Quest for the historical Jesus

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The Bible, as you know it today, was most likely published within the last fifty years. Many of the more commonly available of today's editions are based on the King James Version, which was originally published in the early seventeenth century. It is found remarkable today for its language, literally, the King's English. It was remarkable in its time because, first of all, it was in the language of its people, the English (as was Luther's written in German) instead of Latin, and because it was based on the newly recognized and learned ancient languages, Hebrew and Greek. Erasmus was a leader in this "secularization" of the Bible. No longer was it a sacred text, in an unknown toungue, but a work translated from a foreign tounge, from the original, as best was available, into the vernacular.

All original texts of what we call the Bible were published in Hebrew and Greek, because those were the languages of the people who created and lived the religions of the Bible. Even modern Greek Orthodox churches, certainly familiar with Greek, and Jewish synagogues, certainly familiar with Hebrew, are distanced from the language and culture of the texts, by at least 2,000 years.

Regarding the historical Jesus, almost all of our knowledge comes from the Bible. Either he was not important enough to be mentioned at lenght in contemporary Roman historians' work, or the church fathers, the leaders of the church, surpressed all non-cannonical (outside the Bible) sources mentioning his historical existence.

Complicating this dearth of material are the scattered remanants of the chronologically oldest texts. There is no single source containing most of the Bible that dates earlier than three or four hundred years after the birth of Jesus. The result is that when two historical sources from ancient times are found, they often exhibit textual differences. What Erasmus, Luther and the King James version started, translating the texts from the original, resulted in contemporary debates concerning which text is actually the original, and which is a variant.

Part of the process of discerning this was to relativize the text itself, and study it as if it were any other piece of writing. What was once considered the sacred word, writ large, became a series of folk tales, stories, histories, hearsay, and visions. This movement was and is called "historical criticism", originated in Germany in the mid-nineteenth century, was embraced by such leading intellectuals as Albert Schwietzer, who wrote a book entitled The Quest for the Historical Jesus, and is the dominatnt intellectual form of contemporary Bible study in all major universities, and churches from the Roman Catholic to the Unitarian. The only scholars who do not take such an approach generally also reject modern theories of evolution and geological transformation.

Having relativised the Bible, scholars quickly saw that there were inconsistencies in the stories told of the life of Jesus. When Mathew, Mark and Luke are put side by side, some stories apppear in all three, some stories appear as sole stories, and much of Mathew and Luke seem to be based an another text, which no longer exists. Further more, Mark includes nothing regarding the birth and childhood of Jesus, while Mathew and Luke seem to contradict each other. In addition, the parts descibing the events after the resurection are the sections have the most variants.

Scholars also deduced that they were reading not historically accurate information, but stories, handed down orally at first, and then committed to writing, many of which had to be explained (which is why so many of the parables are explained, in the text) or stories which had been substantially transformed or entirely made up.

in our own lives, we Americans all know the story of how George Washington chopped down the apple tree, but we don't know, and we have good reason to doubt, that the story is true. Since the actual texts, the artifacts, we have of the Bible were created at least two hundred years after the life of Jesus, scholars well assume that much non-historical information is included. Further, this understanding of historical truth, to which we look, is itself a very modern idea, and had little currency at the time the authors of the Bible were writing.

The most radical modern quest for the historical Jesus was the work of the Jesus Seminar, which published its results in the 1990's. Their work was presented in the book, The Five Gospels, compiled by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and The Jesus Seminar. While its findings are not universally embraced, it is one of the most accessible introductions to the modern methodology for discerning the historical life of the man we now call Jesus.