1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus

7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus

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PENDLE HILL PAMPHLET 133

The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus

Henry J. Cadbury

HAVERFORDLIBRARYLECTURESHaverford Colledge

Haverford, Pennsylvania, April, 1963

PENDLE HILL PUBLICATIONS

WALLINGFORD, PENNSYLVANIA


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ABOUT THE AUTHORHenry Joel Cadbury is Emeritus Professor of

Divinity of Harvard University where he taught for twenty-seven

years. Biblical scholar and writer on early Christianity and on the

history of Quakerism, he was a member of the committee of

translators who prepared the Revised Standard Version of the Bible

(New Testament and Apocrypha).He is a birthright member of Philadelphia Yearly

Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends and Honorary

Chairman of the American Friends Service Committee. His

home is at Haverford, Pennsylvania. Since his retirementbe has been lecturing at Pendle Hill, Haverford College, and

Temple University.

Published 1963 by Pendle Hill

Republished electronically 2006 by Pendle Hill

http://www.pendlehill.org/pendle_hill_pamphlets.htm

email: [email protected]


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Forward

This summary of scholarly thinking about the figure of

Jesus Christ was prepared for two Library Lectures given

at Haverford College in April, 1963, and sponsored by theMary Farnum Brown Fund. It was intended to provide an

untechnical audience with an untechnical account of recent

currents and countercurrents in a field of study towards

which there is well justified lay curiosity. It was, for

example, this curiosity that led to the popular interest

recently in the discovery of writings of a Jewish sect

contemporary with Jesus and with early Christianity atQumran near the Dead Sea. The discovery was in itself an

unexpected and highly romantic one and of independent

interest, but the general public especially hoped that it

would tell us more than has actually been the case about

the figure of Jesus. That sort of curiosity appears to be

perennial.

I had met it about fifty years earlier when I came as ayoung teacher fresh from graduate study to this campus. A

group of non-academic men and women in the neighbor-

hood, including a daughter of Mary Farnum Brown in whose

name these lectures are now financed, came to me with

an informal request. They said: We believe something of

importance happened in Palestine in the first century. We

want you to tell us what it was. That lay definition of thesubject was natural and is still perhaps adequate.

When I chose the present title I forgot that Martin

Buber had entitled a book of his The Eclip se of God. This is

not the first time that Jesus and God have been assigned

the same predicate.


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At one point I thought of calling these lectures The

Quest and the Inquest of the Historical Jesus. On the whole

that seemed to me too pessimistic. Eclipse is a better term,

for eclipses in the sky are not permanent and indeed are

rarely total. There is usually at least what the astronomers

call the penumbra or corona. And there is another analogy

that I may mention. An eclipse of the sun is due to a

relatively small satellite like the moon temporarily shutting

it out, while an eclipse of the moon is due to our own planets

being in the waygetting in our light, as we say.

My own function in these lectures is suggested by a

story told me by one of the same lay circle of half a century

ago. He was a botanist and like many botanists he had gone

to Altamaha in Georgia to look for the famous Franklinia

that John Bartram and his son William had found growing

along the river two centuries before. Like all his recent

predecessors he was disappointed, but the search had

become so frequent that he found at the station when he

arrived an old Negro man who guessed that he was a Yankee

botanist on the usual quest, and introduced himself by

saying, I am the guide to the lost tree.


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PART I

Albert Schweitzers Quest And After

Fifty years ago there had reached the hands and minds of

scholars in England and America a book called The Quest of

the H istor ical J esus, written under different German titles

by a young Alsatian theological student and later translatedinto English. Albert Schweitzer, the author, has since

become better known but for other reasons. Before the age

of thirty he had secured higher degrees in philosophy,

theology and music. Then he undertook the long seven-

year task of training as a physician and he became a

medical missionary at Lambarene in Equatorial Africa.

When in 1953 he received the Nobel Peace Prize for 1952he was known much more for other achievements than for

the books he had written before 1906 about Jesus.

How historical persons become obscured

The term historical Jesus was made familiar by the English

title of Schweitzers book but it is not a new or unique one.

The adjective could be applied to any real figure of the past.The term Jesus of history is often used. It suggests that

there is a Jesus not of history, or not historically described.

What any man was actually like may be obscured in several

ways:


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1. There may be sheer lack of data. Memory fails to

supply all that we want to know. Even in literate cultures

written records may be scanty for quite recent persons. This

happened to Jesus also. Our information is painfully

incomplete. There is almost no record of him outside our

four gospels, and three of these overlap to such an extent

as to reduce their contents by half. Paul and some non-

Christian contemporaries are better documented.

Benjamin Jowett once spoke of Jesus as a person scarcely

known to us.

2. An historical person may become obscure by the

growth of unhistorical data about him. This has happened

to many other men. Even in their lifetime they become the

center of legends. Biography today is busy correcting the

image of persons who lived almost up to our time

debunking or rehabilitating them.

3. In the case of Jesus an almost unique disturbing

factor has been at work in the unusual position given him

in the Christian religion since his death. He has been

believed to have become alive again and to be alive. There

is thus a continuity more than mere recollection of the

past. He has been the object of worship or at least of reverent

and exalted regard by millions of persons up to and including

our own generation. The deification of human beings isnot quite unique, but rare enough to provide few satisfactory

analogies. Sometimes and in some places Gautama was

identified as a special Buddha. Roman emperors and some

of their royal predecessors were officially regarded as gods.

Euhemerus, a Greek writer, had attributed this process to

other gods. These parallels do not help us much in solving

the problem of the historical Jesus. The fusion of a humanbeing with a supernatural figure creates a special problem

beyond the more usual cases of mere lack of memory or

accretion of legend. The historian wishes to separate out

at least temporarily the two elements fused in Jesus in

the interest of doing justice to each.


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A suitable terminology is hard to come at. If we use for

one of the two the historical Jesus or the Jesus of history

what shall we call the other? It has become customary to

talk of the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, and the

single words Jesus and Christ are often used in a similar

way of distinction. Perhaps the combination was early

expressed by what resembles a typical double name, like

Julius Caesarthat is, Jesus Christ. If the same individual

has two roles, we need some way of distinguishing them,

just as trinitarian theology seems to distinguish for God

himself three roles, for which it used the now deceptive

word persons. Would it be invidious or irreverent to refer

to the second role in this case, alongside that of the

historical Jesus, as the non-historical Jesus?

A review of the study of Jesuss life

Schweitzers Quest of the H istor ical Jesuswas a laboriousbut also a brilliant review of efforts to write the life or to

interpret the career of Jesus and to recover even his self-

consciousness. It covered more than a century of scholarly

works, mostly German, from about 1778 to 1902. These

works were very various, representing quite different lines

of approach. They were historical, aesthetic, literary,

scientific or philosophical. The names of a few of the authorsare otherwise still remembered, like Baur, Renan,

Schleiermacher and Strauss.

The study looked at in this perspective was a

noteworthy intellectual effort. Just as biblical scenes were

long central in the art of Europe, so this major historical

search was important in the cultural history of its time.

Schweitzer himself speaks of an ethical aspect of this quest:The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology

a school of honesty. The world had 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.1


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Some features of the review

Without repeating or even summarizing Schweitzers work,

one may make a few general observations about it, that

will beuseful as we follow on from Schweitzers time to our

own day.

1. Though the quest has had a continuous aim and

has raised recurrently the same problems it has also been

marked by a progression from one phase to another. These

successive phases followed one another by an unconscious

logic. With the insight of hindsight we recognize that each

temporary approach was the natural sequel to the patterns

of preceding decades.

2. This course of study was not carried on in a vacuum.

Habits of thought in other fields both religious and secular

affected the approach. Thus the study of literary sources in

the Old Testament instigated source criticism in the

gospels. The rise of interest in comparative religion led toanother phase of the story reviewed by Schweitzer. Both of

these patterns have continued since. So the rise of the

scientific temper a century ago made the miracle stories a

very sensitive area of discussion.

3. Each scholar who attempts a solution brings to the

subject his own presuppositions or those of his background

or environment. Though the quest was avowedly historical,nineteenth century schools of German philosophy colored

the conclusions unconsciously. Others, especially men of

a later period, can detect this influence, but rarely the

scholars themselves. Thus they often seem now to cancel

each other out and leave us sceptical of the possibility of

really objective conclusions, until we undertake to

reconstruct the portrait for ourselves and forget to be on

our guard against falling into errors like those of our

predecessors.

It should not be supposed that Schweitzer himself, for

all his keen analysis of others, escaped this danger entirely.

At the end of the volume he gives his own solution. The


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key to Jesuss career and message is, he believes, a radical

and consistent(konsequent)eschatology. This expectation

of the imminent advent of the Kingdom of God affected,

according to Schweitzer, Jesuss action and his teaching.

Following his own earlier writings and a significant little

book by Johannes Weiss,2 Schweitzer relentlessly analyzes

the gospel story and comes out with this solution. He admits

that Jesus was mistaken. What he anticipated did not occur.

Schweitzer at least is not writing into history wishful

thinking. But by a striking non sequi tu rhe summons thereader to a quite orthodox type of Christian loyalty in his

often quoted conclusion. He says in part:

He comes to us as One unknown, without a

name, as of old, by the lake-side. He came to those

men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the

same word: Follow thou me! and sets us to the

tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. Hecommands. And to those who obey Him, whether

they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in

the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they

shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an

ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own

experience Who He is.3

4. Though Schweitzer does not formulate these

generalizations I think he implies them, and perhaps one

other is at least apparent to us. The very process of trying

to understand Jesus oftentimes has really tended to obscure

the historical figure. From the beginning men have started

out with the presupposition that if they could only recover

the real Jesus he would be found to have great meaning

today. They were aware that for centuries dogma had

obscured him and they wished to remove that. But the

presupposition mentioned has had the serious result that

such conditions always produce. It has supplied a motive

other than purely historical inquiry. It has made readers of


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the gospel choose and emphasize by modern standards. It

has blurred the ancient and Jewish lineaments of Jesuss

mind. It has bypassed the necessary processes of historical

imagination. It has produced portraits which reflect as in a

mirror the interests of the investigator and the general

concern of his modern age. Certainly throughout the whole

course of inquiry, both before Schweitzer and since, the

varying impact of this kind of interest has in one way or

another intensified rather than relieved the eclipse of

which we are speaking.

The sequel to Schweitzers Quest

What then has been the sequel to Schweitzers quest? First

of all the sequel for Albert Schweitzer himself. He has been

for nearly fifty years an active administrative and practicing

medical missionary in Africa. He has shown an intellectual

concern on other matters of ethics and civilization ingeneral and recently especially on the urgent world problem

of a suicidal cold war.

His views on the historical Jesus are said to have

changed somewhat, but there has been little published by

him on them.4A full length work entitled Reich Gottes u nd

Christentum(Kingdom of God and Christianity) is already

sufficiently complete in manuscript to be published withoutfurther revision and ultimately it will be published.

Meanwhile others have inevitably resumed the quest.

Insofar as Schweitzer seemed to show its bankruptcy he is

not to be blamed for that. Like the audit of an insolvent

business his book was merely the report of a condition of

affairs for which he was not responsible. Perhaps he has

stimulated re-examination along both old lines and new.

Reaction against eschatology

From one point of view the continued inquiry of the last

fifty years may be regarded as a series of attempts to escape


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from the apocalyptic emphasis which Schweitzer gave.

These attempts include the rejection of certain sayings of

Jesus as unauthentic, or as misunderstood, or as not

exclusively futuristic but compatible with the view that

Jesus felt that the apocalyptic events were already being

realized in his own ministry (realized eschatology), or with

the view that at least his ethical teaching was not

conditioned by the short range outlook (Interimsethik) any

more than it was by the utopianism of the future Kingdom

of God.

The social gospel

Schweitzers review paid little attention to American

scholarship. Hence he hardly reports another phase already

beginning particularly in this country which is known as

the social gospel. Through such writers as Walter

Rauschenbusch, Shailer Mathews and Francis G. Peabodyit was widely influential a few decades ago. It was very

congenial to the awakened social conscience of American

churchmen. Its picture of Jesus is of a humanitarian and

reformer, the prophet of an ideal social order.

Christ as pure myth

In Germany a quite different development was occurringabout the same time. That was the hypothesis that Jesus

never lived at all. It may be called after one of its

publications, The Ch r i s t My th .5 For a few years it had

considerable vogue in Germany and able exponents have

appeared in England, France, and Holland. It has been

assigned wide American support, but I think wrongly. It

illustrates the kind of logic by which one pattern followsanother. The Christ Myth hypothesis was a natural result

of observing similarities between religions. Similarities

suggest borrowing from one culture to another. It was also

a reaction against orthodox claims for the historical Jesus.


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If miracles are elsewhere characteristic of mythology, why

not in the gospels too? And if the gospels are so far

untrustworthy perhaps their exaggerations and contra-

dictions throw doubt on any real factual nucleus.

The advocates of this view rely on many different

arguments, sometimes canceling each other out. They are

each in his own way both sincere and learned. One of them,

writing in 1924, predicted that about 1940 Jesus in his

entirety will have passed from the historical stage to that

of collective menial representations.6 But in most serious

circles what has left the contemporary stage has been the

suggestion that Jesus never lived at all. All the contra-

dictions and limitations of our knowledge about him do not

require that conclusion. But the learned, if erratic,

presentation of the theory of his non-existence has had a

lasting effect in some quarters. It survives east of the Iron

Curtain and appears to be widely accepted in Russian

atheism. It has been affirmed in turn by Lenin, Stalin and

Khrushchev. Just as in Hitlers Germany the old theory of

Jesuss Aryan ancestry (Houston S. Chamberlain) fitted

the current anti-Semitism, so in Soviet Russia and its

allies today atheism is supported by recourse to the

respectable theory of some Western scholars that Jesus

never lived at all.

Jesuss mental health psychoanalyzed

Another approach to the historical Jesus prevailing after

Schweitzer published his Questwas the psychiatric one.

This, of course, reflected a mood and interest of the period.

Indeed, Schweitzer himself, with the economy of a scholar

who makes proficiency in two areas serve an academic

purpose, wrote in 1911 for his medical degree a refutation

of three writers, who diagnosed Jesus as paranoid, morbid,

and ecstatic, as given to chronic delirium, delusion and

hallucination.7


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Form Criticism

More important and durable and more widely accepted even

until today was a development that began in Germany

during the first World War. They called itFormgeschichte. In

English it is called Form Criticism. It is a study of the oral

tradition before the gospels. Following the example of their

Old Testament colleagues, New Testament scholars

undertook to analyze the history of the gospel tradition in

its oral stage before it was written down. This analysis goes

back further than the analysis of written sources. As its

name implies it hopes to discover in the forms of the

material some light on the uses to which the early

community put it. By isolating this factor of later date than

Jesus himself it hoped that one could recover the original

acts and sayings of Jesus.

The results have not been exactly in accordance with

these aims, but nevertheless useful. There are several

distinct forms of the gospel material as well as some

overlapping of forms. No uniform nomenclature has

developed among scholars, but anyone familiar with the

gospels will recognize such categories as miracle stories,

controversies, memorable and pithy sayings, parables. While

the material does not quite disclose the life situation (Sitz

im Leben)of those who transmitted it, whether in mission

preaching, confirming of converts, or Christian worship, it

does show that the material has been sifted and selected to

suit the varied interests of Jesuss later followers. That

does not in itself throw doubt upon its authenticity, as though

everything reported about Jesus must be rejected as untrue

if we can see its usability somewhere in the life and thought

of the church before the gospels. Indeed, the material in

the gospels is so varied, and sometimes almost contradictory

in tendency, that we may regard the interests of the church

as equally varied. Form criticism concluded that the

separate units even within a single gospel had had each


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an independent transmission and use. Hence there are

what I have called Mixed Motives in the Gospels,8 which

makes the identifying and isolating of early Christian

alteration of any primitive memory extremely difficult.

Form criticism hoped to recover the historical Jesus

by such identification of the consistent interests of the early

church. In some ways this has proved to be a search that

has only increased the danger of subjectivity, ignotum per

ignotius. For all that, its intention was fundamentally

sound. Indeed, its conception of the task is not a new one,but solution is not to be found by the adoption of any simple

rules. We are dealing now with two unknown factors instead

of one, two historical layers instead of one, and hoping that

by allowing for the second we can arrive at the first.

PART II

Influences Of Recent Theology

One unexpected sequel to form criticism as a pattern of

study was the transfer of interest which it promoted from

the Jesus of history to the Jesus in early Christian thought.

Of course, this also is a subject of history, the history ofideas. It is not, however, identical with the problem which

we have been following. There have been various other

reasons and interests that have contributed to this transfer.

In a sense it has been a transfer from history to theology.

What the early Church thought of Jesus is a matter of

evaluation and interpretation. Its concern was increasingly

less historical. As Christology it differs from the subject

matter of Schweitzers quest and ours. The difference might

be popularly defined as that between facts and ideas.

Theology and history are different pursuits and have

different goals. Even if the central figure in both is the same,

they become in a sense rivals for intellectual attention.


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As long as the Jesus of history was the goal, the pursuit

was only unconsciously affected by the considerations used

in theology. Theoretically at least the various historical

approaches to the Jesus of history were seeking objective

facts about him. Insofar as the facts they recovered had

value, that value was subjective and nominally secondary.

Undoubtedly the assumption prevailed that the facts of

history might in the end serve useful other purposes. The

mere existence of Christianity suggested a durable value

in the founder.

Even those scholars who concluded that Jesus never

lived admitted quite openly that this result seemed to them

a useful conclusion, freeing religion from the superstition

and inaccuracies of what they called Jesusism, and

detaching eternal truth from the shackles of temporal

connection. The different group of scholars who thought

they found an authentic social message in the gospel records

of Jesus also in their way welcomed what seemed to them

a purely objective discovery as beneficial to the modern

worldmore beneficial than the strictly individual or

futuristic gospel of other historical reconstructions.

Theology, however, thinks the historical determination

of Jesuss own existence or character is relatively

unimportant. At any rate, it is concerned more with whathe means or meant than with what he was. The Jesus of

theology begins at the point in time where the Jesus of

history leaves off. The admitted difficulty of knowing him

as he was frustrates the theologians less than it frustrates

the historians because they can trace from the earliest

times what he meant. Even if there were more hope of

success in recovering the Jesus of history it would seem tothem irrelevant to do so. Compared with sheer anti-

quarianism the problem for them today is the practical one

of human understanding. They can go back to the preaching

of the early church and find there the beginnings of their


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quest. Christianity as strictly defined begins not with Jesus

himself but only with the resurrection faith. For, as we need

to be reminded, Jesus was not a Christian but a Jew, and

the religion was founded by others upon him, not by him.

According to one tenable viewpoint the effective founder of

Christianity was the Apostle Paul.

The more recent development in gospel studies insofar

as it promotes the eclipse of the historical Jesus does so

not because of any new obscurity in that subject but because

of diversion of interest. The hope is more that the needs of

modern man can be analyzed and met in part at least by

attention to the precedents of psychology and theology which

proved so appealing in the experience of the early Church.

How far the apparent bankruptcy of the search for the Jesus

of history was responsible for this alternative interest is

hard to say. Even among those who have not struggled with

the baffling problems of historical recoveryproblems of

methodology as well as problems in the materialsthe

theological approach has an independent appeal, and it

tends to overshadow the other interests.

Transfer of interest to theology

The transition to this situation in modern times has had

various causes. The purely literary study of the gospels wasone of them, as it led to form criticism. This emphasized

the interpretive role of the early Church in attempting to

distinguish primitive Christianity from Jesus himself. This

was not a new awareness. But imperceptibly it moved away

from its original literary emphasis. The classification of

forms never played as important a role as did the recognition

of the use of items in the gospels for the purposes orinterests of the early Church. The motives of the sections

receive and deserve more attention than their forms. It

was this which was determined by the so-called Sitz-im-Leben

(life situation). Form criticism rightly recognized the oral


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earlier history of the gospel material. It also rightly

recognized that the units of that materialboth narrative

and teachinghad had each a separate history so that they

were detached from any possible reconstruction of

chronological order and of mutual essential consistency.

The tendentious or theological character of the Gospel of

John had long been recognized. The form critics extended

a similar judgment to the Synoptic Gospels. In Mark

references to place were now regarded as having theological

rather than historical importance. In Luke the references

to time now are similarly treated. There has been very little

rehabilitation of the historical value of Johns gospel, though

the extreme emphasis upon its lateness of date or upon its

Hellenistic character which once prevailed is now

discredited. John is admitted to be no later than about 100

A.D. and to reflect also a Jewish viewpoint. But it must still

be denied much authority as a book of history. If the other

gospels and John are treated more alike today that is not

because John is brought up to their level of factual

probability but because they are brought down to his. In all

four of them there is a large proportion of interpretation as

compared with sheer history.

The KerygmaThe primitive message about Jesus was thus understood

to have eclipsed the life and teaching of Jesuseven in

the writing of the gospels. Attention therefore was turned

to studying that primitive message. The scholars chose for

that message the Greek word for preaching, kerygma, and

now for many years that word has been fashionable in

English, along with its adjective kerygmat ic .They resemblein pronunciation though not in meaning enigma and

enigmatic. But there is a false sense of reality in using a

foreign term, and that sense of reality was important. The

content of the apostolic preaching was sought at its earliest


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in Pauls letters. The speeches in Acts were also used. It

was soon assumed that the Synoptic Gospels, which, after

all, though later than Paul are not later than Acts,

presented the same kerygmathough only less directly and

explicitly.

Now the recovery of the message of the early Church

is as much a task of history as is recovering the historical

Jesus, but it is not a real contribution to our subject

unless weeding out from the gospels what can be understood

to belong to this secondary stage leaves us with a purer

residue in which to find Jesus himself. The parable of the

tares reminds us that the premature desire to weed

endangers also the wheat.

The interest in ke rygmawas contemporary with a

significant early stage of the ecumenical movement. If a

common early message for Christianity could be proved or

even assumed it would perhaps provide a common basis for

the divergent emphases of a very pluralistic spectrum in

the modern sects of Christendom. The rapidity with which

the terminology ofkerygmahas caught on may be testimony

to this practical interest rather than to any independently

convincing evidence about the consistent unity of the

apostolic preaching.

When we move over to the early message of the churchfrom the gospel of Jesus to the gospel about Jesus, as

Harnack called them respectivelyno matter how early and

clearly we define the kerygma, we have diverged from the

object of the original quest. Can we assume that the

message about Jesus did or did not coincide with his thought

about himself? At one stage in the earlier quest the self-

consciousness of Jesus was one of the most universal andmost inscrutable problems. Even if not called Messianic

self-consciousness it is an area about which many of us

have the most curiosity, but in which at least the Synoptic

Gospels are most silent and objective. What Jesus did and


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said are indeed reported; what he thought of himself one

can only read between the lines. Here one unconsciously

assumes that Jesus could not have had any vaguer or lower

Christology than the first followers had.

Biblical theology

Coincident with the transfer of interest from Jesus to the

early church and its kerygmawas the increasing interest

in recent years in what is called biblical theology. This has

been a major modern trend, and like others evident first in

Continental thought, but spreading to England and America.

It is not a new interest but it has shown a new vitality.

Whereas theology may be quite unbiblical, linked more with

philosophy, biblical theology by its very name shows that it

is concerned with the Scriptures. This again brings it into

contact with the historical aspect of religion, including the

historical Jesus.By using the term biblical rather than merely

theology or systematic theology scholars introduce two

features that are worth noting. Both of them raise some

question. Biblical theology claims a unity in the Bible

material, assimilating even the Old Testament to the New.

It does not speak in the plural of biblical theologies. The

whole book, or rather this collection of sixty-six books, istreated not as development in the human sense but as

sharing a single viewpoint, what is called salvation

history. Not merely as prototype or allegory but essentially

are such events as divine revelation to Moses or the exodus

of Israel from Egypt made part of one conceptthe actual

participation of God in history.

The other feature which I am not prepared to defendis the limitation of this source for theology just to the

canonical books, or to the particular branch of human

history, the Judeo-Christian tradition, with which they deal.

Biblical theology finds the participation of God primarily, if


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not exclusively, in this sector of time and place, and of course

most significantly in the climax of Jesus Christ and his

church. Only some special characteristic like the old

doctrine of biblical inspiration, can on the surface seem to

justify the rather closed selection of material as well as

the assumption of a special homogeneity and consistency

within it.

In spite of these doubts biblical theology has a proper

role when practiced with historical perspective. To

understand how the biblical writers interpreted their

experiences and prospects theologically is entirely

legitimate. It can be as objective as an attempt to get at

historical events. To seek to describe the early Church

ke r ygmais simply to carry over to the first Christian

generation our study of the quest of the historical Jesus,

and to inquire not what Jesus was like, but quite separatelyhow early Christians understood or interpreted him. The

difficulty arises when the demand is made to bend that

primitive theology to meet our own needs as we understand

them, or conversely when it is assumed that the biblical

theology is necessarily valid and normative for all time,

and that we ought to adjust ourselves to it. The first is the

temptation to modernize the Bible, the second is the attemptto archaize ourselves.

The connection of biblical theology with the historical

Jesus is not easy to define. As already suggested, there is

something unparalleled in an historical being becoming so

important a figure in the life of a major religion. I have

been reminded of the case of Gautama and Buddhism. Not

much is known of him but he may well have been a realperson living several centuries before Christ. He was also

the teacher of Buddhist philosophy and ethics. How far the

non-historical aspects of Gautama Buddha in Buddhism also

correspond to the non-historical aspects of Jesus Christ in


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Christianity is a different question to which divergent

answers come from the students of Buddhism.

Theology, a form of dramatization

May I attempt at this point to give a somewhat simple

definition of theology as we have known it in Christianity.

It is a dramatic representation intended to describe

religious experience. It is a kind of narrative play staged in

the past and still in progress in which the drama tis personae

include human beings in imagined situations and other

beings supernatural in character and involved likewise in

the pageant or scenario. The scenery is of course that which

is assumed by persons in the period with their pre-scientific

cosmology and anthropology and the action deals with

scenes in the natural roles of the actors. The subject matter

may be the supposed predicament of the human beings and

the imagined intervention of the supernatural beings. In

early Christianity these latter are God, Jesus and angels,

and likewise Satan and other devils. Mans predicament is

one of being in danger of disaster either from his own error

or from demonic influences. He is an offender in the sight

of God. The play outlines why this is true, how an escape is

available to him either now or ultimately, and also thepossibility of not escaping. Our oldest Christian material

in the letters of Paul already shows, though in quite fluid

form, this kind of ideological background. Much of it is

inherited from the Old Testament thoughtincluding the

protagonist God who is also stage manager, the course of

the plot from creation on towards the day of judgment, and

the plight of mankind individually and collectively bothJewish and Gentile. Judaism had lately added, probably

under alien influence, angels, while demons were a very

real feature of contemporary Gentile mythology or

psychology.


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Our question is the place of Jesus when included in

this generally familiar dramatic construction. What did the

inclusion of an historical character mean for the drama

and what did it mean for the historical understanding of

Jesus? To answer the second question, it tended to replace

or supplement with fiction any possibly accurate portrait.

To answer the first question, it gave the drama a feeling of

reality. The drama had already assumed that God intervened

in events in history, but Jesus was a more significant

embodiment of this intervention. God who spoke to the

fathers in the prophets, hath at the end of these days spoken

unto us in his Son.9 In Jesuss death and resurrection God

was thought to have acted. Gods action in history is a

favorite expression of modern biblical theology, especially

the so-called Christ event.

Tying the drama to an historical figure prevented it

from becoming complete mythology. Perhaps we have in

some sectarian Christianity or in other religions the

example of what happens to theology when not anchored to

at least this much concrete history. The reality of Christ

seems to rest on a very different basis from the reality of

angels, Satan or even God. Christs life and death can be

accepted as actual events. Contact at one point with

recorded history gives the whole drama a kind ofverisimilitude.

Perhaps it is not irreverent to illustrate this by the

familiar modern device of historical fiction. The plot of such

a novel may be purely imaginative but it uses an historic

situation and/or historic characters. Sometimes the

novelist takes pains that these should closely coincide with

fact, but he may also be relatively indifferent about this.There are novels, some of them on the life of Jesus,

conspicuous for their careless anachronism about features

of first century Palestine. There are also novelists who quite

fail to be faithful to what can be known about their historical


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figures. Dr. Weir Mitchell in a novel called Hugh Wynne

portrayed my own great grandfather as an ardent American

patriot in the Revolution, whereas as a matter of fact he

was a Tory or at best a Quaker pacifist.

Already in the earliest Christianity theology showed a

tendency to use history in this way. It wanted to have

whatever advantage history could give its drama but was

not fastidious about ascertaining the actual historical

details. As early as Paul we find that the Jesus who played

a role in his thinking is partly historical but partly a

superhistorical figure. Doubtless Paul knew more of the

earthly life of his late contemporary and fellow Jew than he

happens to mention in his letters, but the Christ who,

though being in the form of God . . . emptied himself,

submitted to death and was exalted, has for Paul cosmic

significances as well. When Paul says, Though he was rich;

yet for our sakes he became poor, he again is thinking of

an act of abnegation unconnected with literal poverty at

Nazareth.10

Early reassertions of historicity

So in the whole early Christian ke rygma, in the creeds,

and in much of the familiar traditional theology, the

dramatic rather overshadows the historical. In fact oneneeds to point out that Christianity has often felt it

necessary to reassert the historicity of Jesus, his human

actuality. The creeds, whatever else they say, insist that

he was born of a human mother, that he suffered under

Pontius Pilate, was crucified, dead and buried. Against

deniers of this historicity Ignatius insisted on the reality

of his career again and again. He says, Be deaf thereforewhen anyone speaks to you apart from Jesus Christ, who

was of the family of David, and of Mary, who was truly born,

both ate and drank, was truly persecuted under Pontius

Pilate, was truly crucified and died in the sight of those in


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heaven and on earth and under the earth, who also was

truly raised from the dead.11

These features of the creeds and indeed the whole

human element in the Synoptic Gospels are not in the main

line of theological development. They appear to be a

reaction against extreme mythologizing, like that of the

gnostics. For this historical reaction we have probably to

thank some heretical Christians who mythologized too

much. After all, extremists sometimes have their utility.

Modern biblical theology shows a continuation of the

same desire to enjoy the assets of historical anchorage

without too much concern for the difficult and partly

hopeless task of recovering the actual portrait of Jesus. It

talks about the that and the what of the historical figure

and is (perhaps has to be) satisfied with the former. Soren

Kierkegaard wrote thus:

If the contemporary generation had left behind

them nothing but these words, We have

believed that in such and such a year God

appeared among us in the humble figure of a

servant, that he lived and taught in our

community, and finally died, it would be more

than enough.

12

This is in fact about all that Paul said. It is what the

Gospel of John said: The word became flesh and dwelt

among us, and we beheld his glory. The Christological

discussions of subsequent centuries were not based on

historical evidence but on philosophical deductions from

the mere premise of the incarnation.

Theologys indifference to history

The answer therefore to the subject before us of the

influence of theology on the quest of the historical Jesus is

that today as always theology tends to deflect attention from


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the subject. It is aware that it is doing so. But it does not

care. Scholarly persons try to keep an eye on both aspects

of the subject. When amazing discoveries tell us about the

beliefs of a Jewish sect by the Dead Sea, or uncover for the

first time an inscription at Caesarea mentioning Pontius

Pilate and another mentioning Nazareth, they have limited

interest for biblical theologians. Of course they have limited

relevance also to the Jesus of history. The theologians

regard their own approach as more important. Unlike

Schweitzer and his predecessors, they are aware that they

are eclipsing the historical Jesus. They are not doing it

unconsciously, and they do not mind doing it.

The historians and the theologians have a different

sense of values. The latter think their sphere, the dramatic

portrayal of human experience, is more relevant. They

regard history as useless. They quite correctly gauge the

difficulty of recovering Jesus. They quite correctly say that

history is always mixed with interpretation, is never pure

and objective. They quite correctly perceive that the

historical approach is often neglectful of the problems of

epistemology, that is of method of knowledge in general. No

wonder they get more satisfaction in the unhampered

constructions of theology. They can claim that the Jesus of

history has never been central in Christianity. Accordingto Bultmann it is the proclamation of Christ in the kerygma

that awakens the response of faith, and one cannot, one

must not, go back from the Christ of the preaching to the

historical Jesus. Jesus Christ confronts men nowhere

other than in the kerygma, as he had so confronted Paul

and brought him to decision. The kerygmadoes not mediate

historical knowledge (of Jesus) . . . and one may not seekto get beyond the kerygmaand use it to reconstruct the

historical Jesus. . . . That would be the Christ according to

the flesh of the past. Not the historical Jesus, but Jesus

Christ, the preached Christ, is the Lord.13 Perhaps such


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writers would admit that the historical Jesus was the

ultimate cause of the Christ of faith; but now at least he is

unrecoverable and certainly dispensable.

Yet the historians are not prepared to surrender their

position. They acknowledge its limitations and its

difficulties, but it remains for them a respectable interest.

They cannot take so seriously as do the theologians the

imaginative drama of theology, It seems to them irrelevant

and even deceptive. They observe it with curiosity if not

sympathy. They have enough confidence that in the course

of the future as in the past excessive emphasis will correct

itself. In fact, at the moment biblical theology itself seems

to be in a state of some ferment.

A Christology based on what one can only call the myth

of the cosmic drama of redemption seems as sterile as mere

historicity. In that drama there was a remoteness in whathad happened, and effort was required to give it con-

temporary meaning. It declared that in Christ God acted,

and acted once for all. A God who acts now is not predicated

in the same sense. A Christ who is merely a figure of history

is not more useless than is a figure in the imaginative

drama of theology unless that can be updated.

Writing as I do as a Quaker and in part to Quakers Imay speak briefly of our own tradition regarding Jesus

Christ. While the Society of Friends historically has not

always been much involved in such matters, it did revolt

from excessive bibliolatry and from the Christology that

concentrated on what happened in the first century. In its

own way it tried to reproduce in current experience biblical

experience. It did not deny the historical Jesus but theChrist was not a phenomenon of Jesuss lifetime only. The

Light of Christ had been at work in Jews and even in pagans

before ever Jesus was born, and was still in the seventeenth

century a real experience, not a dead fact stranded on the


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shore of the oblivious years, but the Light that lightens

every man coming into the world. Perhaps this was the

Quaker parallel to what is happening in biblical theology; it

is also a protest against some features of it.

Theology and existentialism

Biblical theology itself admits that without interpretation

it is unsuited to present needs. At least it requires selection

and interpretation. Otherwise it would lack the relevance

of what they call existential. For Karl Barth the crucial

matter for modern man is right decision. Therefore the

element of decision demanded by Jesus in the light of the

future coming of the Kingdom of God, or by Paul in the light

of both the future and of what had happened in Jesus Christ

is selected as significant to modern man. It may be called

crisis theology. For Tillich the keyword is being. For

Bultmann it is self-understanding. The answers to mans

predicament so defined are, they believe, to be found by

selection and interpretation within the classical scheme

of salvation. But why, if we understand what are our

problems today, should we bother to connect them even

remotely with so arbitrary and fanciful a structure as

traditional theology? Why not, as indeed many do, find ourdescription of the typical human predicament in avowed

fiction, like Dostoevski, Kafka, and the great modern

imaginative novelists and poets of many nationalities? Why

not use psychology? I am not suggesting that psychology or

even fiction is a better medium of analysis and pre-

sentation. I am suggesting that theology, even biblical

theology, if it has to be so translated, transposed and adapted,is not really more instructive. Why just because it is

connected loosely with the Bible and still more loosely with

the Jesus of history has it any special authority? One

suspects here a carryover from typical Protestant emphasis


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on the authority of the Bible and even from the dogmatic

formulation of the creeds. Decoded Christian theology looks

as though it were using borrowed credentials.

Demythologizing

At this point Bultmanns demythologizing comes in for

consideration. What I have been politely calling dramati-

zation in theology he frankly calls a myth. That is certainly

one meaning of the word myth as used with regard to other

religions. But for modern use theology needs to be purged

of myth. Demythologizing, as Bultmann calls it, is the

deliberate effort to eliminate the uncongenial from the

ke r ygma . The myth assumed a three-story universe

heaven, earth and the underworld. It included in its cast

demons and angels. It stressed the entirely speculative

program of the future, which we call eschatology. The

elimination of these mythical features may be unob-

jectionable enough, but I find it hard to see on what grounds

that are logical rather than pragmatic Bultmann stops there.

Bultmann accepts God but not I think the Devil. He believes

in a limited way in Christs resurrection but not his second

coming, nor in his preexistence. It is not surprising that

some persons fear that theology will go further, demyth-

ologizing and dehistoricizing the whole structure of orthodoxtheology.

Of course the Bultmann school does not use the word

myth in the same sense as the Christ Myth school, but it

is interesting that the period since Schweitzer wrote his

Questhas come to this phenomenon now, as it began with

the other phenomenon fifty odd years ago. The likeness

may be merely verbal. There will be some persons who willregard the actual denial of Jesuss historic existence as

not less injurious than the extreme revamping of the classic

scheme of redemption history. Each in its way obscures

the Jesus of history.


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Notable exponents and features of current theology

I have tried to describe as an amateur and outsider what

appears to be going on in this field. I shall avoid further

technical terms and the names of other scholars involved.

Those I have already mentioned are well known for they

are men in their late seventies and have been on the scene

a good whilelike Karl Barth of Basel, and Paul Tillich now

of Chicago (both born in 1886), and two years older and

retired Rudolph Bultmann of Marburg. He, like his English

contemporary C. H. Dodd, is primarily a New Testament

scholar. Philosophically they are influenced by Soren

Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and other writers of a past

generation.

The present debate is being shared internationally.

Tillich has been in America thirty years. The others have

visited this country but, what is more important, a great

many younger Americans have been exposed abroad to the

Continental scholars and to the German language and are

almost currentlyau fa i twith developments. This absence

of time-lag is a new feature of international scholarship

and a welcome one. Translation of German works into

English is also less tardy than it used to be.

There is, however, change taking place. Barth changed

his emphasis considerably and early. There was an earlier

and a later phase of Heidegger. Bultmann has had an

amazing evolution and his pupils differ from each other

and from their master. They talk now of post-Bultmannian

theology, and of a new quest while largely rejecting both

the old quest, and the extremes of skepticism about it.

How this notable intellectual process will eventuate I

do not know and I will not venture to predict. The earlier

quest had elements of merit in spite of the more general

criticism that could be levelled against it. Undoubtedly it

will continue. The biblical theologians are not likely to

escape their own temptations. They are reluctant to


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associate the ke rygmaof the church with the historical

Jesus, except as result and cause. Such reluctance is

justified. The earliest appraisal by Christians may have

differed from what Jesus seemed like to himself or from

what we should have found significant in him. Any

connections that are found between kerygmaand Jesus of

Nazareth seem to me more motivated by theological than

by historical requirementswishful thinking again. That

is a dangerous criterion to rely on. The historians should

strive to be more objective in spite of the difficulty of being

so. Perhaps for a time the historian and the theologian

should each plan to stay in his own fieldto stick to his

last. Each finds it easier to see the speck in the others

eye. Perhaps each should refrain from altercation. My old

teacher at Harvard (Ephraim Emerton) stated the

disengagement pretty drastically many years ago:

If we say that the historian must be objective,

as free as possible from subjectivity, we have to

admit that the theologian must be permitted just

the opposite standard. If his conclusions are to

have any value whatever, they must be his

conclusions, and not those of anyone else.14

A later teacher in the same faculty thought that theill-advised marriage of history and theology should end as

soon as possible in divorce.15

Tension unresolved

I hope I have faithfully described in these pages the current

eclipse of the historical Jesus, leaving the reader at the

point of indecision in which the scholarly world today findsitself. There is tension between two camps, but the tension

may not be unprofitable. There is tension also within the

single individual. Such is the complexity of our human make

up. I am not unprepared to live with this tension, nor


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hopeless about the future course of inquiry and analysis. A

biblical scholar was once asked whether he did not fear

that his studies would destroy religion. His reply was, No

more than the astronomer fears that his studies will put

out the light of the stars.

Some probable facts of history

Perhaps I should end with a few more positive and personal

reactions. I have indirectly indicated here my own position.

I find the quest of the historical Jesus a challenge to

curiosity and also to integrity as a historian. Some of my

conclusions I have heretofore put in writing. No scholar

even with the best intentions can claim to be immune from

the kind of errors which the quest has shown.

I recognize that every historical statement is an

hypothesis. As such I may give it as my judgment that Jesus

was a historical character. That he never lived at all seemsto me simply a less probable hypothesis, as it is in the case

of other disputed characters, like King Arthur or Wilhelm

Tell. The probability of his existence does not make probable

all that the gospels record, nor does the improbability of

some features in the gospels throw doubt on his existence.

The eschatological element in the gospels, recognized

by Weiss and Schweitzer, probably goes back to him. It isgenuine and is only one of his characteristic Jewish

features. Indeed, the study of Judaism in the first century

seems to me one of the most fruitful paths to understanding

him. His differences from it are fewer and less easy to

indicate. His likenesses are reassuring of some veracity

in the gospels.

His ethical interest with his somewhat radicalinsistence on it is I think another historical feature in the

oldest gospels. That also is Jewish, the flowering of an aspect

of Judaism. I do not find it difficult to reconcile this feature

with the eschatology. Psychologically it would have been


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possible for a first century Jew to promulgate a mature ethic,

suitable for a normal period of history, while preaching,

like the Hebrew prophets before him, Gods intention to

intervene in the near future.

The area of most obscurity, and the one where

conjecture is most rash, is the self-awareness of Jesus.

Even his apparent sense of authority can be accounted for

in more than one way. It may not have been a prominent

element in an otherwise extrovert personality.

But after all I must admit how much we cannot know.

Notes

1. Quoted by W. L. Sperry in Jesus, Then an d Now , 1949, p.

95

2. D ie Pred ig t Jesu vom Reiche Got tes , 1892(not translated

into English).

3. A. Schweitzer, Quest of th e Histor ica l J esus, English

translation 1910, p. 401.(The second German edition

adds: . . . )

4. Some indication that Schweitzer has justified more

than he has altered his view of Jesuss eschatology will

be found in the Epilogue which he wrote for E. N. Mozleys

The Theology of Albert Schw eitzer, 1950, pp. 80-108.

5. Th e Ch ris t M yth ,byArthur Drews. English Translation,

1909.

6 . The En igma of Jesus ,by Paul Couchoud.

7. Published in German in 1913. English Translation,The

Psy chia tr ic Study of Jesus. 1948.

8. Proceed ings of the Amer ican Ph i losoph ica l Society , 95

(1951). pp. 117-124.9. Hebrews i. 1.

10. Philippians ii. 6-8; 2 Corinthians viii. 9.

11. Ignatius, To the Tral l ian s, ix. 1-2.


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12. S. Kierkegaard, Ph i losoph ica l Fragm en ts , Princeton

University Press, 1936, p. 87.

13. R. Bultmann, Glaub en un d Verstehen, I. p. 208, 1933,

quoted and translated by Farmer and Perrin in Religion

in Li fe29 (1959-60), p. 87.

14. Ephraim Emerton, Living and Learning, Academic Essay s,

1921, p. 298, quoted in G. H. Williams, editor, The Ha rvard

Divinity School, 1954, p. 172.

15. R. H. Pfeiffer, Journ al of Bibl ical Li teratur e, 70, 1951, p.

13.

Bibliography

For the Benefit of Readers Who Wish to Pursue the Subject

The following books, from among those published in English

from 1959 to 1963, are listed. They show from various anglesrelatively greater confidence in history.

C. K. Barrett, Luk e the Histor ian in Recent Stud y , Epworth

Press, 1961.

G. Bornkamm, Jesus of Nazareth, Harper, 1961.

C. E. Braaten and R. A. Harrisville, editors, Kerygma an d

History,Abington Press, 1962.

C. H. Dodd, H is to r i ca l T ra d i t i on i n the Fou r t h Gospel ,

Cambridge Press, 1963.

M. S. Enslin, The Prophet from Nazareth, McGraw-Hill, 1961.

John Knox,The Chu rch and the Reality of Christ, Harper, 1962.

J. M. Robinson, ANew Quest of the H istor ical Jesus, S. C. M.

Press, 1959.

H. E. W. Turner, H istorici ty an d the Gospels, Mowbray, 1963.

H. G. Wood, Jesus in the Tw entieth Century , Lutterworth Press,

1960.

H. Zahrnt, The Histor ical J esus, Harper, 1963.

1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus

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