1 - Stand Up, Stand Up for (the Historical) Jesus

Stand Up, Stand Up for (the Historical) Jesus
By Thomas G. Long

Here's what I imagine. If you were in Galilee, let's say in the 30s, you would have seen a person called Jesus. Let's imagine three different people responding to that person. One says, "This guy's a bore. Let's leave him." The second one says, "This guy's dangerous. Let's kill him." The third one says, "I see God here. Let's follow this guy." Now each of these, in its own way is an act of faith.

-John Dominic Crossan ¹

According to the old joke, a little boy came home from school angry because he had been told by a playground informant the unsettling truth that there really was no Santa Claus, that all these years his parents had been perpetrating a well-crafted hoax. The boy felt betrayed. "I found out today that Santa Claus is not real," he sputtered at his mother. "And another thing," he hissed as he turned away. "I'm going to get to the bottom of this Jesus business, too."

Getting to the bottom of this "Jesus business" has lately become a major preoccupation in some quarters of New Testament research (and, indeed, serves as the theme of this issue of THEOLOGY TODAY). Herschel Shanks, editor of Bible Review, describes historical Jesus studies as "one of the hottest buttons in biblical studies." Albert Schweitzer's old, turn-of-the-century "quest of the historical Jesus" and the revived quest of the 1960s have now yielded to the new and improved quest for the hard copy historical data regarding the enigmatic Jewish peasant who serves as the key figure of the Gospels.

Who was Jesus, really? Today, scholars employ an impressive array of new sociological, anthropological, and literary methods as they tweezer through the scanty textual and archaeological evidence attempting to answer that question, and their efforts over the last decade have produced a half dozen major books and numerous lesser ones on the historical Jesus.

What have they uncovered? As anyone familiar with academic ways would expect, the researchers do not agree. Some scholars retain the view-the consensus until recently-that the Jesus of history was an eschatological prophet who saw himself standing astride the faultline of

¹ Quoted in The Search for Jesus: Modem Scholarship Looks at the Gospels (Washington: Biblical Archaeology Society, 1994), p. 80.

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history calling for repentance even at the very moment that the tectonic plates of the ages had begun to shift. Intriguingly (and controversially), most North American researchers have moved away from this position. They have turned their backs on the eschatological Jesus, the Jesus with his eye on the coming cloud and his finger on the failing pulse of a dying world, and embraced a more wisdom-oriented, politically savvy, this-worldly Jesus. More and more, Jesus historians are seeing him as a cynic, a wandering sage, or a peasant mystic; a community organizer, a hippie poet jabbing at the establishment, or a street smart provocateur who raps his way through the seething, impoverished, socially volatile villages of backwater Palestine.

There is much novel, unexpected, and unconventional in these emerging portraits of Jesus, but there is little new, of course, in the process by which they were produced.  Ever since Reimarus in the mid-eighteenth century challenged, on historical grounds, much that the New Testament claimed about Jesus, each new generation of biblical scholars has, quite naturally, inserted the known data about Jesus into the methodological machinery currently in vogue, turned the crank, and announced whatever came out the other end as the "real" historical Jesus behind the myth.

At least as interesting as the results of this latest round of research is the wide public attention that it has garnered. The current quest for the historical Jesus has received front page treatment in The New York Times Book Review and cover story status in popular magazines; television talk shows have discovered that Jesus is good for ratings; a pastor in the Northwest reports that Marcus Borg's Jesus: A New Vision continues to be the book of choice in lay discussion groups nearly a decade after it first appeared.

In one sense, this is not surprising. The prospect of seeing the "real Jesus" unprotected by his Sunday School bodyguards has always drawn a crowd. Over a century-and-a-half ago, David Strauss's daring The Life of Jesus, Critically Examined cost him his teaching job at Tübingen but earned him a massive readership, not only in Germany but throughout Europe and America as well. The Life of Jesus became a nineteenth century "media event." In a time when few German theological works made it out of the Black Forest, it was quickly translated into English, meriting the gifts of no less than George Eliot as translator.²

Admittedly, a measure of the current public curiosity about the historical Jesus has been generated by the researchers themselves, some of whom have been deliberately playing to the gallery. The prime example is the well-publicized "Jesus Seminar," which has, among its aims, the otherwise worthy goal of drawing the general public into the scholarly conversation about religion. However, their glitzy practice of tossing beads of various colors into a box to vote on the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus seems a contrivance, possessing a certain game show, cable-ready

² Cullen Murphy, "Who Do Men Say That I Am?" The Atlantic, 258 (December, 1986), p. 41.

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sparkle, the sort of thing that could end up on stage in Vegas (one can even imagine Vanna White announcing the results of each ballot).

But even if the scholars were not working the angles, even if they were not trolling for press coverage, there would still be considerable lay interest in their work.

Why?

On the positive side, part of the reason is that thoughtful Christians are eager to see Jesus as a historically credible person. They may recognize the vital theological truth in such statements as "I am the resurrection and the life" or "Now the Son of Man has been glorified, and God has been glorified in him," but they have a difficult time imagining a human being actually speaking to other people in just that way. To find modern scholarship probing beneath the theologically freighted language of the Gospels and discovering a Jesus who does not float above circumstance but who makes sense as a participant in the social order of a specific time and place comes as something of a relief.

On the more negative side, however, there is the latent suspicion (or, for some, the anxious fear) that the "real" Jesus behind the traditions and the Jesus of the Gospels are finally contradictory, indeed, that the "real" Jesus is the victim of a churchly coverup, that there is surely a "Passover Plot" or two waiting to be uncovered. The insinuation is that under the "Santa Claus" talk of Jesus as messiah, as worker of wonders, as the risen and living Lord, the church is hiding a disturbing little secret, namely a more honest, down-to-earth, factual, believable version of the storytherefore, the trembling eagerness to "get to the bottom of this Jesus business."

It is fascinating, however, to observe that, time and again, the Jesus historians themselves cannot quite get to the bottom of this Jesus business. Tracking him down the corridors of history, they keep catching glimpses of a Jesus who will not be domesticated, a Jesus who slips out of the scholars' calipers, a Jesus whose force will not be tamed, even by the harness and bit of historical research. At the close of the second volume of his massive A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, John Meier concludes that his research has led him, not to a kind-hearted rabbi who preached gentleness, troubled no one, and who "is instantly relevant to and usable by contemporary ethics, homilies, political programs, and ideologies of various stripes," but rather to a "strange, marginal Jew" whose wild prophetic presence mediated the imminence of God's reign.

Not long ago, the Smithsonian held a public symposium on historical Jesus research. In the question-and-answer period, a curious member of the audience asked Marcus Borg if the new historians, for all their sophisticated methods, were not simply treating the data as a mirror, claiming to see Jesus but actually beholding only their own reflections. "I'm wondering," said the questioner, ". . . if these views of Jesus don't reflect more on the 20th century than they do on the first century. I mean, [Jesus is] sort of a stand-up comedian, a cynic, a sort of new age mystic. Are we hearing more about the 20th century than the first?"

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In reply, Borg admitted the obvious, that historians can only see from where they stand, but, then, added that the Jesus he sees emerging from the research is, in fact, not the Jesus he would have preferred to find. In short, Borg said that if he had been trying to use historical research to shield himself from a troubling, demanding Jesus, he had failed. "I don't have any interest in Jesus being a peasant reformer," he said. "I'd rather he was a middle class guy who drove a Mitsubishi . . . . "³

In a deeper sense, not only is Jesus not a middle class guy who drove a Mitsubishi, he also refuses to lie still on the examining table while the historians conduct an autopsy. He is a living presence who spills over the dam built to separate the past from the present. "I began my scholarly study of Jesus," Borg reports, "as an 'unbelieving son of the church'. . . , I did not yet understand (and therefore did not believe) its central claims." But something has happened to Borg. "The study has continued," he states, "through the glimmering of understanding and the birth of belief, embryonic but growing. "⁴

Even John Dominic Crossan, the author of one of the more provocative of the new books on Jesus and one who shares a measure of the suspicion that the church has produced "Christs" that "mute, mitigate, or manage" the program of the true, historical Jesus, nonetheless acknowledges the limits of his method and the elusiveness of his subject. He imagines a conversation between himself and Jesus:

"I've read your book, Dominic," Jesus begins, "and it's quite good. So you're now ready to live by my vision and join me in my program?"

"I don't think I have the courage, Jesus, but I did describe it quite well, didn't 1, and the method was especially good, wasn't it?"

"Thank you, Dominic, for not falsifying the message to suit your own incapacity. That at least is something."

"Is it enough, Jesus?"

"No, Dominic, it is not."⁵

Research regarding the historical Jesus can and should continue. "Christianity," maintains Paula Fredriksen, "lays upon itself the obligation to do history," since all of its major doctrines-incarnation, resurrection, revelation-point "to the importance of human time as the place where God speaks."

But history alone will not take us to the bottom of this Jesus business. Several years ago, Cullen Murphy, the managing editor of The Atlantic, produced a well-researched article on contemporary Jesus study. His interests were more than journalistic, however. "It would be fair," he wrote, "to describe me as a person who wants to believe."

His project took him across the country and to Europe, tracing the contours of the recent work on Jesus. He discovered the lines of the

³ As quoted in The Search for Jesus, p. 106.
⁴ Marcus Borg, Jesus: The New Vision, p. iii.
⁵ As quoted in "The Historical Jesus: An Interview with John Dominic Crossan," The Christian Century, 108 (December 18-25,1991), p. 1204.

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current debate, the shaky historical character of the Gospel traditions about Jesus' birth, life, and death. In the middle of his research, he spent a long day in Chicago interviewing several biblical scholars and theologians. "At times," he commented, "I had the distinct impression of being present at some sort of clinical procedure." But then, at the end of this day, as he walked wearily up Michigan Avenue in a light snowfall, he came to the brilliantly illuminated Water Tower.

On the pavement nearby was a Salvation Army band, which as I approached, began to play "O Little Town of Bethlehem. " And I must say that it was quite a thrill.⁶

Indeed.