continues today among scholars such as the fellows of the Jesus Seminar. Image File history File links Broom_icon. ... This article is about Jesus the man, using historical methods to reconstruct a biography of his life and times. ... Albert Schweitzer, M.D., OM, (January 14, 1875 â€“ September 4, 1965), was an Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. ... Hermann Samuel Reimarus (December 22, 1694, Hamburg - March 1, 1768, Hamburg), a German philosopher and writer of the Enlightenment who is remembered for his Deism, the doctrine that human reason can arrive at a knowledge of God and ethics from a study of nature and our own internal reality, so... The Jesus Seminar is a research team of about 200 New Testament scholars founded in 1985 by the late Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan under the auspices of the Westar Institute. ...

The First Quest

These scholars of what today would be called the Quest for the Historical Jesus applied the historical methodologies of their day to distinguish the mythology from the history of Jesus. Reimarus pioneered "the search for the historical Jesus", applying the Rationalism of the Enlightenment Era to claims about Jesus. Although Schweitzer was among the greatest contributors to this quest, he also ended the quest by noting how each scholar's version of Jesus seemed little more than an idealized autobiography of the scholar himself - a criticism that still haunts Jesus research to this day. In epistemology and in its broadest sense, rationalism is any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification (Lacey 286). ... The Age of Enlightenment refers to either the eighteenth century in European philosophy, or the longer period including the seventeenth century and the Age of Reason. ...

Some recent scholars have reasserted Schweitzer's eschatolgical view of Jesus: see Dale Allison in his 1998 work "Jesus of Nazareth, Milenarian Prophet" and Bart D. Ehrman in 1999 work Jesus, Apolocyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Conversely others, such as the Jesus Seminar, have denied the authenticity of Jesus' eschatological message, describing Jesus as a wandering sage. Hermann Samuel Reimarus (December 22, 1694, Hamburg - March 1, 1768, Hamburg), a German philosopher and writer of the Enlightenment who is remembered for his Deism, the doctrine that human reason can arrive at a knowledge of God and ethics from a study of nature and our own internal reality, so... Thomas Jefferson (13 April 1743 N.S.â€“4 July 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801â€“09), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of Republicanism in the United States. ... The Jefferson Bible, or The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth as it is formally titled, was an attempt by Thomas Jefferson to glean the teachings of Jesus from the Christian Gospels. ... David Friedrich Strauss (January 27, 1808 - February 8, 1874), was a German theologian and writer. ... Ernest Renan (February 28, 1823â€“October 12, 1892) was a French philosopher and writer. ... Albert Schweitzer, M.D., OM, (January 14, 1875 â€“ September 4, 1965), was an Alsatian theologian, musician, philosopher, and physician. ... Dr. Dale Allison Dale Allison is a Christian theologian who currently serves as Errett M. Grable Professor of New Testament Exegesis and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary since 1997. ... Bart D. Ehrman is a New Testament scholar and an expert on early Christianity. ... The Jesus Seminar is a research team of about 200 New Testament scholars founded in 1985 by the late Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan under the auspices of the Westar Institute. ...

The No Quest

These scholars asserted the Quest for the Historical Jesus was impossible because of insufficient evidence. These scholars argued that later redactors adapted, relocated, framed and censored the stories (pericopes) about Jesus to form the New Testament. (See Form criticism.) Outright fictions about Jesus via "prophecy" were also speculated. The New Testament was seen as evidencing the later non-Jewish Christian followers only and saying virtually nothing about the Historical Jesus himself. These scholars tended to embrace the modern philosophy of Existentialism and to advocate Jesus as an ahistorical symbol who personified a pure act of will in the throes of the ungrounded subjectivity of freedom: that is, an Existentialist take on "faith". Despite claims of historical agnosticism about Jesus, they tended to present Jesus as an Existentialist philosopher. A pericope (pur-IC-op-ee) (Greek περικοπη, a cutting-out) in rhetoric is a set of verses which form one coherent unit or thought. ... Form criticism is a method of biblical criticism applied as a means of analyzing the typical features of texts, especially their conventional forms or structures, in order to relate them to their sociological contexts. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement which claims that individual human beings create the meanings of their own lives. ...

Rudolf Karl Bultmann (August 20, 1884 - July 30, 1976) was a German theologian of Lutheran background, who was for three decades professor of New Testament studies at the University of Marburg. ... This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... Martin Dibelius (born September 14, 1883 in Dresden; died November 11, 1947 in Heidelberg) was German theologian and a professor for the New Testament at the University of Heidelberg. ...

The Second Quest

Quest 2A

These scholars emphasized the "constraints of history", so that despite uncertainties there were historical data that were usable. Moreover they disputed claims of extreme lateness for the formation of the New Testament and generally accomplished a consensus of approximately year 70 CE, give-or-take a decade or two depending on a specific text. Likewise they emphasized how the redaction of the New Testament resulted from a process over time, so that the New Testament included early textual layers, around which later and later layers crystalized. The detection of such early texts became useful for data relevant to the Historical Jesus. The existences of these early texts remain hypothetical until archeological discoveries find them thus prove them, but many textual researchers support the methodologies to identify them, and certain texts such as the Q Gospel and the Passion Narrative are widely accepted. The form of the Gospel of Thomas was often argued to corroberate the existence of the Q Gospel, whose hypothetical form would resemble it. The Q document (also called the Q Gospel, the Sayings Gospel Q, the Synoptic Sayings Source, and in the 19th century the Logia) comprises a hypothetical collection of Jesuss sayings, hypothesized in accordance with the two-source hypothesis to be a source of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. ... The Gospel of Thomas is a New Testament-era apocryphon completely preserved in a papyrus Coptic manuscript discovered in 1945 at Nag Hammadi, Egypt. ...

GÃ¼nther Bornkamm (1905-1990) was a German New Testament scholar and Professor of New Testament at the University of Heidelberg. ... Ernst KÃ¤semann, (Bochum, 12 July 1906 â€“ 17 February 1998 in TÃ¼bingen), was a Lutheran theologian and professor of New Testament in Mainz (1946-1951), GÃ¶ttingen (1951-1959) and TÃ¼bingen (1959-1971). ... James M. Robinson is Professor Emeritus of Religion, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, California. ... Dr John Arthur Thomas Robinson (1919 in Canterbury, Englandâ€“December 5, 1983) was a New Testament scholar, author, and former Anglican bishop of Woolwich, England. ... Edward Schillebeeckx (Antwerp, November 12, 1914 -) is a Belgian theologian. ...

Quest 2B

These scholars tended to focus on the early textual layers of the New Testament for data to reconstruct a biography for the Historical Jesus. Context is meaning. By dislocating these early texts from the rest of the New Testament's context, the default contexts (whether conscious or unconscious) often lacked methodology and the resulting meanings of the early texts seemed arbitrary and occasionally wild. Many of these scholars relied on a redactive critique of the hypothetical Q Gospel and on a Greco-Roman "Mediterranean" milieu as opposed to a Jewish milieu and tended to view Jesus as a radical philosopher of Wisdom literature, who strives to destabilize the economic status quo. Some scholars also relied on a critique of non-canonical texts for early textual layers that possibly evidence Jesus. The Q document (also called the Q Gospel, the Sayings Gospel Q, the Synoptic Sayings Source, and in the 19th century the Logia) comprises a hypothetical collection of Jesuss sayings, hypothesized in accordance with the two-source hypothesis to be a source of the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. ... Wisdom literature is the a genre of literature common in the Ancient Near East. ...

Marcus Borg is a contemporary Jesus Scholar and religious author. ... John Dominic Crossan (born Nenagh, Co. ... Robert W. Funk (July 18, 1926-September 3, 2005), was founder of the controversial Jesus Seminar and the nonprofit Westar Institute in Santa Rosa, California. ... Burton L. Mack is a writer and John Wesley Professor in early Christianity at the Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California. ... Morton Smith (1915 May 29, Philadelphia, - 1991 July 11, New York City) was a Professor of Ancient History at Columbia University in New York City. ... The Jesus Seminar is a research team of about 200 New Testament scholars founded in 1985 by the late Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan under the auspices of the Westar Institute. ...

The Third Quest

The Jewishness of Jesus is first and foremost. These scholars use the archeology of Israel and the analysis of formative Jewish literature, including the Mishna, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament (as a Jewish text) and Josephus, to reconstruct the ancient worldviews of Jews in the 1st-century Roman provinces of Iudaea and Galilaea - and only afterward investigate how Jesus fits in. They tend to view Jesus as a proto-rabbi who announced the Kingdom of Heaven. The focus on Jesus's social environment rather than on Jesus himself is an intentional methodology to increase the influence of verifiable scientific criteria for evaluating Jesus and to reduce the influence of personal subjective criteria. The reconstruction of the wider environment of the ancient Judaisms allows a more stable reference point from which to view Jesus. The archaeology of Israel is researched intensively in the universities of the region and also attracts considerable international interest on account of the regions Biblical links. ... The Mishnah (Hebrew משנה, Repetition) is a major source of rabbinic Judaisms religious texts. ... The Dead Sea scrolls comprise roughly 900 documents, including texts from the Hebrew Bible, discovered between 1947 and 1956 in eleven caves in and around the Wadi Qumran (near the ruins of the ancient settlement of Khirbet Qumran, on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea) in the West Bank. ... This article is about the Christian scriptures. ... A fanciful representation of Flavius Josephus, in an engraving in William Whistons translation of his works Josephus (37 â€“ sometime after 100 CE),[1] who became known, in his capacity as a Roman citizen, as Titus Flavius Josephus,[2] was a 1st-century Jewish historian and apologist of priestly and... Desert hills in southern Judea, looking east from the town of Arad Judea or Judaea (יהודה Praise, Standard Hebrew Yəhuda, Tiberian Hebrew Yəhûḏāh) is a term used for the mountainous southern part of historic Palestine, an area now divided... The Galilee (Hebrew: â€Ž ha-Galil, Arabic: â€Ž al-Jaleel), meaning circuit, is a large region overlapping with much of the North District of Israel. ... The Kingdom of Heaven (or the Kingdom of God, Hebrew ×ž×œ×›×•×ª ×”×©×ž×™×, malkhut hashamayim, Greek basileia tou theou) is a key concept detailed in all the three major monotheistic religions of the world â€” Islam, Judaism and Christianity. ...

Raymond Edward Brown (May 22, 1928 - August 8, 1998), was an American Roman Catholic priest and Biblical scholar. ... Dr. James H. Charlesworth is the George L. Collord Professor of New Testament Language and Literature at Princeton Theological Seminary, noted for his research in Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, the Dead Sea Scrolls, Josephus, the Historical Jesus, and the Gospel of John. ... James D. G. (Jimmy) Dunn was for many years the Lightfoot Professor of Divinity in the Department of Theology at the University of Durham. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... Paula Fredriksen is a historian, and author of two books. ... Joachim Jeremias (1900-1979) was born on 20 September 1900 in Dresden and spent his formative years in Jerusalem, where his father worked as a provost for the Evangelical Lutheran ErlÃ¶serkirche. ... This article does not cite any references or sources. ... John Paul Meier is a prominent Biblical scholar and Catholic priest. ... Jacob Neusner (born July 28, 1932, Hartford, Connecticut) is an influential as well as controversial academic scholar of Judaism, and the most prolific. ... Ed Parish Sanders (born 1947) is a leading New Testament theologian and one of the principal proponents of the New Perspective on Paul. ... Geza Vermes (born 22 June 1924) is a Jewish scholar and writer on religious history, particularly Jewish and Christian. ... Tom (N.T.) Wright, Bishop of Durham Tom (N.T.) Wright is the Bishop of Durham of the Anglican Church and a leading British New Testament scholar. ... Ben Witherington III is a prominent evangelical Biblical scholar, and popular lecturer on New Testament Studies. ...

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