Abstract
Since the advent of the first quest for the historical Jesus in the nine-teenth century, theologians have felt compelled to accept as normative either the Jesus of history (so Liberal Theology) or the Christ of faith (so Liberal Theology). This choice is a false one, for the structure of early Christian faith involves both historical and confessional elements inthe creation of meaningful theological discourse. We can recover the poetics of that discourse if we clearly distinguish between the historical and confessional elements in the gospels, and place them once again in a dialectical relationship. In this way, the quest for the historical Jesus may retain its character as an historical discipline, and yet still prove fruitful for critical theological reflection.
Highlights
Who was Jesus, historically speaking? Every generation or so scholars of the New Testament find themselves returning again to this very old, yet very important question
For Christians - and to some extent, anyone involved in the course and flow of Western history - it is a question about origins, about roots, about beginnings
Steplum J Patterson this person in whom generation upon generation of Christians have claimed to see God, in whose name Christians have risen to the heights of what it means to be human in acts of care and compassion, and sunk to the very depths of demonic possession in acts of.brutal oppression and violel)ce? These questions draw us back time and aguin because they are foundational to our understanding of who we are as a culture, and what we would like to be
Summary
Who was Jesus, historically speaking? Every generation or so scholars of the New Testament find themselves returning again to this very old, yet very important question. Faith in the Bible, in the form of biblical inerrancy, became a necessary prerequisite to faith in Jesus Christ Both positions, different, shared a set of basic assumptions, and it was these assumptions that Kahler questioned: (a) that the gospels were intended to be read as history in the first place, and (b) that Christian faith should even be interested in an historical Jesus as its ground· and starting point. Most lay people continued to assume that the church still considered the gospels to be historical, a comfort to conservative Christians, but a scandal to more progressive, criticallyminded persons, who either left the church in dismay, or held their piece in discomfort with one more institution that could not deal honestly with diffIcult questions This was the situation within which Robert W Funk declared the Quest on again with the founding of the Jesus Seminar in 1985.
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