Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.5 The Flight from History
tors, puts him firmly in the 'third quest' (see §5.5 below). Theissen and Merz's
discussion of 'Historical Scepticism and the Study of Jesus' is more far-reaching,
though summary in form," but the Jewishness of Jesus as such is not a particular
focus of the volume. Even so, if I have to recommend a single volume on 'the
historical Jesus' for student use, this is it.
The trouble in all this is that, with the exception of Theissen, issues of fundamental
perspective and method, some posed by the sociological approach and
the neo-Liberal quest (see above, §§4.6-7), others left over from the reconceptualisation
of the task by the early form critics (§3 above), have been too
much neglected. What should be the starting point for an approach to the Jesus
tradition for those in 'quest of the historical Jesus'? Have the implications of Jesus'
particular social setting in Galilee been adequately taken into account? What
should count as sources for the earliest phases of the Jesus tradition? And with
what conception of the traditioning process should we operate? Or in a word, can
the roadblock of 'impossibility' be so easily dismantled as the second questers
seem to assume?
5.5. A Third Quest?
In the closing decades of the twentieth century the most hopeful advance in life of
Jesus research was the recognition that the quest must primarily have in view Jesus
the Jew and a clearer and firmer grasp of the consequences. What distinguishes this
'third quest of the historical Jesus' 100 is the conviction that any attempt to build up
99. Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus ch. 4.
100. The title was introduced by N. T. Wright in his updating of Stephen Neill's The Interpretation
of the New Testament, 1861-1986 (Oxford: Oxford University, 1964, 2 1988) 379.
On the continuities and discontinuities between the 'second' and 'third' quests see Du Toit,
'Redefining Jesus' 98-110. The description ('third quest') is sometimes used to cover also what
I have called the neo-Liberal quest (as by Witherington, Jesus Quest; Scott, 'New Options' 7
['third stage']); and in his emphasis that Jesus looked for 'the renewal of Israel' Borg certainly
overlaps with characteristic 'third quest' concerns (§4.7 above, as also Horsley, §4.6). Meier's
emphasis on the Jewishness of Jesus (albeit 'a marginal Jew') also qualifies him as thirdquester;
in Marginal Jew 3.8 he points out that he uses the term ('marginal Jew') to avoid a set
definition of Jesus and in imitation of Jesus' own 'riddle-speech'. Funk notes the key question
to be 'what role to assign Jesus the Jew in the Jewish sect known as Christianity' (Honest to Jesus
32, 58-59), but subsequently distances himself from 'the third quest' (65), though his dismissal
of 'third questers' ('faith seems to make them immune to the facts') seems to ignore the
fact that none of his 'facts' is undisputed.
However, I invest no significance or importance in such numbering of the quests.
C. Marsh, 'Quests of the Historical Jesus in New Historicist Perspective', Biblical Interpretation
5 (1997) 403-37, distinguishes nine quests in all: (1) The Positivist Quest (eschatological
85