Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§5.5 The Flight from History
and bigots retains a disquietingly stubborn popularity. 116 And, as just noted, the
assumption that Judaism's only function was to prepare for Christianity (thus
'late Judaism') still persists. Oddly enough, however, despite other potent earlier
contributions on Jesus the Jew 117 and the recognition that some fresh methodological
reflection was necessary to break the impasse of the second quest, 118 it
was E. P. Sanders' work on Paul which caused the penny finally to drop in New
Testament scholarship. 119 If traditional New Testament scholarship had misrepresented
the Judaism with which Paul had to do, how much more was it necessary
for Jesus' relationship to his ancestral Judaism to be reassessed. In that
sense, Sanders' Jesus and Judaism (1985) 120 has to be reckoned as the real beginning
of the third quest. 121
The prospects for such a (third) quest have also been considerably improved
by the fresh insights into the character of Second Temple Judaism
which have been granted to scholarship during the last fifty years. Here the discovery
of the Dead Sea Scrolls has pride of place. More than anything else they
have broken open the idea of a monolithic, monochrome Judaism, particularly
as set over against the distinctiveness of newly emerging Christianity. It has
now become possible to envisage Jesus, as also 'the sect of the Nazarenes'
(Acts 24.5, 14; 28.22), within the diversity of late Second Temple Judaism in a
way which was hardly thinkable before. This breakthrough has been accompanied
and reinforced by other important developments — particularly the breakdown
of the previously quite sharp distinction between Judaism and Helle-
116. See below, §9.3a.
117. See n. 114 above.
118. We should recall Jeremias' Proclamation, notable for its appreciation of Jesus as an
Aramaic speaker. Meyer's Aims of Jesus was an important precursor of Sanders (n. 120 below),
but his work was equally if not more significant in highlighting the importance of a better hermeneutic
for would-be questers (see further below, chapter 6). J. Riches, Jesus and the Transformation
of Judaism (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1980) anticipates some of Borg's
emphases, though his central motif ('the transformation of Judaism') is problematic (a reworking
of Judaism's fundamental beliefs). The attempt of Harvey, Jesus and the Constraints of History,
to give a new turn to the discussion by the notion of 'historical constraints' works well initially
(political constraints, the crucifixion) but progressively less so as he proceeds. And
B. Chilton, A Galilean Rabbi and His Bible: Jesus' Own Interpretation of Isaiah (London:
SPCK, 1984), proposes a quite narrowly focused thesis, as indicated by his subtitle.
119. E. P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism (London: SCM, 1977).
120. London: SCM; see his critique of previous studies (23-51), starting with a scathing
denunciation of W. Bousset's Jesus (London: Williams and Norgate, 1906) (Jesus and Judaism
24-26).
121. So also Scott, 'New Options' 11, and Meier, 'Present State of the "Third Quest'"
462; it was Sanders' work which brought the third quest to German attention (Theissen and
Winter, Kriterienfrage 152).
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