Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.7
follows that the call, originally made by Wrede, 193 for inquiry into Christian origins
to ignore the boundaries formed by the canon, hitherto of little real effect,
has now to be given serious attention as never before. 194 These two facts revolutionise
the issue of sources for knowledge of Jesus' own preaching and teaching,
and the use to be made of Q and Thomas in particular will require fuller consideration
later (chapter 7).
The reappearance of a deapocalypticised Jesus constitutes a protest against
the influence of Weiss and Schweitzer, who had previously been credited with
putting in place one of the most important parameters for twentieth-century 'historical
Jesus' research. The importance of the protest lies in the fact that nonapocalypticism
has become one of the hallmarks of the neo-Liberal Jesus: it is
the absence of apocalyptic sayings in the Gospel of Thomas which allows it to be
dated early; and the possibility of separating out a non-apocalyptic layer in Q results
similarly in a non- or pre-apocalyptic 1Q/Q 1 . 195 In each case the finding is
taken to confirm that Jesus' own preaching was non-apocalyptic, though it is
hard to see how the argument escapes the criticism of petitio principii (begging
the question). The loss of Schweitzer's 'stranger and enigma' yardstick for responsible
critical reconstruction of the 'historical Jesus' is probably even more
serious. The attractiveness of the neo-Liberal Jesus to an unrepresentative strand
in NT scholarship, a counter-culture Jesus who serves as an iconic precedent for
all anti-establishment restiveness, or a Jesus who was more sophisticatedly subversive
than an apocalyptic prophet, 196 should have provided warning enough.
The historical distance and difference has once again been elided. Jesus has once
again been modernized; or should we rather say, post-modernized!
It is somewhat unnerving thus to find the quest beginning in effect to repeat
itself and the governing idea reappearing so strongly, that lurking somewhere behind
the Synoptic tradition there is a 'historical Jesus', untrammelled by what
late-twentieth-century sensibilities regard as unacceptable dogmas, just waiting
to be found and to function as a corrective to later distortions. Quite apart from
the issues which it has posed afresh, then, the neo-Liberal quest provides a strong
193. Wrede, 'The Task and Methods of "New Testament Theology'" 68-116.
194. So particularly H. Koester, 'GNOMAI DIAPHOROI: The Origin and Nature of Diversification
in the History of Early Christianity', HTR 58 (1965) 279-318, reprinted in Robinson
and Koester, Trajectories 114-57 (here 115, 119); also his discussion of the genre 'gospel'
in Ancient Christian Gospels 43-48.
195. Particularly Koester, e.g., 'One Jesus and Four Primitive Gospels', HTR 61 (1968)
203-47, reprinted in Robinson and Koester, Trajectories 158-204 (here 171); also Ancient
Christian Gospels 87.
196. Borg evidently wishes to distance Jesus from the sort of Christian groups today
which 'most of us know' and 'for whom the imminent expectation of the second coming and
the final judgment is central' (Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship 78, 82-83).
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