Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.5
layers and (presumed) distortions. Kahler responded by arguing that this could
not be done: the Gospels' picture of Jesus is impregnated with interpretation
throughout. 113 It simply is not possible to get back from the Gospels to a Jesus
who may or may not have been significant. In trying to do so the questers were in
effect drawing on a further source to fill in the gaps, a fifth Gospel, as it were —
that is, themselves, their own minds and imaginations. 114 On this perspective, the
whole quest was nothing more than 'a blind alley', wherein the so-called 'historical
Jesus' was not to be found. 115 This forthright challenge by Kahler did not
make much of an immediate impact, but it was a fundamental theological consideration
in Bultmann's abandonment of the quest and remained influential
through the middle decades of the twentieth century.
Wrede made a correlated but much more immediately crippling observation:
that the Gospels so much relied on as sources for objective history were in
fact also, indeed primarily documents of faith. They were not portrayals of Jesus
as he was, but of Jesus as his disciples subsequently saw him. This larger claim
was the result of Wrede's more narrowly focused study of 'the messianic secret'
in the Synoptic Gospels, and of his conclusion that the secrecy motif in Mark in
particular was a theological motif inserted by the Evangelist to explain why Jesus'
messiahship had not been recognized by his own people.' 16 The unavoidable
corollary was that Mark had not intended to write a historical account of Jesus'
ministry and teaching; the shape and content of Mark, and by extension of the
other Synoptics also, had been determined by theological considerations. In
which case, the sharp distinction between historical Synoptics and a theological
John had to be abandoned; the Synoptics were also theological, and in their own
manner and degree just as theological as John. In which case also, the possibility
of using Mark as a straightforward source for the history of Jesus' ministry was
gone. This finding by Wrede, of the Synoptics as theological tracts, became almost
axiomatic for twentieth-century scholarship and an effective block on any
renewal of the 'quest of the historical Jesus' on Liberal assumptions for most of
the twentieth century.
In the same connection we should note also a point made by Schweitzer in
his own response to Wrede. He climaxes his account of the quest with the contri-
113. 'Every detail of the apostolic recollection of Jesus can be shown to have been preserved
for the sake of its religious significance' (Kahler, So-Called Historical Jesus 93).
114. Kahler, So-Called Historical Jesus 55 (Braaten's 'Introduction' 20). Hence also the
criticisms in nn. 107-109 above.
115. Kahler, So-Called Historical Jesus 46.
116. W. Wrede, Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien: Zugleich ein Beitrag zum
Verständnis des Markusevangeliums (Göttingen, 1901); ET The Messianic Secret (Cambridge:
Clarke, not till 1971). See C. Tuckett, ed., The Messianic Secret (London: SPCK, 1983), and
further below § 15.2c.
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