Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.5 The Flight from History
those of the Jews'. 106 Schweitzer's own account of the quest simply failed to take
account of the substantial debate between Jewish and Christian scholarship on
the theme of Jesus the Jew. 107 The irony of Liberalism at this point is that it not
only sought to 'liberate' Jesus from the distorting layers of subsequent dogma,
but it also sought to present Jesus as the one who 'liberated' the quintessential
spirit of religion from the 'outmoded garb' of Jewish cult and myth. 108
In the twentieth century, in a not wholly dissimilar way, Bultmann's existential
Christ of faith could make the quantum leap into the present moment of
encounter without any dependence on his historical (Jewish) background. 109 It
remained fairly commonplace in German theology even after the Second World
War to describe Second Temple Judaism as Spätjudentum (late Judaism) 110 —
that is, Judaism ceased to have significance thereafter — and to describe Jesus as
doing away with Judaism or bringing Judaism to an end. 111 In the second quest
the principal criterion, the criterion of dissimilarity, tried to make a virtue out of
what second questers perceived as a necessity by reconstructing their picture of
Jesus out of what distinguished Jesus from his historical context and set him over
against his Jewish milieu. 112 And the neo-Liberal quest differs from the old Lib-
106. Heschel, Abraham Geiger 123. Note also the response to Weiss by W. Bousset, Jesus
im Gegensatz, zum Judentum: ein religionsgeschichtlicher Vergleich (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1892): 'In late Judaism there is no really living power, no creative
spirit. .. . Jesus' message above all and first of all must be understood in light of its contrast to
Judaism . . .' (6-7), cited by Kümmel, New Testament 230-31.
107. Heschel, Abraham Geiger 3, 127.
108. In effect working out the programmatic understanding of Christianity and its beginnings
as indicated by Baur already in his Paul 3 (cited above in chapter 1 at n. 13). On Hegel's
anti-Judaism see Brown, Jesus 88-90. Dungan also points out that the triumph of Markan priority
in effect dethroned the Jewish Matthew from its former pre-eminence (History 339).
109. Despite his recognition that the proclamation of Jesus belonged under the heading
of 'Judaism' (see above at n. 54).
110. See C. Klein, Anti-Judaism in Christian Theology (1975; ET London: SPCK/Philadelphia:
Fortress, 1978) here ch. 2; still in F. Hahn, Christologische Hoheitstitel (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck, 5 1995) 133, 351; Becker, Jesus, e.g., 88, 224 n. 146.
111. See, e.g., Pannenberg, Jesus 255; L. Goppelt, Theology of the New Testament. Vol. 1:
The Ministry of Jesus in Its Theological Significance (1975; ET Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1981)
97 ('Jesus actually superseded Judaism at its very roots through a new dimension'). See further
J. T. Pawlikowski, Christ in the Light of the Christian-Jewish Dialogue (New York: Paulist,
1982) 37-47. Heschel gives a very unsympathetic reading of a 1992 contribution by Käsemann
to a debate on Christian identity in Christian-Jewish dialogue: 'Käsemann writes that calling Jesus'
teaching Jewish is insulting and renders Christianity meaningless' (Abraham Geiger 232,
referring to E. Käsemann, 'Protest!', EvT 52 [1992] 177-78, but this is not an actual quotation
from Käsemann). The debate was initiated by J. Seim, 'Zur christlichen Identität im christlichjüdisch
Gespräch', £VT 51 (1991) 458-67; Seim responds in EvT 52 (1992) 185-87.
112. See further above §5.4. H. Merklein, Jesu Botschaft von der Gottesherrschaft (SBS
87