On March 10, 2000, one of my closest friends and I watched our beloved Kentucky Wildcats play Arkansas at the ESPNZone in Times Square after our failed attempt to attend the Big East Tournament at Madison Square Garden. As the evening progressed, we started talking with an Arkansas graduate at the next table and ended up joining this man and his friends. When he found out that I was working on a Ph.D. in New Testament, he began to tell me the story of how he walked away from the Christian faith during his time pursuing an M.A. in English at Arkansas because of questions that his research raised about the historical accuracy of the Gospels. This conversation might have been the first time that anyone had engaged him on his own terms and cast doubt on the worldview that had shattered his faith. He listened intently as I shared with him my thoughts about the truthfulness of the Gospel accounts, and he promised to read some resources that I shared.

Why does the quest for the historical Jesus matter? It matters because people matter, and their Christian faith stands or falls on the truthfulness of the historical and theological claims the Bible makes about Jesus of Nazareth. In large measure, the quests for the historical Jesus have tried to divide the historical question of Jesus’ messianic claims from the theological claim that Jesus is God in the flesh. In the view of most questers, faith is faith, and cannot have historical validation; and history is history, and demands detached, objective investigation. But the Scriptures demand more of believers (1 Corinthians 15:17; 1 Peter 3:17). As a result, we must understand the quests for the historical Jesus because the claims of these investigations, which in previous generations might have been limited to discussions in a university classroom, now invade the homes of anyone with the History Channel or the latest conspiracy theory novel about the Church. Let’s begin with a brief overview and evaluation of the quests and conclude with some application.

Our story divides into four periods: Old Quest, No Quest, New Quest, and Third Quest. Enlightenment philosophy — which deemed all previous ways of understanding the place of humans in the world archaic and inadequate — gave birth to the Old Quest. God, if He existed at all, was distant and unable to defy the laws of science. As a result, Enlightenment thinkers questioned the Gospels because they claimed Jesus did miracles, was resurrected, and was both messianic king and God the Son. If any one of these were allowed to stand, their worldview would come crashing down. So, the Old Quest began not as the unbiased reassessment of Christianity’s historical claims about Jesus, but as an anti-theological and anti-Christian attempt to undermine the Christian faith by detaching it from its historical foundation. Reimarus, who receives “credit” for beginning the Old Quest, asserted that the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith (created by the disciples) were in conflict. As time passed, scholars who had embraced the Enlightenment worldview but still longed for religious value in the stories of Jesus created pictures of Jesus, using the Gospel of Mark, as the supreme example of theological liberalism (God’s Kingdom, the universal fatherhood of God, and the commandment to love). Their methodology came crashing down when Wrede demonstrated that Mark had a distinctly theological perspective, which meant they couldn’t trust its historical claims. In “The Messianic Secret in Mark,” Wrede attempted to destroy the “positive” attempts of the Old Quest through his argument that Mark, like the rest, was theological fiction. Finally, in 1906, Albert Schweitzer wrote the eulogy for the Old Quest that would end “questing” for nearly 50 years. He critiqued the work of the liberal portraits of Jesus as sentimental novels in which Jesus was created in their own image, and while Schweitzer did not defend the miraculous nature of Jesus’ ministry, he contended that Jesus was a Jewish apocalyptic prophet who claimed He was the Messiah.

During the next 50 years, Europe endured two World Wars. For much of this period, Rudolf Bultmann dominated the landscape of New Testament scholarship and argued that the apocalyptic elements in Jesus’ teaching were a creation of the early Church. Bultmann embraced the idea that faith and history could not and need not be combined. The only historical foundation that faith needed was the fact that Jesus lived. In 1953, Ernst Käsemann launched the New Quest in a famous lecture, “The Problem of the Historical Jesus.” He argued that the preached Jesus had to be grounded in history so that we could know who died on the cross and, thereby, understand the Gospel and not be duped by those who wanted to hijack the historical Jesus for their ideologies. While this manifesto might seem like a good start, the skeptical influence of Wrede stunted the growth of the project. The separation of the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history remained, and the tools employed in the investigation established a focus on what Jesus said at the expense of what He did.

During the last 30 years, the Third Quest has begun. While numerous descriptions of the historical Jesus have been written in this period, let’s just focus on the Jesus Seminar and N.T. Wright. The members of the Jesus Seminar championed the skeptical (Wrede) approach to Jesus by elevating the non-canonical “Gospel” of Thomas, focusing on what Jesus said, and championing a supposed democratic method that had rather contrived results because only a small group of scholars got to vote, and their counting procedure favored denying the authenticity of the Gospels. On the other end of the spectrum, N.T. Wright has painted a stunning picture of Jesus of Nazareth (Schweitzer), in which He both speaks and acts as a prophet-king who is ending the exile of Israel, establishing the kingdom of God, bringing about the forgiveness of sins, and enacting the return of Yahweh to His people in His life, death and resurrection.

Let me finish this story that has fueled my interest in historical Jesus studies for the last 15 years. I wish I could say this man whose faith had been rocked by the Old Quest received Christ that night, but he didn’t. I do know, however, that God gave me an opportunity to use what I had learned to engage someone in a way I would have never been able to do without understanding a bit about the quests. Attempts to undermine the picture of Jesus have both changed and stayed the same in the last 15 years. Real fiction has been passed off as fact in the stories of Dan Brown. Other “gospels” (of the Gnostic sort) have risen and fallen after a few agenda-driven scholars have attempted to exalt them to a status on par with the canonical Gospels. And attempts to undermine the historical witness of the canonical Gospels continue to appear on various television outlets. Sadly, people inside and outside our churches are being deceived by these pictures of Jesus that in varying ways find their genesis in the quests. So Christians must possess knowledge of these debates and, most importantly, a deepened understanding of the Gospels in order “to contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

— Donny R. Mathis is a professor of Christian Studies at North Greenville University.