For centuries, the gospels were read as accurate accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Then something strange happened near the end of the Enlightenment.
Scholars, in the thrall of so-called critical scholarship, drew a false distinction between the ‘Jesus of history’ and ‘the Christ of faith.’ The Christ of faith was the one encountered in the gospels. But the Jesus of history, so they reasoned, must have been someone else. Only by peering behind the curtain of the gospels, they argued could we glimpse who Jesus really was.
In the world of biblical scholarship, this is known as ‘the quest of the historical Jesus.’ And it began in earnest in the late 1770s with the publication of a work by the German liberal Protestant theologian H.M.S. Reimarus in 1778. Contrary to what the gospels said, Reimarus argued that Jesus had set out to establish an earthly kingdom. This mission ended with His death. For Reimarus, there was no resurrection that followed. Instead, the Christ of Christianity, he concluded, was invented by His disciples.
The theory did not gain widespread acceptance, but the quest for a historical Jesus who could be reconstructed apart from the gospels was on.
Over the course of the nineteenth century, a parade of liberal theologian scholars each claimed to have been the one to have ‘found’ the historical Jesus. For these critical scholars, the gospels were something like textual cobwebs and grime on a picture, obscuring the true figure depicted. By scraping away the accretions of tradition and pious texts, the thinking went, one could see Jesus for Who He really was.
Some were motivated by a sincere desire to ground their faith in history. Others were just Christian skeptics to the core.
Strangely, no one ever seemed to end up with the same Jesus. One contemporary introduction to New Testament theology, authored by Eugene Boring, lists some of the Jesus figures these scholars claimed to have constructed: there was the Jesus who was a good teacher. Jesus the zealot. Jesus the romantic naturalist. The Jewish cultist. The ‘good Pharisee’ and so on. (This list is adapted from the one on pages 121 to 122 in Boring’s textbook, An Introduction to the New Testament. Much of the historical outline presented here is also indebted to Boring’s account.)
Near the end of the century, another German scholar, David Friedrich Strauss, realized the project was doomed to fail, according to another synopsis of this period: “[A]ccording to Strauss the historical Jesus was buried underneath deep layers of myth, so much so that a biography of his life was nearly impossible to write.”
After the turn of the century another German liberal Protestant named Albert Schweitzer published another landmark study pinpointing what had gone wrong. Rather than penetrate through the mists of myth and tradition, each scholar had instead only “created Jesus in his own image,” to quote Boring.
The problem was one never knew when to stop scraping away all the accretions of Church tradition supposedly lathered onto the gospels. Once the Church and the gospels themselves were discounted as standards, there was no other standard to which these scholars could turn. The stripping away of the gospels thus became an entirely subjective enterprise. Each scholar had stopped only when the image of Jesus made sense to them or their preconceived notions of what they expected to find.
The irony here is that Schweitzer himself repeated exactly the same error. He alone claimed to have found the ‘historical’ Jesus: one who had believed Himself to be a heaven-sent messenger announcing a radical new kingdom that would soon—as in during His lifetime—be ushered in. When that didn’t happen, according to this account, Jesus “died in despair” as Boring characterizes this view. This historical Jesus called us to a tragic heroism: to do the good, but with no real hope of redemption or resurrection.
As with the others, this Jesus was more a mirror of Schweitzer himself than a window into the divine: Schweitzer famously spent the last few decades of his life devoted to medical mission work at a hospital he founded in Africa.
For a time, the quest for the historical Jesus seemed dead in the water. It was briefly revived in the mid twentieth century and then yet again for a third time in the 1980s. But consensus on who the historical Jesus was proved just as elusive as before. By the time Boring wrote his synopsis of New Testament theology in 2012, the movement was already seen as sputtering out, at least according to his assessment of it.
The upshot of all this is that the gospels were left standing as the only real place to find the historical Jesus. Looking for the historical Jesus? Turn to the gospels and encounter the Christ of faith. The lesson of liberal Protestant theology is that any attempt to divorce the two is doomed to fail.
