Jesus in History

The “Quest for the Historical Jesus” has emerged in various stages. With the emergence of critical historical tools in the Enlightenment, it wasn’t long before these were turned to the sacred history of the Bible. Very briefly, the First Quest argued about what kind of a figure Jesus was, culminating with Albert Schweitzer’s convincing argument that Jesus was an apocalyptic teacher who preached the end of the world and the end of the present order. Not long after this, Bultmann argued that in fact there was hardly any access to what Jesus might have said because it was all filtered through the memories of the church which altered Jesus’s sayings for its own purposes. Besides, he argued, the positivist history was the wrong kind of question to be asking of the Bible. Instead, we should be seeking to experience the message of the gospel. This remained virtually the dominant opinion for thirty years when finally someone broke the silence on Jesus in 1953. Bultmann’s student Ernst Kasemann argued that actually we can know a little about who Jesus really was, and that it is important to match history with our theological beliefs. Where they don’t match up, we should be willing to change our theology.

Is Kasemann’s theological demand a reasonable one? What effect should history have on our beliefs? If we know that Jesus didn’t actually teach something that is attributed to him, must we discard it, or does it have some other kind of validity? What kind of authority does history have over our construction of faith?