Scholar Claudia Setzer explores the discoveries and controversies of the present 1990's quest, comparing it to earlier intense periods of inquiry into Jesus' life. Show
by Setzer, Claudia Tikkun The images of Jesus throughout history are as varied as the people who have embraced him-the Son of God, the Divine Word by whom the world was created, the Passover sacrifice on behalf of the people, the Suffering Servant who takes on the sins of the world, the new High Priest, or more recently, Jesus the intellectual genius, the liberator of the oppressed, or the feminist. Each group and generation sees in Jesus a reflection of itself. hat is the connection between these personae and the historical Jesus, the flesh-and-blood preacher of ancient Israel executed by the Romans? Not much, scholars have often said. "There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus," said Albert Schweitzer, a key figure in the early "quest for the historical Jesus." Yet, as we approach the beginning of the twenty-first century, a new pursuit for information about the historical Jesus is energizing scholars and lay people alike. Christians are sometimes puzzled and hurt by the allergic reaction of many Jews to Jesus -- even to the mention of his name. But the energy is not really to Jesus the person, about whom Jews (like everyone else), know very little, but to his appropriation by the church and the oppression of Jews in his name. Yet Jews have also been fascinated by Jesus. When Jews began to think about their own history, they had to consider him as part of it. Sporadic references to Jesus in the Talmud are less than complimentary. The host of nineteenth-century scholars who investigated Jesus included the Jewish historians Heinrich Graetz and Abraham Geiger. The British Jew Claude Montefiore wrote a two-volume commentary on the Synoptic gospels in the early part of this century, and What A Jew Thinks about Jesus, published in 1935. The Lithuanian Jew Joseph Klausner wrote Jesus of Nazareth in Hebrew in 1922. Translated into several languages, it is still the best-know book on Jesus by a Jew and is quoted approvingly in John Meier's widely praised 1994 volume on Jesus. More recently, other Jews have written on Jesus, including Samuel Samuel, Geza Vermes, Jacob Neusner, and Paula Fredriksen. Jewish writers typically separated Jesus the Jew from the Christianity that incorporated him, approving of the former but disliking the latter. They have often characterized him as simply another Jewish holy man, unexceptional beyond his later public-relations image, or so unlike Jewish expectations of a Messiah as to make his lack of acceptance by most early Jews utterly unsurprising. The present generation draws a bold line between Jesus the Jew and Christianity's picture of him. Just as earlier generations of scholars often separated Jesus from his Judaism, present-day scholars, Jewish and Christian, distance him from the Christianity that claimed him. The last few years have seen an explosion of books on the historical Jesus. A recent browse in my local seminary bookstore turned up seven books on Jesus published in 1994. The second volume of John Meier's trilogy on the historical Jesus, A Marginal Jew, more than 1,000 pages in length, was already sold out. Last year, two scholars, a Jew and a Christian, packed an auditorium at Fordham University with their topic, "the Jewishness of Jesus" The April 1995 issue of Theology Today is devoted to this scholarly debate. Popular works, such as Barbara Thiering's fanciful Jesus the Man or A.N. Wilson's idiosyncratic Jesus drew much publicity, but had no impact on the scholarly world. A number of Wilson's innovations are commonplace to scholars, and the speculative reconstructions Thiering and Wilson offer are not grounded in responsible methodology or common sense. But even the more sober works have found a popular audience. Meier's book, even with its copious footnotes, is a case in point. John Dominic Crossan recently published Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, a more popular and readable version of his densely-packed scholarly work, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, but the original itself sold more than 50,000 copies. Marcus Borg, in frequent demand as a lecturer, recently published a popular work, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, which stems from his scholarly work, Jesus, A New Vision. Last year, HarperCollins and the Trinity Institute sponsored a discussion between Borg, Crossan, and another Jesus scholar, Burton Mack, that was broadcast to churches and colleges across the country. Both the church and academia have gotten along successfully without the historical Jesus for centuries. The historical Jesus, the human being who walked the roads of ancient Israel, gathered disciples, and was executed by the Romans, is often contrasted with the "Christ of faith," a supra-historical figure whose presence in the world enlivens and nourishes Christian communities. The latter has always been far more important for most Christians. Why is there so much attention now to the person of Jesus? Is it part of our interest in people's private stories, an impulse that multiplies talk shows and sells People magazine? Is it our need to humanize our heroes to make them more accessible? Is it part of the search for roots, and our desire to reclaim our pasts in a way that contributes meaning to our present? Is it simply part of humankind's enduring interest in religion, which takes many forms, but never really fades? The answer is probably a bit of each. In fact, the current wave of books constitutes a third quest for the historical Jesus. The first largely Protestant quest -- from the late eighteenth to the late nineteenth century -- breathed the air of the Enlightenment, presenting Jesus in utterly rational terms, explaining his miracles as natural phenomena, and depicting him as a teacher of timeless wisdom. It came to a close with Albert Schweitzer's book, The Quest for the Historical Jesus, published in 1906. He concluded that the historical Jesus must be a "stranger and an enigma." The Jesus designed by nineteenth-century rationalists never had any existence. Furthermore, what little we could know about this Jesus was irrelevant to theology. Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also," wrote Schweitzer, "This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery." The current generation of Jesus researchers have similarly bracketed questions of theology. The second quest was centered in Germany in the 1950s and 60s, led by Ernst Kasemann and others who were influenced by and in reaction to the towering New Testament scholar Rudolf Bultmann, who argued that most the Gospel accounts of Jesus' life grew out of the mythos of the early church. These scholars argued that Christian theology could not be cut off from history and developed a set of criteria for deciding what is historical in the gospels. Although their existentialist theology now seems dated, many of their rules for assessing historicity continue to be utilized, for example by the current "Jesus Seminar," a group of scholars re-examining the synoptic traditions and particularly the sayings of Jesus. They have produced The Five Gospels, a work that evaluates the four canonical gospels and the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas for authentic sayings of Jesus. Despite how often the question of recovering the Jesus of history has been declared hopeless, it has nevertheless generated a vast literature. What distinguishes the latest crop of Jesus scholars from their predecessors is that they understand Jesus within the context of Jews and Judaism in the first century. Whereas some scholars in the past may have talked about the Jewish background" of the New Testament as if it were a mere backdrop to Christianity, or talked about "late Judaism" as if Judaism, on its last legs in the first century, was superseded by Christianity, no serious New Testament researcher today speaks of "the Jesus movement" or Jesus himself as outside the orbit of first-century Judaism. Books that explore the Jewishness of Jesus include Geza Vermes's Jesus the Jew, Jesus and the World of Judaism, and The Religion of Jesus the Jew and E.P. Sanders's Jesus and Judaism and The Historical Figure of Jesus. While every generation has produced scholars like George Foot Moore, who understood Jesus within the Judaism of his time, they were exceptional. Now they are the norm. Further, we have a more nuanced view of the variety of Judaisms in the first century and where Jesus and his followers might have fit in. This generation also has access to more materials. The Dead Sea Scrolls, only recently available to a wide range of scholars, do not mention Jesus, but they do illuminate a brand of apocalyptic thought and expectation alive in the first century. The urgency of the impending apocalypse that John the Baptist and Jesus preached has been muted by 2,000 years of church history, but the Dead Sea Scrolls remind us that many expected the end of the world would be violent and imminent. In addition to the information from the Qumran materials, recent archaeological finds correspond to details of the Gospel stories of Jesus. The skeleton of a crucified man was discovered in Israel on Giv'at ha Mivtar. His ankle bones were pierced and his legs broken, giving evidence of the nature of Roman crucifixion. In 1990, archaeologists discovered an ossuary containing the bones of Joseph Caiaphas, the high priest who interrogated Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and is mentioned in the Gospels of Luke and John. The current scholars draw upon many disciplines, borrowing anthropological and sociological methods. For example, Crossan relies on some of the insights of anthropology to illumine agrarian peasant Mediterranean society, Richard Horsley and others use sociological data to understand Jesus as a radical political figure responding to economic and political persecution. A number of different portraits of Jesus have emerged. Marcus Borg portrays Jesus as a religious ecstatic, a teacher of wisdom and a social prophet, focused on the present. "Jesus' relation to the Spirit was the source of everything that he was", Borg claims. Burton Mack describes Jesus as a Jewish Cynic, a popular sage who shocked people into understanding with his sharp and disturbing sayings. Like Borg, he sees Jesus as focused on the present state of the world, a dispenser of timeless truths. Crossan pictures him as a preacher of radical egalitarianism, addressing a peasant society suffering in political and economic straits, offering a message of healing: "You are healed healers, so take the kingdom to others, for I am not its patron and you are not its brokers. It is, was, and always will be available to any who want it."An essential point of Crossan and others' thought is that Jesus was not preaching himself and his own aggrandizement, but preaching God's kingdom. E.P. Sanders agrees, but shifts the emphasis to the future. He sees Jesus as an eschatological prophet, a figure who prepared the people for the coming of God's kingdom, which God would bring in the future. John Meier combines present and future, suggesting Jesus is an eschatological teacher who sees God's kingly rule as already present, but not yet complete, in his ministry. God's plan to establish His rule over His people has yet to come to fullness. As these scholars further hone their theories, certain issues dominate the emerging picture of the historical Jesus:
Other apocalyptic leaders have arisen throughout the course of Jewish history. Bar Kochba and Sabbatai Sevi, for example, drew significant numbers of loyal followers. But their apparent failures to bring their transformative vision to reality led to the end of their movements. When Jesus' followers, probably in hiding somewhere, heard he was dead, it did not spell the end of his group. Somehow, hope persisted and was transmuted into a force that changed history. Anyone who looks at maps of established churches in the late first, second, and third centuries cannot help but marvel at the rapid spread of Christianity. The persistence and extraordinary growth of Jesus' following after his death is the miracle on which to focus, claims Crossan, not the resurrection. Indeed, the transformation of some disappointed messianists into a dynamic movement is one of the fascinating stories of history. When someone asked Franz Rosenzweig what Jews thought about Jesus, he answered simply, "They don't. " But in regard to the historical Jesus, the same thing could be said about Christians. Whether Whitney Houston thanks Jesus as her Lord and personal savior at the Grammy Awards, or the Pope invokes his name in daily private prayer, it is the "Christ of faith" whose continuing and powerful presence makes a difference in people's lives. The charismatic preacher of first-century Palestine remains in the shadows. Yet the movement of the historical Jesus to center stage is good news for Jews and Christians in their relations with each other. Effectively dislodged from the church, Jesus becomes more Jewish. Jews find it less threatening to think and talk about him. Graetz and Geiger understood Jesus as part of Jewish history. As contemporary Jews wrestle with their history, they ought to consider the question of Jesus' historical place in that story. Most Jews back away from the Christ of the church, the crucified Lord, but do not mind claiming the Jesus of history, the preacher of ancient Palestine, as their own. With the burden of later Christian theology and organized Christianity removed, they can do this with some comfort. We may then move beyond old issues of Jewish pain and Christian guilt, finding points of intersection, even if not the same conclusions. Reprinted from TIKKUN MAGAZINE, A BI-MONTHLY JEWISH CRITIQUE OF POLITICS, CULTURE, AND SOCIETY. Information and subscriptions are available from TIKKUN, 26 Fell Street, San Francisco, CA 94102, or by calling 1-800-395-7753. Which of the following is a criticism of feminist theories?Which of the following is a criticism of feminist theories? They often overlook gender, social class, and generational gaps in how issues are viewed.
Which of the following is a criticism of feminist perspectives of health and illness quizlet?Which of the following is a criticism of feminist perspectives of health and illness? Feminist scholars sometimes gloss over the fact that social class, rather than gender, has a big effect on people's health.
Which of the following is a criticism of the functionalist perspective on religion quizlet?According to functionalists, education benefits taxpayers because more highly educated people are: less likely to rely on public assistance programs. Which of the following is a criticism of the functionalists' perspective on religion? It implies that religion is indispensable to leading a good life.
Which of the following is a criticism of the functionalist perspective on religion?Criticisms of the Functionalist Perspective on Religion
Religion does not always promote harmony: it can promote conflict: there may be conflicts within religion, or between religions for example. Secularisation means that religion performs fewer functions today: thus functionalism may be less relevant.
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