Historical Jesus
Definition
The “quest for the historical Jesus” is the academic project, running from the eighteenth century to the present, of using historical-critical method to reconstruct what can allegedly be established about Jesus apart from the Gospels’ own theological portrait, on the assumption that a “Jesus of history” can be recovered independently of, and sometimes contrary to, the “Christ of faith” the church confesses. It differs from the historicity of Jesus, which asks simply whether Jesus existed; this quest asks which parts of the Gospel record critical method can certify.
Objections and Responses
Can historical-critical method reliably recover a more objective “real Jesus” behind the Gospels’ theological portrait? Kruger argues that the quest’s own history undermines this claim: “ever since Schweitzer’s critical review of the Jesus Quest, it is clear that higher-critical methodologies provide few certain historical results, but are often contradictory and subjective, frequently producing a Jesus made in the image of those conducting the investigation.” Kruger notes that this is not merely an outside criticism — J. D. Crossan, a founding member of the Jesus Seminar itself, conceded the same point: “this stunning diversity is an academic embarrassment. It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.”1 Each quest across two centuries has tended to reconstruct a Jesus who conveniently matches the theological or philosophical commitments of the reconstructor, rather than converging on a single, stable, more certain result — the opposite of what confidence in the method’s objectivity would predict.
Doesn’t treating the Gospels’ Christ of faith as the real, only Jesus assume what the quest is trying to test? The premise of a sharp Jesus-of-history/Christ-of-faith dichotomy is itself what Reformed theology rejects, not a neutral starting point both sides share: it treats the Gospels’ own theological claims about Jesus as disqualifying evidence rather than as testimony to be weighed like any other historical claim. A method that begins by setting aside everything the sources say about who Jesus is in order to find out who Jesus “really” was has decided the answer before the investigation begins.
Related Doctrines
References
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Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 2, “Tracing the Origins.” ↩