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Who Was Jesus of Nazareth?

This little volume will outline two major domains of biblical thought that are absolutely necessary for a foundation in studies about Jesus. Who was Jesus and what did he do? (chapters 1 and 2). Additionally, we must address the role of myth and folklore, as these impact what people come to believe as tenets of faith (chapters 3 and 4).

First we must address the following question: who was Jesus of Nazareth? By way of answer, we shall turn to the classic work of Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. This is a late-nineteenth-century–early-twentieth-century work. There are also second-, third-, and fourth-quest endeavors, with several modern contributions. We must start, however, with Schweitzer’s classic contribution to the literature.1

It would be so much easier if all we needed to do was read the four Gospels. Unfortunately the four Gospels don’t tell us nearly as much as we need to know. They were written between ca. 70 ce and 110 ce by men who ascribed their work to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. They each wrote from a different viewpoint or perspective. Mark was a lot like a reporter who wrote with little elaboration. Matthew and Luke, however, were storytellers. Matthew was telling his version of the story to Jews. Luke was telling his version to gentiles. Alternatively, John was probably writing his version of events to Greeks. John was less like a reporter or a storyteller, and more like a poet.

I hesitate to say this, but it even makes a difference which version or translation of the New Testament a person uses. Not all scholars agree on the meaning of the Greek words. Jesus spoke Aramaic. This makes translation even more difficult.2

There has always been, and evidently will be for a long time to come, people who desire (even demand) the following: 1) that the so-called written Word of God—that is, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments—be held as containing the divinely inspired Word of God, even to the point of believing that God directed the point of the pen; 2) that these books are forever held as being absolutely inerrant, i.e., without error; these two doctrinal tenets of faith held by (practically) all Christian fundamentalists, in spite of the knowledge of ancient languages combined with the disciplines of the higher (historical) criticism and the lower (textual) criticism, reflect not simply a stubbornness to reason, but a preference to dwell in the land of sheer ignorance.

As a result of the Enlightenment, which took place throughout Europe and England (especially in Germany) in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, literally hundreds of scholars began to investigate the Bible in both literary and historical ways. Theology was not neglected, but it slowly took a backseat to historical investigation.

Until the enlightenment, Christendom clung to the doctrines and creeds of the church. After the Nicene Creed and its offspring, the Apostles’ Creed, there reigned supreme among theologians and church fathers the Definition of Chalcedon. Chalcedon (451 ce) attempted to define and describe, once and forever, the relationship between the earthly Jesus and the heavenly Christ—that is, the substantive makeup of the human Jesus versus the divine Christ.

Therefore, following the holy Fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance [ὁμοούσιος] with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood.3

Approaches to the Historical Backdrop: Super Naturalistic-Rationalistic/Spiritualistic-Mythological

With the publications of the first “Lives of Jesus,” there burst forth a wealth of conjecture and scholarship never before known to humankind. In the wake of the predominant supernaturalists came the rationalists. I include with the rationalists the spiritualists, who attempted to put a spiritual take on the miracles, including the healings, the resurrections, and the water, fish, and feeding episodes.

A third approach to the Jesus narratives, following the supernaturalists and the rationalists, was the way of David Friedrich Strauss. According to modern scholar Bart D. Ehrman,

The supernatural interpretation can’t explain the text and the natural explanation ignores the text. According to Strauss, both modes of interpretation err precisely because both of them see the story as a historical account. In fact, Jesus’ walking on the water is not an actual historical event but a myth—a history-like story that is trying to convey a truth.4

Strauss developed the concept of the myth. We must understand the word “myth” as having several meanings. Following Strauss, we understand that myth, while being untrue in a literal sense, may be a vehicle for the conveyance of truth. We consider fairy tales to be myths because they often convey deep truth. This emphasis on myth would get Strauss into a lot of trouble. Nevertheless, his work remains seminal.

This third category, in addition to the supernaturalists and the rationalists, contains many “Lives of Jesus.” Ehrman states,

One thing has remained constant since Strauss. There continue to be scholars—for most of this century, it’s been the vast majority of critical scholars—who think that he [Strauss] was right, not in all or even most of the specific things he said, but in the general view he propounded.5

Before we look further at these three, let us look briefly at another tribe or school of scholars. I call them the apocalyptics because they bring out into the open the questions to which I referred earlier. Who was Jesus? What was his understanding of himself? What did the Messiah mean to Jesus? Was his Messianic ambition his own view of the Messiah, or the traditional Jewish view of the Messiah? Was Jesus the Son of Man? What does “Son of Man” mean or imply? And perhaps most crucial of all, what was meant by the “kingdom of God”? Was it a future paradise in eternity, or was it a present possibility for those following Jesus?

Increasingly, in the study of the lives of Jesus we face the question of Jesus and his belief in the last times, the echaton facing the demise of the world. As things worked out, Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus essentially ended the quest. It would take two world wars and a revival of faith in the “living Christ” before there would be a renewed interest in the historical Jesus. In the neo-liberal and neo-orthodox periods, personages such as Karl Barth, Rudolph Bultmann, Emile Brunner, Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich dominated the theological scene. Additionally, there were Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale, neither of whom were neo-orthodox, but both of whom were ultra liberal in their hermeneutics, their theory and method of interpretation.

Seventy Lives of Jesus in the Nineteenth Century: Schweitzer’s Attempt to Make Sense of the Quest

Each “Life of Jesus” had some powerful effect on its author.

Reimarus evaded that woe by keeping the offence to himself and preserving silence during his lifetime—his work, “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples,” was only published after his death by Lessing. But in the case of Strauss, who, as a young man of twenty-seven, cast the offence openly in the face of the world, the woe fulfilled itself. His “Life of Jesus” was his ruin.6

There is a literary Jesus, a synoptic Jesus, an eschatological Jesus, a Messianic Jesus, a Son-of-Man Jesus, and, for our purpose, a historical Jesus. There are implicit problems with all of them. The best place to begin is to attempt to give answer to the question, how did Jesus think of himself?

1. Did he define himself as the Messiah? If so, in what sense? The Jewish view of Messianic reality was of political and military predominance. The Messiah is not one who would suffer and be crucified and buried in a cave. Emphatically, the Jesus of history did not conform to the Jewish idea of Messiahship. Did Jesus think of himself as the suffering servant of Isaiah? If so, this was quite foreign to the Jewish idea of stately, political, and religious stature. The Jewish Messianic vision was absolutely foreign to the suffering servant of Isaiah as developed in Isaiah 52:13–53—53:1–12.

2. Did Jesus think of himself as the Son of Man? The Son of Man idea emanates from the Old Testament book of Daniel: “To him was given dominion and glory and kingdom . . . one like a son of man” (7:1–14). Was the Son of Man a metaphor for the deliverer of Israel? Did Jesus adopt this term in reference to himself?

3. What about the kingdom of God? There is no question that Jesus taught about the coming of the kingdom. Was the kingdom a place or a state of mind in which one commands and conducts oneself to be always under God’s rule? Or, was the kingdom the product of the eschatological end-times? Of course, not everyone would be admitted to the future kingdom. Only those who survived the final judgment. Jesus taught about the coming Messiah and the Son of Man, but he always stopped short of self-identification with these concepts. There is little question that his favorite oratorical theme was the kingdom of God. The question remains, did Jesus actually identify himself as being the incarnation of the concepts about which he taught?

4. We must also note that the evidence, both internal (biblical) and external (including the Apocrypha, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and personages such as Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Josephus) almost always points not to a full lifetime of Jesus, but rather only to his two-to-three years of teaching, healing, and public ministry.

The truth is, in terms of historical veracity, we know very little about the life of Jesus. The seventy “lives of Jesus” reflect, according to Schweitzer, not only the different epochs of time, but also the various points of view of the individual researchers. This is to say, if Professor x is a rationalist or spiritualist, he/she will come up with a rationalistic or spiritualistic Jesus. If Professor y is one who believes in the millennium, he/she will somehow find a Jesus who believes in the coming of the millennium. If Researcher z is an apocalyptic personage, he/she will somehow end up with an apocalyptic Jesus. Schweitzer says, “There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a life of Jesus.”7 He also comments that:

The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world has never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record.8

If this conclusion by Schweitzer is accurate, then we have an excellent illustration of how constructivism works!9 In truth, each researcher, from Reimarus to Paulus to Strauss, has constructed the version of Jesus his scholarship has led him to see and to create. The work of deconstruction includes the study of each individual who has endeavored to write a life of Jesus. Who is he? (Yes, they were all men.) What is his background? What is his life story? What shade of theological assumptions tended to color his hermeneutic, his interpretation of the events and sayings of Jesus?

Reimarus, Paulus, and Strauss

Reimarus was not published until after his death. Paulus, the second of our noted scholars, was denied several academic positions and stripped of others. Strauss, perhaps the greatest of the scholars, was practically run out of town.

Herman Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) wrote seven fragments. Today we call them essays.

To say that the fragment on “The Aims of Jesus and His disciples” is a magnificent piece of work is barely to do it justice. This essay is not only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a masterpiece of general literature.10

Reimarus was a deist and a rationalist. He did not believe in miracles. Reimarus believed Jesus to be a product of his time who believed in the Jewish expectation of a forthcoming Messiah. Jesus was absolutely human. Reimarus portrayed Jesus as one who spoke forth about the kingdom of God being at hand: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matt 3:2). Baptism and the Lord’s Supper must not be interpreted as meaning there is a new religion.

Baptism in the name of Jesus signified only that Jesus was the Messiah . . . for the only change which the teaching of Jesus made in their [the Jews’] religion was that whereas they had formerly believed in a Deliverer of Israel who was to come in the future, they now believed in a Deliverer who was already present.11

According to Reimarus, Jesus fully expected people to respond to his message about the kingdom of God being fulfilled in himself, e.g., Jesus, the Messiah.

Heinrich Paulus (1761–1851) was a thoroughgoing rationalist. Every miracle ascribed to Jesus, including the feeding of the five thousand, the walking on the water, and his resurrection from the dead can be explained. Many miracles are ascribed to simple misunderstandings. Everybody followed the lead of Jesus and his disciples, who shared their food with each other. This served as an invitation for the crowd to also share their baskets of food. The boat failed to go very far out in the water because the wind was blowing inward toward shore. Jesus was wading as he tried to help Peter get back in the boat. The resurrection didn’t really happen because Jesus was not really dead.

When I was a student at Princeton Seminary (1953–1956), I often found myself trying to explain the miracles by coming up with explanations such as those rendered by Paulus. In bull sessions with other students, I seemed to be the loner. Like Paulus of old, I believed that Jesus was only a man. He was human. My own time in the pastoral-preaching ministry was devoted to this type of interpretation. My goal was to help bring the carpenter, the son of Joseph and the leader of men, to life in the eyes and hearts of my congregants. I tried to be completely rational in my approach to the miracles, especially in matters pertaining to the alleged virgin birth and the resurrection. I would attempt to spiritualize that which I could not otherwise explain. Healing miracles seemed to give me more latitude than other types of miracles. I dwelt heavily on the parables and teachings of Jesus, always concerned with making the scene and the situation come alive. I certainly neglected (ignored) the apocalyptic Jesus messages and behaviors. I always celebrated the Jesus who reputedly gave us the Sermon on the Mount.

According to Paulus, Jesus seemed to work miracles only because people did not fully comprehend his movements and his ability to help people gain perspective and resolution of their dilemmas. Jesus sometimes used the power of suggestion. Sometimes, according to Paulus, Jesus used medicines known only to him: “The truly miraculous thing about Jesus is himself, the purity and supreme holiness of His character, which is, not withstanding, genuinely human, and adapted to the imitation and emulation of mankind.”12

Schweitzer says that, for Paulus, the question of miracles can neither be overthrown nor attested as truth, and that everything that happens in nature emanates from the omnipotence of God.13 In short, Paulus refused to accept miracles at face value. One way or another, everything could be explained away. To Paulus, believing was seeing. People believed what they thought they saw and saw what they believed. Paulus, according to Schweitzer, was a fully developed and thoroughgoing rationalist. According to Schweitzer, the rationalistic approach by Paulus to the study of the life of Jesus was destroyed by Strauss.

David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) is heralded by many scholars, including Schweitzer, as being the central figure in the quest of the historical Jesus. In short, he is the myth scholar, because myth is the method by which he retains the integrity of the teachings of the historical Jesus, protecting and defending Jesus’ teachings and physical actions before the crowds of adoring admirers. (I would here interject, for the sake of the reader in attempting to better understand the twenty-first-century meaning of the word “myth,” that we perhaps can grasp Strauss’s intended meaning by using the phrase “legendary myth.”) It is, for Strauss, myth-based or grounded in legend. Strauss did not intend to tie myth to untruth, but rather to legendary truth.

Schweitzer claims,

Considered as a literary work, Strauss’ [sic] first Life of Jesus is one of the most perfect things in the whole range of learned literature . . . Myth formed . . . the lofty gateways at the entrance to, and at the exit from, the Gospel history; between these two lofty gateways lay the narrow and crooked streets of the naturalistic explanation.14

Prior to Strauss, myth had been used in Old Testament interpretation, but not in New Testament exegesis or hermeneutic. Strauss reminds his readers that there were no eyewitness reports regarding the sayings, teachings, and movements of Jesus. Nothing was written down at the time of events and episodic happenings.

Schweitzer describes Strauss’s method thusly:

The supernaturalistic explanation of the events of the life of Jesus had been followed by the rationalistic, the one making everything supernatural, the other setting itself to make all the events intelligible as natural occurences. Each had said all that it had to say. From their opposition now arises a new solution—the mythological interpretation. This is a characteristic example of the Hegelian method—the synthesis of a thesis represented by the supernaturalistic explanation with the antithesis represented by the rationalistic interpretation . . . Each incident of the life of Jesus is considered separately; first as supernaturally explained, and then as rationalistically explained, and the one explanation is refuted by the other . . . in these Strauss recognises only the last desperate efforts to make the past present and to conceive the inconceivable; . . . he sets up the hypothesis that these inexplicable elements are mythical.15

As an example of Strauss’s use of legendary mythology, let us now consider the reputed conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary by the Holy Spirit.

• Matthew 1:21–23: “An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means ‘God is with us.’”

• Isaiah 7:14: “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman [Hebrew almah, “young woman”; Greek parthenos, “virgin”] is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel [“God with us”].

Strauss comments:

In the world of mythology many great men had extraordinary births, and were sons of the gods. Jesus himself spoke of his heavenly origin, and called God his father; besides, his title as Messiah was—Son of God . . . In conformity [with the passages above] the belief prevailed that Jesus, as the Messiah, should be born of a virgin by means of divine agency . . . But according to historical truth, Jesus was the offspring of an ordinary marriage, between Joseph and Mary; an explanation which, it has been justly remarked, maintains at once the dignity of Jesus and the respect due to his mother.16

It was . . . a common notion among the Jews . . . that the Holy Spirit co-operated in the conception of pious individuals; moreover, that God’s choicest instruments were conceived by divine assistance of parents, who could not have had a child according to the natural course of things. And if, according to the believed representation, the extinct capability on both sides was renewed by divine intervention (Rom 4:19), it was only one step further to the belief that in the case of the conception of the most distinguished of all God’s agents, the Messiah, the total absence of participation on the one side was compensated by a more complete superadded capability on the other . . . thus must it have appeared to the author of Luke [Luke 1:37, for nothing will be impossible with God], since he dissipates Mary’s doubts by the same reply with which Jehovah repelled Sara’s incredulity. Neither the Jewish reverence for marriage, nor the prevalent representation of the Messiah as a human being, could prevent the advance to this climax; to which, on the other hand, the ascetic estimation of celibacy, and the idea, derived from Daniel, of the Christ as a superhuman being, contributed.17

Strauss develops his mythus, on the order of the above, throughout the entire synoptic narratives, dealing laboriously with almost every episode involving Jesus. Schweitzer’s summation runs as follows:

In the stories prior to the baptism, everything is myth. The narratives are woven on the pattern of Old Testament prototypes, with modifications due to Messianic or messianically interpreted passages. Since Jesus and the Baptist came into contact with one another later, it is felt necessary to represent their parents as having been connected. The attempts to construct Davidic genealogies for Jesus, show us that there was a period in the formation of the Gospel History during which the Lord was simply regarded as the son of Joseph and Mary, otherwise genealogical studies of this kind would not have been undertaken. Even in the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, there is scarcely more than a trace of historical material.18

The above quotation from Schweitzer serves as an excellent example of Strauss’s methodology. In his entire book, Strauss allows us to see the supernaturalistic explanation, as well as the rationalistic explanation prior to his development of the mythus.

The Jesus Seminar: Funk and Hoover

The most notable event in the modern quest for the historical Jesus is the creation of The Jesus Seminar and its sponsoring agency, the Westar Institute. Led by Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover, its noteworthy publication is The Five Gospels: What did Jesus Really Say?19 This work from 1993 is a search for the authentic words of Jesus, with over one hundred participating New Testament scholars actually voting according to a four-point scale on the likelihood of Jesus speaking or saying the words of a sentence, phrase, or paragraph. One of the three dedicatees is David Friedrich Strauss!

The authors take the view that John the Baptist, not Jesus, was the true eschatological/apocalyptic figure. Funk and Hoover claim that in the seventies and eighties, scholars were free from the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth and the idea of an eschatological Jesus. “John the Baptist, not Jesus, was the chief advocate of an impending cataclysm, a view that Jesus’ first disciples had acquired from the Baptist movement.”20 Funk and Hoover state that “Jesus himself then rejected that mentality in its crass form, quit the ascetic desert, and returned to urban Galilee.” Jesus’ new point of view was characterized by the parables and his emphasis on God’s imperial rule.21

Jesus’ followers did not grasp the subtleties of his [Jesus’] position and reverted, once Jesus was not there to remind them, to the view that they learned from John the Baptist. As a consequence of this reversion, and in the aura of the emerging view of Jesus as a cult figure analogous to others in the Hellenistic mystery religions, the gospel writers overlaid the tradition of sayings and parables with their own memories of Jesus. They constructed their memories out of common lore, drawn in large part from the Greek Bible, the message of John the Baptist, and their own emerging convictions about Jesus as the expected messiah—the Anointed.22

The Apocalyptic Prophet: Bart Ehrman

Bart Ehrman published Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium in 1999. This work stands today as a landmark study because it considers all of the Jesus material—that is, all of his parables, warnings, prognostications, teachings about the kingdom of God, healing episodes, fishing episodes, and feeding episodes. Ehrman does not utilize the methodology of the Jesus Seminar (that is, attempting to judge the authenticity of material that may or may not “sound” like something Jesus would or would not have said).

As with the primary contributors to the Jesus Seminar, Ehrman is free of denominational or creedal ties and affiliations. He writes from the perspective of sound New Testament scholarship, carefully tracing the lexical roots of the Jesus material, and his bibliography is instructive for all New Testament endeavors.

Ehrman is emphatically not in the supernaturalist camp, nor is he in the rationalist-naturalist sphere of influence. He does not identify with Strauss’s views concerning the mythus, or what I have called legendary myth. Further, he does not agree with Funk and Hoover regarding Jesus’ alleged breaking away from the teachings of John the Baptist and his apocalyptic message.

In Ehrman’s view, there is no other viable explanation for Jesus’ teachings and interventions than as an apocalyptic prophet who believed in the imminent coming of the end times.

The historical Jesus did not teach about his own divinity or pass on to his disciples the doctrines that later came to be embodied in the Nicene Creed. His concerns were those of a first-century Jewish apocalypticist. Jesus anticipated that the end of the age was coming within his own generation. God would soon send a cosmic judge from heaven to right all the wrongs of this world, to overthrow the wicked and oppressive powers that opposed both God and his people, to bring in a perfect kingdom in which there would be no more hatred, war, disease, calamity, despair, sin, or death. People needed to repent in view of this coming day of judgment, for it was almost here . . . It’s no wonder that a figurative [naturalistic, rationalistic, legendary myth] construal of Jesus’ words became so popular so soon and achieved such dominance for so long. If Jesus were to be taken literally—that is, if he really meant that the Son of Man was to arrive in the lifetime of his disciples—he was obviously wrong.23

If Ehrman is correct in his analysis, and I personally believe he is closer to the truth than most scholars are willing to admit, then we can probably infer that Jesus was but one of many would-be prophets and apocalyptics of his day. It was not unusual for vagabonds and other homeless men to become wandering prophets, forthtellers of a future judgment and eschaton. While there can be little doubt about the reality of a strong legendary mythology enveloping the person of Jesus, the essential driving thrust of Jesus’ core message remains rooted in his first-century conviction that the day of judgment was soon to be a reality, and the kingdom of God was soon to be established.

Coda

In the final pages of The Quest of the Historical Jesus, it sounds as if Dr. Schweitzer is reverting to the Christ of faith, or the Jesus of faith, compared to the Jesus of history. At best, he sounds as if the impossibility of recovering a true Jesus of history compels a continuing devotion to the Jesus of faith.

In these remarks, I think it best that we allow Dr. Schweitzer to speak for himself.

Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.