The Historical Jesus

Luke Timothy Johnson published a worthwhile article entitled The Jesus Controversy, in the August 2, 2010 issue of America Magazine. He writes about the two trends in Jesus scholarship. One group tries to show that we can ascertain to a large degree the historical details of Jesus' life and ministry. The other group tends to the side that we really can't know much at all about the historical Jesus.

In response to both camps, Johnson writes:

History is a limited way of knowing reality. Dependent on the fragmentary bits of what was observed, recorded, saved and transmitted from the past, recognizing that all human witness is biased and cautious about speculating beyond available evidence, responsible historians know they deal only in probabilities, not certainties. Theirs is a descriptive art rather than a prescriptive science. And in the case of Jesus and the Gospels, the critical problems facing all historical reconstruction are extreme, warning investigators against pushing against the limits. Thus, historians can assert with greater or lesser probability certain facts about Jesus (his death by crucifixion) or certain patterns of his ministry (speaking in parables) or even certain incidents (his baptism by John). But historians cannot on the basis of those probable conclusions offer an alternative narrative or interpretation from those found in the Gospels.

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But I emphasize that the real point of historical knowledge is not the dismantling of the Gospels but a fuller engagement with the Gospel narrative. One of the perhaps surprising results of the best historical study of first-century Palestine, I point out, is that the incidental information provided by the Gospels concerning Jesus’ political and cultural context and religious environment tends to confirm rather than disprove the information about those matters in the Gospels.

More important, I try to show how encountering Jesus as a literary character in each of the canonical Gospels makes possible a more profound, satisfying and ultimately more “historical” knowledge of the human Jesus than that offered by scholarly reconstructions. Once readers recognize and begin to appreciate the diverse portraits of Jesus found in the Gospels, not as the poor offerings of historical sources but as the rich witness of faith, they begin to sense that the human Jesus is a far richer and elusive reality than either superficial belief or superficial historical scholarship would suggest. Such literary appreciation of the Gospels also leads to the insight that despite their divergent perspectives and themes, they converge impressively precisely on the historical issue that is of the most vital importance concerning the human Jesus, namely his character. What sort of person was Jesus? Each Gospel witnesses to the truth that Jesus as a human being was defined first by his radical obedience to God and second by his utter self-giving to others. This Jesus of the Gospels is the same Jesus found in the letters of Paul and Peter and in the Letter to the Hebrews. It is the historic Christ who shaped the identity of Christian discipleship through the ages and generated prophetic reform in every age of the church.

Most of all, I try to remind my audience that the entire quest for the historical Jesus is a massive deflection of Christian awareness from its proper focus: learning the living Jesus—the resurrected and exalted Lord present to believers through the power of the Holy Spirit—in the common life and common practices of the church.

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Jesus is best learned not as a result of an individual’s scholarly quest that is published in a book, but as a continuing process of personal transformation within a community of disciples. Jesus is learned through the faithful reading of the Scriptures, true, but he is learned as well through the sacraments (above all the Eucharist), the lives of saints (dead and living) and the strangers with whom the exalted Lord especially associates himself.