Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §5.5
a historical picture of Jesus of Nazareth should and must begin from the fact that he
was a first-century Jew operating in a first-century milieu. After all, when so much
is historically uncertain, we can surely assume with confidence that Jesus was
brought up as a religious Jew. There is no dispute that his mission was carried out
within the land of Israel. And his execution on the charge of being a messianic pretender
('king of the Jews') is generally reckoned to be part of the bedrock data in
the Gospel tradition. 101 What more natural, one might think, what more inevitable
than to pursue a quest of the historical Jesus the Jew? 102
Such an objective seems very obvious, but it is one which generations of
scholarship seem to have resisted. Indeed, one of the most astonishing features of
two hundred years of earlier quests is the way in which they have consistently attempted
to distance Jesus as quickly and as far as possible from his Jewish milieu.
Although Reimarus set Jesus within Judaism (Christianity was founded by
the apostles), his importance, according to Kümmel, is that he raised the question,
'what role in the emancipation of Christianity from Judaism is to be attributed
to Jesus'. 103 Susannah Heschel observes that liberal theologians painted 'as
negative a picture as possible of first-century Judaism' in order 'to elevate Jesus
as a unique religious figure who stood in sharp opposition to his Jewish surroundings'.
104 A unique religious consciousness, unaffected by historical circumstances,
in effect cut Jesus off from Judaism. Renan, for example, could
write: 'Fundamentally there was nothing Jewish about Jesus'; after visiting Jerusalem,
Jesus 'appears no more as a Jewish reformer, but as a destroyer of Judaism
. . . Jesus was no longer a Jew'. 105 And for Ritschl, Jesus' 'renunciation of
Judaism and its law . . . became a sharp dividing line between his teachings and
Jesus); (2) The Positivist Quest (non-eschatological Jesus); (3) The Romantic Quest; (4) The
Form-critical Quest; (5) The Quest of the non-Jewish Jesus; (6) The Traditio-historical Quest;
(7) The Existentialist Quest; (8) The Jewish-Christian Quest; (9) The Postmodern Quest (410-
15). See also J. Carleton Paget, 'Quests for the Historical Jesus', in M. Bockmuehl, ed., The
Cambridge Companion to Jesus (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2001) 138-55 (147-52).
For a German perspective on the 'third quest' see Theissen and Winter, Kriterienfrage 145-71.
101. See below §§15.3a and 17.2.
102. The case is well made by Wright, Jesus ch. 3.
103. Kümmel, New Testament 90; Brown points out that 'Reimarus's interest in the Jewish
background (of Jesus) extended no further than his interest in reducing Jesus' mission to a
messianic political coup' (Jesus 53).
104. S. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1998) 9, 21. On the anti-Jewishness of nineteenth-century NT scholarship see particularly
66-75, 106-107, 117-18, 123, 153-57, 190-93, 212-13, 227. See also H. Moxnes, 'Jesus
the Jew: Dilemmas of Interpretation', in I. Dunderberg, et al., eds., Fair Play: Diversity and
Conflicts in Early Christianity, H. Räisänen FS (Leiden: Brill, 2002) 83-103 (here 83-89, 93-
94).
105. Heschel, Abraham Geiger 156-57.