Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung: Von Kelsos und Origenes bis heute by Marius Reiser

Abstract

Reviewed by: Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung: Von Kelsos und Origenes bis heute by Marius Reiser Linda M. Maloney marius reiser, Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung: Von Kelsos und Origenes bis heute ( SBS 235; Stuttgart: Katholisches Bibelwerk, 2015). Pp. 204. Paper €28. [Full disclosure: this reviewer and Marius Reiser have been friends and conversation partners since our student days in Tübingen in the 1980s.] In this volume for the Stuttgarter Bibelstudien series, Marius Reiser has reviewed in a scant two hundred pages the history of Jesus research, beginning with Origen's Contra Celsum and ending with our own contemporaries. R. is an acute and widely read scholar in Greek history and literature, and he brings that background, as well as his expertise in NT, to the task. He finds that Origen was in many ways a more accurate assessor of the evidence regarding Jesus than most, if not all, subsequent critics. Among the ancients he also includes a section on Porphyry. In the first chapter, "Kritische Geschichte der Jesusforschung," R. reviews a panoply of scholars whom, in his Vorwort, he divides essentially into skeptics and "orthodox." He numbers himself among the latter and describes these scholars as those who seek to think in accord with the ancient creeds that constitute the universal Christian confession: the conviction, that is, that historical-critical biblical research is done in a context of and is part of theology. The scholars whose work is treated in the first section include (among the non-orthodox) Reimarus, Johann Gottfried Herder, Matthias Claudius, David Friedrich Strauss, and Ernest Renan. A subsection on Marie-Joseph Lagrange locates him within his time period as an "orthodox" outlier. Then comes a chapter called "Der kreisende Berg" (with sardonic reference to the mountain that labored and brought forth a mouse). R. concentrates on the issue of identifying the historical Jesus with the biblical Christ, which he sees as the fundamental question asked (and for the most part answered in the negative) by the several "Quests." The most influential figure here is, of course, Rudolf Bultmann, and he receives the most extended critique. Ernst Käsemann, Günther Bornkamm, John Dominic Crossan, and the Jesus Seminar are sharply criticized; Gerd Theissen fares somewhat better. R. disputes Geza Vermes's thesis that Jesus was a Galilean ḥāsîd, with reference to R.'s own [End Page 346] previous book, Der unbequeme Jesus (Biblisch-theologische Studien 122; NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlagsgesellschaft, 2012), in which he sought to show that Jesus was and remains an irritant in his own and subsequent religious communities. Even John Meier comes in for criticism here: though R. deeply respects his profound and diligent scholarship, R.'s response to the attempt to discover a Jesus-image acceptable to agnostics as well as believers is essentially: cui bono? The chapter on the conservative-critical line of thought starts with Martin Dibelius and includes the Jewish scholar Hans-Joachim Schoeps; R. agrees with Schoeps and Joseph Klausner, that Jesus "opened a path that necessarily led away from Judaism" (p. 115, citing Schoeps's 1963 essay, "Jesus und das jüdische Gesetz," in idem, Studien zur unbekannten Religions- und Geistesgeschichte [Göttingen: Musterschmidt, 1963]). Others treated here are C. H. Dodd, Milan Machovec, Ben F. Meyer, and N. T. Wright. R. finds his own point of view especially close to that of Meyer, whose attention to the work of Bernard Lonergan R. respects, and whose scholarship probably comes closest to that of R.'s and my own teacher, Gerhard Lohfink. He also values the late scholars Graham Stanton and Martin Hengel (who was teaching in Tübingen during our studies there). There follows a summary chapter on "the results of scholarship," and then a concluding section on fundamental principles and methods: those in use in the past and those still worth employing for the future. I have my disagreements with R. here and there. It seems to me that his summary dismissal of a "hermeneutic of suspicion" is too blunt an instrument. He means by it a principled skepticism of the veracity of the biblical witness (in essence, regarding the biblical writers as guilty until proven innocent), which is not what it means, for example, to...