Journal: Bulletin for Biblical Research
Volume: BBR 04:1 (NA 1994)
Article: Who Needs “The Historical Jesus”? An Essay-Review
Author: Jacob Neusner

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BBR 4:1 (1994) p. 113

Who Needs “The Historical Jesus”?
An Essay-Review

Jacob Neusner

University Of South Florida

John P. Meier, A Marginal Jews: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. N.Y., 1992: Doubleday. The Anchor Bible Reference Library. 484 pp. $25.

John Dominic Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. San Francisco, 1992: Harper San Francisco. 507 pp. $30.

Key words: Jesus, historicism, Morton Smith, John P Meier, John Dominic Crossan

From the beginnings of the quest for the historical Jesus, before the middle of the last century, to the present day, intense historical study has addressed to the Gospels a secular agendum grounded in three premises. These have been [1] historical facts, unmediated by tradition, themselves bear theological consequence, the gift of the Reformation (show me as fact in the sources, e.g., Scripture); [2] historical facts must undergo a rigorous test of skepticism, the donation of the Enlightenment (how could a whale swallow Jonah, and what else did he have for lunch that day); and [3] historical facts cannot comprise supernatural events, the present of nineteenth century German historical learning (exactly how things were cannot include rising from the dead).

These premises set a standard of historicity that religious writings such as the Gospels cannot, and should not, attempt to meet. For, after all, all three dismiss what to the evangelists is critical: these things happened in the way the Church has preserved them (also) in the Gospels, tradition also being a valid source, to which evangelists appeal; these things really did happen as the narrative says (would the Gospels lie?); and Jesus Christ assuredly performed miracles in his lifetime and rose from the dead (ours is the story of the unique man, God among us). The quest for the historical Jesus commences with the denial of the facticity of the Gospels in favor of their (sometime, somewhere) historicity. So to begin with the quest of the historical Jesus, from the Life of Jesus movement in the middle of the

BBR 4:1 (1994) p. 114

nineteenth century forward, theological issues were laid before the tribunal of secular history, and theologians thought to sort out historical facts to settle theological questions.

Advocates of such a theological enterprise conducted in accord with the rules of another, secular field of knowledge altogether set forth extravagant claims in behalf of their results, which (in the Reformation tradition) serve as a medium for the reform of the faith (as both Catholic scholars before us explicitly state, as we shall see). But, in point of fact, the historical objectivity and r...

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