Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§4.5 The Flight from Dogma
lives of Jesus. 93 Such use of Markan priority soon came under question, but the
basic finding, Markan priority itself, the conclusion that Mark is the earliest of
all the Gospels and source of the other two Synoptics, has remained a very solid
accomplishment of Gospel scholarship, which has rightly retained its value and
importance for 'life of Jesus' research.
4.5. The Collapse of the Liberal Quest
The assumption that historical and source criticism were uncovering the 'historical
Jesus', a Jesus attractive to the Liberal sentiments of the late nineteenth century,
was rudely shattered in the decades spanning the turn of the century. Two
principal causes have been identified as undermining the quest.
a. Enter Eschatology
One was the reintroduction of eschatology into the picture. 94 The point of entry
was Jesus' teaching on the kingdom of God. In late-nineteenth-century Liberal
Protestantism the kingdom had been understood in purely ethical terms. Ritschl
defined it thus: 95
The kingdom of God consists of those who believe in Christ, inasmuch as they
treat one another with love without regard to differences of sex, rank or race,
thereby bringing about a fellowship of moral attitude and moral proprieties extending
through the whole range of human life in every possible variation.
In other words, for Ritschl the kingdom of which Jesus spoke was 'the highest
good' of humankind in this world, was ethical in character (the product of action
93. See Schweitzer, Quest ch. 14, particularly Quest 1 203-204 = Quest 2 176-77 (on the
influence of the brief outline of the life of Jesus with which Holtzmann ended his 1863 study of
the Synoptics), and Quest 1 210-11 = Quest 2 181-82. J. S. Kloppenborg, 'The Sayings Gospel Q
and the Quest of the Historical Jesus', HTR 89 (1996) 307-44, points out how surprising it was
that so little attention was paid at this stage to 'the second main source', Q (311-12).
94. It was the principal concern of Schweitzer's Quest to demonstrate that eschatology
was the key to understanding Jesus' mission, a key which Reimarus and Strauss had recognized,
but which generally had been neglected or rejected.
95. A. Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versöhnung vol. 3
(Bonn, 3 1888) 271, ET The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation (Edinburgh:
Clark, 1902) 285. See also Ritschl's Instruction in the Christian Religion (1875) §§5-9, conveniently
available in G. W. Dawes, ed., The Historical Jesus Quest: Landmarks in the Search for
the Jesus of History (Leiderdorp: Deo, 1999) 154-71 (here 154-58).
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