Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §5.4
few introductory pages on methodology. 88 Both share the original assumptions
of form-critical method, particularly as to the earliest form of the tradition (individual
units), with the most cursory of references to the phase of oral transmission.
89 Both continue to give pride of place to the criterion of dissimilarity in
evaluating individual sayings. 90 And the issues raised by the North American
neo-Liberals, particularly as regards the Gospel of Thomas, are at best only
hinted at. 91 At this point the gulf between European and North American, or,
better, between English-language and German-language scholarship becomes as
wide as ever it has been before. 92
At the same time, both sides of the Atlantic have produced important
works which draw on the best of the earlier methods and which serve as a bridge
to the latest phase of the quest. I have in mind John Meier's massive (now threevolume)
study of A Marginal Jew 93 and Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz's The
Historical Jesus. 94 Unlike Gnilka and Becker, they both devote considerable attention
to the question of sources, 95 and, like Gnilka, they attend to questions of
social context. 96 Meier's emphasis on criteria to determine the historicity of particular
words and deeds of Jesus, 97 and his otherwise brief methodological observations,
98 reflect more the techniques of the new quest. But his third volume in
particular, which is totally dedicated to detailing the various relationships and interactions
between the Jew named Jesus and his Jewish followers and competi-
88. J. Gnilka, Jesus von Nazaret: Botschaft und Geschichte (Freiburg: Herder, 1993), ET
Jesus of Nazareth: Message and History (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1997) 12-25; J. Becker, Jesus
of Nazareth (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1998) 1-17. But special mention should be made of
Schillebeeckx's Jesus, the most ambitious and successful attempt by a historical and systematic
theologian to master and integrate specialist NT scholarship into a larger perspective on the
early developments in dogmatic Christology.
89. Gnilka, Jesus 13, 15; Becker, Jesus 7.
90. Gnilka, Jesus 20; Becker, Jesus 13-14.
91. Gnilka, Jesus 15; Becker, Jesus 9, 16 n. 15.
92. Similarly Strecker's Theology does not look beyond the immediate post-
Bultmannian phase of the Quest (241-43, 249-53)
93. Vol. 1 — The Roots of the Problem and the Person (above n. 73); vol. 2 — Mentor,
Message, and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994); vol. 3 — Companions and Competitors
(New York: Doubleday, 2001). Meier provided a brief summary of his conclusions to date in
'Reflections of Jesus-of-History Research Today', in J. H. Charlesworth, ed., Jesus' Jewishness:
Exploring the Place of Jesus in Early Judaism (New York: Crossroad, 1991) 84-107.
94. G. Theissen and A. Merz, The Historical Jesus (London: SCM, 1998).
95. Meier, Marginal Jew 1 chs. 2-5; Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus chs. 2-3.
96. Meier, Marginal Jew 1 chs. 9-10; Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus chs. 5-7.
97. Meier, Marginal Jew 1 ch. 6.
98. Meier, Marginal Jew 1.4-6, 9-12, though with an interesting discussion of basic concepts
('The real Jesus and the historical Jesus'), including Kähler's distinction between 'historical'
and 'historic' (22-40).
84