Tracking jesus' bible scholars: The 3 Quests for the historical Jesus and Jesus Seminar.

December 27, 2012

Tracking jesus’ bible scholars: The 3 Quests for the historical Jesus and Jesus Seminar.

The quest for the historical Jesus is the attempt by scholars to use historical methods to construct a historical portrait of Jesus.

Since the 18th century, scholars have taken part in three separate “quests” for the historical Jesus, attempting to reconstruct various portraits of his life using historical methods.

As originally defined by Albert Schweitzer, the quest began in the 18th century with Hermann Samuel Reimarus, up to William Wrede in the 19th century.

*The first quest uncovered the truth of fraud and myth within the New Testament. These honest historians were replaced by the 2nd and 3rd quests to hide those findings and promote christianity.

First Quest

Although Schweitzer was among the greatest contributors to this quest, he also ended the quest by noting how each scholar’s version of Jesus often seemed to reflect the personal ideals of the scholar, an observation first stated by Johannes Weiss in 1890, and which continues to be observed in Jesus research (as it does in other historical studies) even today.

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) - credited as the father of the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Reimarus composed a treatise rejecting miracles and accusing Bible authors of fraud, but he didn’t publish his findings. Gotthold Lessing published Reimarus’s conclusions in the Wolfenbuettel fragments.

Baron d'Holbach (1723-1789) - “Ecce Homo -The History of Jesus of Nazareth, a Critical Inquiry” (1769), the first Life of Jesus described as a mere historical man, published anonymously in Amsterdam. Translated in English by George Houston, and published in Edinburgh, 1799, London, 1813, for which “blasphemy” Houston was condemned to two years in prison, and New York in 1827.

Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) - a US president who considered Jesus’ ethics superb and miracles ahistorical: Jefferson Bible

David Friedrich Strauss (1808–1874) - asserted that the supernatural elements of the gospels could be treated as myth.

Ernest Renan (1823–1892) - asserted that the biography of Jesus ought to be open to historical investigation just as is the biography of any other man. Ernest Renan was the first of many to portray Jesus simply as a human person.

William Wrede (1859–1906) - wrote on the Messianic Secret theme in the Gospel of Mark. He also wrote a crucial study of the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which argued for its inauthenticity. William Wrede questioned the historical reliability of Mark.

Martin Dibelius - advocated that form criticism be applied to the New Testament.

Albert Schweitzer stated that the histories of Jesus had reflected the historians’ bias.

Acting on his own conclusion, in 1913 Schweitzer abandoned a brilliant career in theology.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/

RESULTS

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/schweitzer/chapter20.html

THOSE WHO ARE FOND OF TALKING ABOUT NEGATIVE THEOLOGY CAN FIND their account here. There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus.

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.

This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another, and in spite of all the artifice, art, artificiality, and violence which was applied to them, refused to be planed down to fit the design on which the Jesus of the theology of the last hundred and thirty years had been constructed, and were no sooner covered over than they appeared again in a new form. The thoroughgoing sceptical and the thoroughgoing eschatological school have only completed the work of destruction by linking the problems into a system and so making an end of the Divide et impera of modern theology, which undertook to solve each of them separately, that is, in a less difficult form. Henceforth it is no longer permissible to take one problem out of the series and dispose of it by itself, since the weight of the whole hangs upon each.

The Second Quest (also called the New Quest)

It was a brief movement in the 1950s to revive the quest for historical Jesus

Moreover they disputed claims of extreme lateness for the formation of the New Testament and generally accomplished a consensus of approximately year 70 AD, give-or-take a decade or two depending on a specific text.

Hypothesizing about the existence of original source texts became useful for data relevant to the Historical Jesus.

Third quest

It became increasingly clear that the “new quest” was one-sided. Scholars of the new quest had a theological agenda.

The scholars of the third quest have also been accused of mixing apologetics with scholarship.

John Meier has said “…I think a lot of the confusion comes from the fact that people claim they are doing a quest for the historical Jesus when de facto they’re doing theology, albeit a theology that is indeed historically informed.

The Search for the Historical Jesus

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/james_still/jesus_search.html

~Jesus Seminar

The Jesus Seminar was a group of about 150 critical scholars and laymen founded in 1985 by Robert Funk under the auspices of the Westar Institute. The seminar was active in the 1980s and 1990s, but has since disbanded. The seminar used votes with colored beads to decide their collective view of the historicity of the deeds and sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. They produced new translations of the New Testament and apocrypha to use as textual sources. They published their results in three reports: The Five Gospels (1993), The Acts of Jesus (1998), and The Gospel of Jesus (1999). They also run a series of lectures and workshops in various U.S. cities.

According to the seminar, Jesus was a mortal man born of two human parents, who did not perform nature miracles nor die as a substitute for sinners nor rise bodily from the dead.

The seminar treats the canonical gospels as historical sources that represent Jesus’ actual words and deeds as well as elaborations of the early Christian community and of the gospel authors.

The method and conclusions of the Jesus Seminar have come under harsh criticism by biblical scholars, historians and clergy for a variety of reasons. It is the assertion of such critics that the Fellows of the seminar are not all trained scholars, that their voting technique doesn’t allow for nuance, that they are preoccupied with Q and the Gospel of Thomas but omit material in other sources such as the Gospel of the Hebrews.

Voting History by guessing and wishful thinking:

The Fellows used a "bead system” to vote on the authenticity of about 500 statements and events. The color of the bead represented how sure the Fellow was that a saying or act was or was not authentic.

Red beads – indicated the voter believed Jesus did say the passage quoted, or something very much like the passage. (3 Points)

Pink beads – indicated the voter believed Jesus probably said something like the passage. (2 Points)

Grey beads – indicated the voter believed Jesus did not say the passage, but it contains Jesus’ ideas. (1 Point)

Black beads – indicated the voter believed Jesus did not say the passage—it comes from later admirers or a different tradition. (0 Points)

Like other scholars of the historical Jesus, the Jesus Seminar treats the gospels as fallible historical artifacts, containing both authentic and inauthentic material.

Jesus Seminar

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/christianity/seminar.html