The New Search For the Historical Jesus

[Gloria]

THE NEW SEARCH FOR THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Most Christian believers accept the Gospels as accurate and pious record of the life and times of the Savior but others still wonder. Some believe in “de-mythodology” while others believe in laid down principles. Some are concerned with history and others are concerned with the present circumstances. Some are concerned with the actual “painting” while others are concerned with the background information of the “artist” and the various cultural and geographical circumstances behind a particular artwork. However, the Gospels were not simple historical accounts but highly sophisticated theological works in which the oral traditions preserved by Christ's early disciples were considerably expanded. These oral traditions consisted almost exclusively of Jesus' sayings; thus his actions as recounted in the Gospels, and the geographical circumstances of his words.

According to James Robinson, the new quest was possible because it sought after Jesus’ selfhood and his understanding of existence. One of the main goals of the New quest was to locate the parallels between the “Kyrygma” and the Historical Jesus. In other words, to find “implicit in Jesus what was explicit in the Kyrygma” or the proclamation of the early church’s faith in a Risen Christ.
Through out history, many great theologians and philosophers have gone deeper into the search for who and whom Jesus truly is. According to Rudolf Bultmann (One great German Lutheran scholar whom many regard as an arch-heretic), “the Gospels were interested not in presenting a dispassionate portrait of Jesus but in expressing the kerygma—the proclamation of the early church's faith in a Risen Christ”. This meant that although the New Testament might be a primary source for a study of the early church, it was only a secondary one for a life of Jesus. Since the faith of later generations was really based upon the shining faith of the first Christians and not upon Jesus himself, theologians should forget about seeking the earthly Jesus and analyze the formation of the kerygma. Bultmann limits attention to the purpose of Jesus and discounts any study which would seek to see to the personality of Jesus. This purpose can only be understood as teaching and only in the sense that they meet us with the question of how we are to interpret our own existence. Bultman therefore offers us an existentialist “historiographical” approach which leads not to the persuit of life of the historical Jesus, but to the Christ of faith who confronts us in the text. Bultmann argued that to become credible for modern man, the kerygma must be "de-mythologized” thus, stripped of such unbelievable elements as its heaven-above, hell-below framework.

However, James Robinson in his “New Quest for the Historical Jesus” points out that, demythologizing threatened to end up with "the conclusion that the Jesus of the kerygma could well be only a myth." Deprived of its link with the historical Jesus, Christianity might end up as some kind of existentialist philosophy, of which Christ was little more than a mythological symbol. Most of the old “questers” who made the quest for the historical Jesus could not succeed because most of them were concerned with writing miracle-free biographies of the historical Jesus forgetting that “Miracles” are part of the historical Jesus.

The church, Robinson argues, has two avenues available to Jesus. The first avenue is through an existential response to the kerygma, in this sense faith ‘is not dependent on historiography’. Yet this kerygma, Robinson goes on to say, needs to be connected to history, and thus Jesus can be approached by way of historical critical method. The New Quest for the Historical Jesus is committed to a kerygma which locates its saving event in a historical person to whom we have a second avenue of access provided by the rise of scientific historiography since the enlightenment. This new quest, like Bultmann, tended to work with the teachings of Jesus, but sought through a variety of methods and criteria to gain access to solid historical data.

The gospels, in the methodology of the ‘new questers’ are analysed, in a piecemeal fashion, to find authentic Jesus tradition by using criteria, such as the criteria of dissimilarity and multiple attestation, to provide a firm bedrock of Jesus tradition