In Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical and Comprehensive Assessment

The quest for the historical Jesus is a rational enterprise aiming to reconstruct Jesus’ life through a historical-critical approach to sources. This quest challenges traditional narratives by critically assessing the reliability of canonical texts. Despite significant resistance and ideological biases from scholars who might be expected to be more critical and objective, the quest seeks to contextualize Jesus within his first-century Jewish milieu, aiming at a detached and epistemologically sound understanding of his life and teachings.

See also, Why is the Hypothesis that Jesus Was an Anti-Roman Rebel Alive and Well?  

By Fernando Bermejo-Rubio
Departamento de Historia Antigua
UNED, Madrid
June 2024 

    The quest for the historical Jesus is, at least in theory, a rational enterprise which assumes that Jesus of Nazareth indeed existed and was a historical actor, understandable as any other human being in his sociopolitical, religious, economic, and cultural contexts. Its starting point is dissatisfaction with the available sources (above all, the Canonical Gospels), insofar as they are riddled with incongruities, contradictions, anachronisms, and unreliable claims.[1] By taking an epistemic approach which adopts a historical-critical view of those sources, and a detached stance towards the characters portrayed in them, it calls into question the traditional narratives, having as its goal to offer the most compelling reconstruction of Jesus’ career.

    In practice, however, things are often substantially different. Although Jesus was a first-century Jew, his cultural relevance as the alleged founder of Christianity has given rise to all kinds of prejudices and controversies surrounding this issue. To begin with, the quest itself has proved extremely unwelcome in several quarters, which have invested much energy in preventing it from advancing. On the one hand, since the 18th century until the very present, the so-called “mythicists” (Ch.-F. Dupuis, B. Bauer, A. Drews, R. Carrier…) deny the historical existence of Jesus by resorting to the most disparate arguments.[2] On the other, a trend started by Martin Kähler at the end of the 19th century and held until today by conservative theologians (L.T. Johnson, K. Wengst…) asserts that this historical search is not only impossible but also irrelevant.[3] Both extremist positions have been subjected to severe and compelling criticisms.

     Odd phenomena have also developed around historiographical matters. Since about 1986, the quest has been outlined as a three-phase search beginning in the German Enlightenment.[4] Every postulate of such a triadic model, however, has proved untenable: Reimarus did not start the quest; publications through the beginning of the twentieth century cannot be subsumed into a unified label (“Old Quest”); the investigation did not stop or decrease in the first half of the twentieth century (the notion of “No Quest” is nonsense); research carried out from 1950 to 1980 cannot be fairly encompassed through the category “New Quest”; and that done since 1980 is not homogenous enough to be deemed a “Third Quest”. Far from providing a sound assessment of the history of Jesus research, the Three-Quests model⸺under which a theological agenda lurks⸺is a pseudo-historiographical Procrustean bed in which a lot of evidence is arbitrarily deleted as nonexistent or obsolete.[5] The crypto-theological bias of each postulate and assumption of that triadic division, which provides ideological advantages for mainstream scholarship, contributes to explain the striking fact that many scholars still cling to such a faulty and unwarranted model.[6]

     There have been some recent attempts to pinpoint the beginning of the quest with Christian writers (either in ancient times⸺Pa­pias, Marcion, Origen⸺or in the modern age⸺traditions of Socinianism and Unitarianism, where the humanity of Jesus is especially relevant).[7] Nevertheless, these attempts rely on too broad a definition of the quest. Although a reliable study should not rule out in advance any plausible context, the emergence of a historical quest does not seem to have taken place within an emic approach. There were no reasons for believers to call into question, out of mere historical curiosity, their sacred texts and the events narrated therein. To cast doubts on basic certainties upon which a society relies one must have an alternative standpoint, within which objections and criticism become meaningful. Therefore, the development of a perspective on Jesus which is not subservient to Christian tradition was more easily attainable for people with a different cultural and ideological background.

    Before the German Enlightenment, traces of a critical approach to the Gospels and Jesus are detected in at least five realms: Graeco-Roman philosophers (Celsus, Porphyry…), Jewish authors engaged in Jewish-Christian polemics in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Jacob ben Ruben, Profiat Duran, Isaac ben Abraham of Troki, Leone Modena…), proto-Deist thinkers (Martin Seidel),[8] British Deists (Thomas Woolston, John Toland, Thomas Chubb…), and French freethinkers and philosophes (Jean Meslier, D’Holbach…).[9] Although their works have been ostracized by the adherents of the Three-Quests model, sound historiography cannot do without them. Admittedly, not all those authors produced unbiased portraits of Jesus⸺most of them had discernibly distorting agendas. It is significant, however, that key aspects of a plausible historical reconstruction have been advanced for the first time in some of their works: a skeptical view of the trustworthiness of the Gospels, the adoption of a detached stance towards their main character (particularly clear in Seidel and Modena), the reasoned use of comparison and analogy, the espousal of a contextual approach, the acknowledgment that Jesus was a full-fledged Jew, the sharp distinction between the historical figure and the theological Christ, and the realization of the sociopolitical dimensions of Jesus’ preaching are found in this literature. Such ideas are not achievements of con­temporary research: they were already set forth centuries ago.

    Despite their importance, those ideas did not find wide acceptance for a long time. Among the reasons accounting for this situation is the polemical vein in which many of them were conveyed, but also the fact that the dominance of the Christian Weltan­schauung in the public space, from the 4th century until at least the 18th century, meant that any genuinely critical approach to the figure of Jesus was unacceptable, thus preventing a free discussion on the topic. Things began to change after the posthumous publication of the Wolfenbüttel Fragments of H.S. Reimarus⸺and particularly of Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Jünger (1778). Several factors contribute to explain the uncommon impact of this work, which became a real turning point: it combined a critical stance, methodological sophistication, and historical plausibility within a comprehensive narrative. Whilst many former books had been written in Hebrew or Latin, Reimarus composed his work in German, one of the main European vernacular languages, and in a readable way. Unlike many books which circulated only clandestinely, the Fragments were published by G.E. Lessing, a towering figure of the German Enlightenment, in a collection supported by the prestigious ducal library of Brunswick, and later in editions of the Works of Lessing, thereby making them further available to the scholarly realm. In addition, whilst many of the former authors were virtually unknown, Reimarus was an outstanding and respected figure within the European Republic of Letters.[10] All these circumstances account for the fact that the issues tackled by him acquired epistemological relevance and became the focus of a scientific debate within scholarly networks, to the extent that much of the quest since then can be understood as a reaction to his views.

    Moreover, because of the secularization process within Western societies, it became increasingly difficult for Church authorities to prevent independent authors with very different cultural backgrounds (including atheists and agnostics) from doing research and spreading their results. For instance, D.F. Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu: kritisch bearbeitet (1835)⸺a work which deemed many Gospel stories as “mythical” compositions, argued persuasively against the view that these writings are deliberate deceptions, and presented Jesus as a deluded visionary⸺became notorious among educated Germans. Since then, instead of staying out of the quest, faith-driven scholars (first Protestants, later Catholics) chose to take part in it, usually in an effort to counter the challenge it entailed.

    Once the quest became a feature of the intellectual landscape, scholars with theological constraints have also been able to adopt an epistemic perspective to the study of the Gospels and Jesus, which allowed them to make lasting contributions to the field. Sometimes they coped with critical demands by focusing on specific aspects. Johannes Weiss’ Die Predigt Jesu vom Reiche Gottes (1892) is a careful plea for a thoroughly eschatological Jesus; William Wrede, in Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien (1901), demonstrated that at some points of crucial importance the Gospel narrative might be controlled by a theological agenda. Maurice Goguel, in his largely overlooked double article “Juifs et Romains dans l’histoire de la Passion” (Revue de l’histoire des religions, 1910), argued that in the primitive Gospel tradition Jesus’ arrest was carried out on the initiative of the Romans; Karl-Ludwig Schmidt, in Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu (1919), showed that the framework of Jesus’ life was supplied by Mark himself, debunking the possibility of writing a reliable biography of the Galilean; Rudolf Bultmann’s Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition (1921) further eroded the trust in the historical reliability of many Gospel episodes. In other cases, the special competence and historical sensitivity of scholars allow them to leave their religious convictions outside their research: this has usually happened with E.P. Sanders, R.A. Horsley, and D.C. Allison, among others.

    Nevertheless, extra-epistemic agendas and beliefs about Jesus as a normative and magisterial figure make it difficult for many authors to endorse a truly detached stance towards him, so they end up carrying out a retrojection of Christian thought back into the investigation.[11] The outcome is a host of apologetic works: at worst, dispensable publications where history is hardly distinguishable from theology (as in Joseph Ratzinger’s trilogy); at best, compromise solutions giving way to hybrid blends of history and theological assumptions (most books written in the last decades fall into this category). Since many results of strict historical inquiry debunk the inherited view of Jesus and his preaching as timeless, matchless, and blameless phenomena, the most uncomfortable data are silenced, downplayed, or denied in this pervasive hybrid-genre literature. This is why the alleged quest for the historical Jesus too often is “a quest to avoid him”.[12] Instead of serving the interest of unbiased knowledge, many works aim at authorizing the beliefs and practices of faith-driven communities, to the extent that they can hardly be deemed genuine historiography. A great deal of the self-styled “historical quest” paradoxically works against the historical investigation itself.  

    The former remarks indicate that the quest has an intrinsically conflictual nature, the main clash taking place between an epistemic/naturalistic and a normative/theological approach. The reason is simple to grasp. Any reconstruction unveiling Jesus as a thorough Jew and as a fully intelligible historical actor is hardly manageable for those authors assuming that he transcended Judaism and was a completely unique person. At the same time, despite the presence of Jews, agnostics and atheists in the field, the overwhelming majority of works published in the last 150 years comes from Christian exegetes and theologians, who, from their sheer number, dominate mainstream scholarship and dictate the terms of any consensus. In these circumstances, even the most elementary results of research, however well-grounded and compelling, are bound to arouse the deepest resistance in many quarters. After all, whilst history aspires to contextualize and understand its object of study on purely natural grounds, theology aims at preserving its object of belief and worship as an incomparable and inapprehensible being.

    The conflictual nature of the quest is perceived everywhere. The issue of Jesus’ Jewishness is particularly sobering in this respect. Whilst the consistent vin­dication of the Jewish character of Jesus’ religiosity links quite a few authors from the Middle Ages to the very present (from J. ben Ruben to Seidel, Modena, Reimarus, Strauss, A. Geiger, P. Winter, G. Vermes, E.P. Sanders, A.-J. Levine, D.C. Allison…), the process of his alienation from Judaism goes on through the ages: the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and even the twenty-first, although usually in a mitigated and subtle form) have seen a countless number of works by savants (E. Renan, W. Bousset, W. Grundmann, G. Bornkamm, J. Jeremias, E. Bammel, N.T. Wright…) openly or guardedly contrasting Jesus to Judaism. Although nowadays nobody dares to make Jesus an Aryan (as happened in Nazi Germany), and although his Jewishness is vocally emphasized, it is also too often relativized or inconsistently endorsed by the same scholars who claim to advocate it: for many of them, Jesus was Jewish, but not that Jewish.[13]

    Something similar can be said regarding other crucial aspects. The views of J. Weiss on the eschatological outlook of the Galilean preacher have been endorsed and developed in the 20th and the 21st centuries (e.g. by R.H. Hiers, B.D. Ehrman or D.C. Allison); a non-apocalyptic Jesus, however, has been repeatedly offered, from A. Ritschl in the nineteenth century to M. Borg, J.D. Crossan, and other members of the Jesus Seminar. Whilst since the 16th until the 21st century many authors (Seidel, Reimarus, Ch. Hennell, K. Kautsky, R. Eisler, S.G.F. Brandon, H. Maccoby, G.H. Buchanan…) have argued that the Galilean harboured a messianic claim and presented himself as the promised king of Israel ⸺which understandably led to his crucifixion by the Romans⸺, a depoliticized Jesus has been set forth in mainstream scholarship until the present day, thereby turning his crucifixion into a historical conundrum. Whilst several scholars (A. Loisy, J. Klausner, M. Casey, J.E. Taylor…) have quietly recognized the many phenomenological similarities between Jesus and John the Baptist, many others (J.P. Meier, J.D. Crossan, J.G.D. Dunn, G. Theissen…) present them as significantly contrasting characters.[14] Whilst some scholars (from Greco-Roman philosophers and medieval Jewish authors to H. Avalos) have not refrained from pointing out Jesus’ ethical shortcomings,[15] most of them assume the traditional view that he was a unique paragon of virtue.

    The foregoing survey makes plain that any diachronic approach according to phases does not do justice to the evidence and proves incapable of explaining the history of research: there are key contrasting ideas and views of Jesus which recur, time and again, through the ages. Works can be legitimately classified not according to the period in which they were written, but only according to typological criteria, such as contents and category of approach.[16] For instance, at the end of the sixteenth century, one notices not only Seidel’s critical pages on Jesus in his Origo et fundamenta religionis christianae, but also those of Baronius, who in his Annales ecclesiastici offers a life of Jesus which is mainly an apologetic paraphrase of the Gospels. In the eighteenth century, Reimarus’ critical work and J.S. Semler’s Beantwortung der Fragmente eines Ungenannten coexist. Time and again one witnesses the synchronic presence of deeply diverging approaches throughout history, as well as the existence of an unbridgeable chasm among contemporary works about Jesus regarding methodological rigor, critical insight, simplicity, and heuristic power.

    Quite a few surveys of the history of Jesus research claim that the most recent decades entail a decisive turning-point in the study of the Galilean preacher, as if the reconstruction of a plausible image of him were at stake only in the present. Among the factors which supposedly set the most recent research apart from previous work, the use of social sciences such as anthropology and sociology, archaeological and historical research on the Galilee, or the so-called “memory approach” are usually mentioned. There are, however, good reasons to infer that such a claim is nothing but wishful thinking, because none of those approaches have demonstrably carried out a substantial improvement in our understanding of Jesus or the acquisition of a more likely historical reconstruction of his figure. In these circumstances, everything indicates that the alleged progress in present-day research is only the result of⸺as a much-respected scholar has put it⸺a distorted perspective, chronological snobbery and the ever-present temptation of scholars to flatter themselves.[17]

    This overview allows some inferences to be drawn. First, unlike what is often asserted, within the quest some progress does take place, but only in a very relative and inconsistent way: there are indeed steps forward (such as the explicit distinction between canonical traditions of different reliability, replacement of the imposture theory of Christian origins with the notion that Jesus’ disciples underwent a messianic delusion, or an increasing sophistication in methodological matters), but many backward steps can be detected along the centuries. Second, the abundance of counterintuitive and far-fetched claims in the quest is intriguing only at first sight: the pervasive need to make Jesus safe for orthodoxy compels many scholars to exegetical detours, which are bound to persist. Third, ideology masquerading as research is also at work in the historiographical realm, as the concoction and persistence of the Three-Quests model prove. Fourth, the widespread contention that the quest is⸺because of the lack of consensus and the irreconcilable nature of the available images of Jesus⸺an irretrievably chaotic space, or a hopeless enterprise, is unsound: when the conflictual nature of the quest and the inroad of ideological interests into the field are grasped, one easily finds order and logic behind the apparent confusion.

    The unsatisfactory nature of the evidence about Jesus demands from the historians, as in the study of other figures of the past, the drawing up of hypotheses from which the most plausible reconstruction can be obtained given the available data. Any credible account of Jesus’ story is necessarily conjectural, but, when the different reconstructions are compared regarding contextual plausibility, internal consistency, historical sensitivity, and explanatory power, it becomes clear that they are not at all equivalent, and that most of them do not stand scru­tiny. Only those hypotheses which provide the most likely reconstruction of Jesus as an intelligible actor within the first-century Palestine under Roman and Herodian rule are adequate from an epistemological standpoint and deserve being taken seriously into account. The development of the quest, however, cannot be properly understood without considering the variegated and ongoing resistances to such a challenging enterprise.

Author’s note: Some years ago, the German publishing house De Gruyter contacted the present author, asking him to contribute an entry with the title “Quest of the Historical Jesus” to the Encyclopedia of the Bible and Its Reception. This contribution was provided by the author to EBR in February 2023. In June 2024, the author was told that the second part of his text “cannot be accepted.” In the face of this act of censorship, the author decided to withdraw his whole text from EBR. The text published here is a slightly expanded version.