Norman Perrin's Contribution to the Question of the Historical Jesus

Abstract

Testament scholarship only in the context of the developing historical consciousness of modernity and in the subsequent application of the historical-critical method to biblical texts. The year the problem surfaced can be dated rather precisely. When in 1778 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing published the fragment by Hermann Samuel Reimarus entitled On the Intentions of Jesus and His Disciples, the premodern, unquestioning attitude toward the historical Jesus had come to an end.1 This attitude was now subjected to the scrutiny of the human intellect, which had learned to distinguish between history transmitted by tradition and the actuality of history. The historical quest forJesus reached truly critical proportions when [his] complete strangeness suggested itself at least as a possibility: Jesus as adherent of apocalypticism, whose self-identity is inimitable, whose personal expectations proved erroneous, and who cannot even in his own ethical demands serve as direct authority.2 Henceforth, Albert Schweitzer's statement in the