The Gospels and Jesus: Some Doubts about Method

Abstract

No single issue has so taxed and fascinated students of early Christianity as quest for historical Jesus. Yet on no other issue have such prodigious efforts led to more inconclusive results. Some of causes underlying this nagging impasse are obvious, others less so. Among former are status of Christianity in Western culture and role of New Testament within Christianity. In its broadest terms, issue is unresolved and often unrecognized tension between history and religious belief. Albert Schweitzer's The Quest of Historical Jesus' and more recently Van Harvey's The Historian and Believer2 have chronicled various ways in which rigorous historical method has been subordinated to religious and theological concerns. With dogged regularity, desire to reach authentic Jesus material has led questers to sacrifice methodological rigor or to minimize difficulties posed by sources. Thus Schweitzer's judgment that the historical investigation of life of Jesus did not take its rise from a purely historical interest 3 applies not just to motives for quest but inevitably to manner in which it is carried out. To justify this situation, as some have done, merely by observing that no historian approaches subject with total objectivity is unacceptable. In addition to normal problems of any historical topic, this quest poses special difficulties and demands special precautions. Beyond this, status of New Testament as sacred scripture has long fostered a parochial attitude toward specific issues of methodology. Working hypotheses have tended to become methodological dogmas and hence immune to critical reassessment. Thus tendency to focus on Synoptic Gospels as primary and often exclusive