Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FROM THE GOSPELS TO JESUS §7
tions can be pursued and will form the agenda for Part Two — sources (chapter
7), tradition (chapter 8), and historical context (chapter 9) — as we re-envisage
the historical realities behind the Gospels and attempt to get back in some sense
from the Gospels to Jesus.
The first task in any historical investigation is to ascertain what the sources
are on which the historian can draw, and to ask how reliable these sources are. In
this case our sources are almost entirely limited to those which evidence direct
influence from Jesus at one remove or another. The few external sources can be
reviewed quite briefly. As to the Christian (and near Christian) sources themselves,
the above survey indicated two periods of intensive debate on the source
question: the Liberal phase focused attention particularly on 'the Synoptic problem'
; and the most recent, still continuing neo-Liberal phase has raised the status
of non-canonical sources. We will not forget the intermediate phase (roughly
1920 to 1980) when form criticism supplanted source criticism as the principal
engine of Gospels research. But that is an important part of the subject matter of
chapter 8.
The issues are clear. I have already concluded (chapter 6) that the pre- and
post-Enlightenment advances in historical and hermeneutical awareness still provide
some sound principles for any quest of the historical figure of Jesus. Can we
also say that the advances in source criticism during the heyday of Liberalism
(the two source/document hypothesis for the Synoptics, and the much lower
value accorded to John's Gospel as a source for information on Jesus' ministry)
still provide sound working hypotheses for any attempt to assess the historical
value of the traditions regarding Jesus? The arguments of Kloppenborg in particular,
followed by the neo-Liberal questers, that the Q source can be readily stratified,
and those of Koester in particular, that there are other Gospel sources on
which to draw, have not commanded anything like the same consent as the older
source hypotheses and certainly require further scrutiny. Nevertheless, the increasing
recognition of Q as a coherent document with a distinctive theological
profile, and the possibility of tracing different trajectories through earliest Christianity,
pose challenging questions to traditional claims of coherence and continuity
between Jesus and what came after. The ramifications of these hypotheses
for any continuing 'quest of the historical Jesus' are so important that it will be
necessary to give them careful attention.
But first, it is important to remind ourselves of the testimony regarding Jesus
outside specifically Christian sources and the earliest evidence for Jesus as a
historical person.
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