Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§4.7 The Flight from Dogma
sus of the Gospels. 159 Similarly Paul Hollenbach seeks the Jesus of history 'in
order to overthrow, not simply correct the "mistake called Christianity'". 160 The
nearest equivalent in Germany is Gerd Lüdemann, who has been a devoted practitioner
of the historical method, but who now regards 'as illegitimate any return
to the preaching of Jesus as a foundation for Christian faith'. 161
The search for new sources has found a doughty champion in Dominic
Crossan, 162 who has broken right through the constraints imposed by the four canonical
Gospels, hitherto regarded as the only substantive sources, and has produced
an amazing cornucopia of sources for traditions about Jesus — no less
than fifty-two! 163 Of course, most of them provide testimony to only a few sayings
of Jesus or episodes from Jesus' life. But the heart of Crossan's claim is that
there are three major sources which can be dated confidently to the period 30-60
CE. 164 The first of these is the Gospel of Thomas, the most important document
among the cache discovered at Nag Hammadi in Egypt in 1945. A Coptic translation
of an earlier Greek document, it has usually been regarded as a Gnostic reworking
of earlier sayings material, many of which are found also in Q. But
159. Funk, Honest 10-11, 19-21; 'The first test concerns whether or not the quest gives
credence to the distinction between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of the gospels' (64). Similarly
R. W. Funk, et al., The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New
York: Macmillan, 1993) 3-4. In the poster for his lecture tour in the UK, 'Jesus Seminar on the
Road — UK 2000', Funk is cited thus: 'The purpose of the quest of the historical Jesus is to set
Jesus free from the scriptural and experiential prisons in which we have incarcerated him. . . .
the pale, anaemic, iconic Jesus suffers by comparison with the stark reality of the genuine article'
— more or less a quotation from Honest 300.
160. P. Hollenbach, 'The Historical Jesus Question in North America Today', BTB 19
(1989) 11-22 (here 20).
161. G. Lüdemann, The Great Deception and What Jesus Really Said and Did (London:
SCM, 1998) x; the book was a 'taster' for his Jesus after Two Thousand Years: What He Really
Said and Did (Lüneburg: Klampen, 2000; ET London: SCM, 2000), where he acknowledges
the stimulus which his own project received from the Jesus Seminar and its publications (vii).
The value of Lüdemann's succinct summary of the reasoning of a fairly sceptical wing of German
scholarship on individual Gospel traditions should not be underestimated. Similarly the
views of the Jesus Seminar, as summarized in Funk's Five Gospels and The Acts of Jesus (San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998), whatever may be said of the methods used, bear testimony
to an important segment of scholarly opinion. In my own analysis of the Jesus tradition I
will make constant reference to them.
162. J. D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant
(San Francisco: Harper, 1991).
163. Crossan, Historical Jesus 427-50. See also R. J. Miller, ed., The Complete Gospels
(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), which provides the annotated texts of twenty-one
Gospels.
164. Crossan, Historical Jesus 427-29; cf. Funk, Honest 124-25, who, like Harnack
(n. 89 above), has found in Q the means to get behind the Pauline gospel (which already influenced
Mark) to the gospel of Jesus himself (41-42).
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