7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
1/33
PENDLE HILL PAMPHLET 133
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
Henry J. Cadbury
HAVERFORDLIBRARYLECTURESHaverford Colledge
Haverford, Pennsylvania, April, 1963
PENDLE HILL PUBLICATIONS
WALLINGFORD, PENNSYLVANIA
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
2/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
2
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]
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
3/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
3
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.
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
4/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
4
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.
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
5/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
5
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
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:
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
6/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
6
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.
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
7/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
7
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
8/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
8
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
9/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
9
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
10/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
10
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
11/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
11
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.
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
12/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
12
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
13/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
13
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
14/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
14
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.
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
15/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
15
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
16/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
16
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
17/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
17
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
18/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
18
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
19/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
19
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
20/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
20
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
21/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
21
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.
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
22/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
22
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
23/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
23
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
24/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
24
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
25/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
25
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
26/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
26
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
27/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
27
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
28/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
28
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.
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
29/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
29
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
30/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
30
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
31/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
31
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
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
32/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
32
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.
7/27/2019 1963 - Henry J. Cadbury - The Eclipse of the Historical Jesus
33/33
HENRY J. CADBURY
The Eclipse Of The Historical Jesus
33
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.
Top Related