The study of the historical Jesus involves an interplay between theology, philosophy, and historiography, with our understanding shaped by pre-existing worldviews as much as it shapes them. While absolute certainty about Jesus’ life is unattainable, historians assess plausibility through their philosophical and theological assumptions, making “what we can know” dependent on who “we” are. Embracing diverse perspectives, rather than enforcing a single framework, offers the best path toward meaningful research.
See also The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research: A Prolegomenon to a Future Quest for the Historical Jesus (London, 2023).
By Jonathan Rowlands
Graduate Tutor, Lecturer in Theology, and Lead Tutor for Assessment
St. Mellitus College, East Midlands
August 2025
It’s hard to think of another historical figure whose identity is as contested as that of Jesus of Nazareth. Nearly every aspect of his life and his teaching has been and continues to be debated at length by biblical scholars and historians. In recent years, some outside of the realms of “mainstream” academic biblical scholarship (e.g., Carrier 2014) have sought to bring Jesus’ very existence into question (although it’s worth noting that within academia, even atheist historians accept that Jesus existed; see, e.g., Casey 2014).
Of course, one of the reasons for protracted discussion about the historical person of Jesus of Nazareth is because of his continued theological significance. According to the latest available data from the Pew Research Center, there are over 2 billion Christians in the world; it remains the world’s largest religious group (Pew Research Center 2025). That is a lot of people who still – albeit in many and various ways – take their cues about beliefs and behavior from the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth.
And yet, this conversation is not just one-way. This is to say that, while historical claims about the person of Jesus affect how people understand and behave in the world, the inverse is also true: the ways in which people understand reality also shape the ways in which they make sense of the historical person of Jesus. History doesn’t just shape theology and philosophy; theological and philosophical concerns are always also shaping how people think about the past.
This is actually true of every historical claim conceivable. To suggest that there is such a thing as “the past” that might be thought about is already to make a whole host of philosophical claims: there is a reality that is in some sense “external” myself; I am correct to think that I am not being entirely deceived by my senses; the world existed prior to appearance in it, and the prior state of the world is something I can meaningfully think about. All these claims are philosophical claims. All these claims are essential if I am to begin to write history at all.
For the most part, these philosophical assumptions made in the course of practicing history are trivial. Unless we are in the business of practicing the most extreme form of philosophical skepticism, I think we can take for granted that the world around exists, in some way, shape, or form. However, the philosophical and theological questions that underpin historical study are brought into focus when historical questions are asked of the person of Jesus specifically. This is precisely because, as I’ve mentioned already, there is so much philosophical and theological significance riding on his identity.
It's one thing to write a history of Miles Davis, or Jane Austen, or Groucho Marx, or whomever you care to imagine. No radical re-writing of their lives is likely to change fundamentally my understanding of the nature of reality. But this is not the case with Jesus of Nazareth. Whether I think Jesus existed; whether and what he taught; whether and how he healed the sick, cast out demons, and raised the dead; whether he himself was raised back to life; my understanding of all of these historical – or allegedly historical – events will radically shape my understanding of reality. Indeed, my response to the last of these issues (Jesus’ resurrection from the dead) is likely to define whether or not I am a Christian. And yet, at the same time, my pre-existing understanding of reality – including whether I believe in God and how I might understand God’s interaction with the world, if at all – is also shaping my approach to history.
If all this is beginning to sound rather circular, that’s because it is. History shapes theology and philosophy; theology and philosophy shape history. There is no neutral, detached, or objective viewpoint from which I can think about the past, free from a pre-given framework for understanding reality. I always already see the past from some particular time and place.
This is, in part, why questions of the historical Jesus continue to persist. Each generation will “see” the Jesus of history from a new vantage point and so will have something new to say about him. But the provisionality of our ability to “see” the past has also led some to be skeptical of our ability to say anything about the Jesus of history with any concreteness or confidence.
Rudolf Bultmann was one of the most significant and influential biblical scholars of the twentieth century. In a 1926 book about the historical Jesus, he famously wrote that “I believe, of course, that we can know next to nothing about the life and personality of Jesus” (Bultmann 1926: 8 [my translation]). Was he right?
Can we know anything about Jesus?
Whether Bultmann is correct to say “we can know next to nothing” about the historical Jesus depends, to no small extent, on what we understand the words “we” and “know” to mean, in that statement. In other words, we might ask, 1) what would it mean to “know” something about the historical Jesus, and 2) who is doing the “knowing”?
First, then: is it possible to “know” anything about the historical Jesus? Well, if we’re practicing the kind of extreme skepticism I mentioned earlier – the kind that demands 100% certainty – then no: it’s obviously not possible to “know” anything about Jesus with 100% certainty. We exist at a series of distances from the historical Jesus. We exist roughly 2,000 years after he did, in a completely different cultural, political, economic, and linguistic context to him. I only have access to his particular context through a handful of pieces of textual and archaeological evidence and, when it comes to data about the man Jesus himself, I have even less to work with. And all this is before I begin to call into question the more fundamental questions about the nature of reality and the past that I mentioned above.
To be fair, the vast majority of scholars do not look for absolute certainty in pursuit of the historical Jesus. I can’t know with 100% certainty that Miles Davis, Jane Austen, or Groucho Marx existed, and yet I’m very comfortable saying that they did. I’m happy to suspend my most extremely skeptical questions about their existence; why should I hold the historical Jesus to higher standards than this? Instead, historians seek to assess questions of “plausibility” and “probability” when it comes to the historical Jesus.
And here is where philosophy and theology again come to bear upon the act of reconstructing history. All historians take some claims about the nature of reality to be true when they seek to reconstruct the past. Let’s call this an historian’s “historiographical worldview”: “historiography” refers to writing about the past, “worldview” refers to a series of claims taken for granted about the world; an “historiographical worldview” is a series of claims about the world that are taken for granted when writing about the past.
If historians are seeking plausibility rather than certainty with regards to the historical Jesus, then we might ask: what makes something more plausible than not? How should we measure plausibility?
Jesus historians have come up with numerous ways to measure the inherent plausibility of a particular saying or deed ascribed to Jesus. In the twentieth century a number of “criteria of authenticity” were proposed. For example, the “criterion of embarrassment” suggests that if a recorded saying or act of Jesus was likely to cause embarrassment to the early Church, it is less plausible that the early Church would have fabricated that saying or act. It is therefore more plausible that that saying or act is authentic (i.e., actually comes from the life of Jesus himself).
However, these “criteria” are not without their problems. For example, how could we possibly know what would and would not cause the early Church embarrassment? We would have to 1) come up with a whole series of tests for ascertaining the plausibility of claims about what would and would not cause the early Church embarrassment and then 2) use those results to assess the plausibility of sayings and acts of Jesus in accordance with the embarrassment they might allegedly cause the early Church. The entire process becomes a Russian Doll of plausibilities nested within one another. As a result, the use of strict “criteria” for assessing claims about the historical Jesus has all but been abandoned (see, e.g., Bernier 2016).
Instead, and as I’ve written elsewhere, “all historical judgements are made based on what seems plausible to the historian … an event becomes more plausible to the historian to the degree to which it coheres with his or her historiographical worldview” (Rowlands 2023: 89). In other words, we approach the past with a series of theological and philosophical claims taken for granted about the nature of the external world and how it works. When we encounter information about the past, we assess it in light of those pre-given theological and philosophical claims. The more this new information seems to match up with our pre-existing understanding of the world, the more intrinsically plausible it seems to us. Where new information doesn’t match up – or even outright contradicts – our pre-existing understanding of the world, we require overwhelming evidence to affirm it as plausible and might subsequently have to revise those pre-given claims about the nature of the world. This is what I mean when I say “an event becomes more plausible to the historian to the degree to which it coheres with his or her historiographical worldview” (Rowlands 2023: 89).
And so, here we have something of an answer to the first question rising from Bultmann’s statement: is it possible to “know” anything about the historical Jesus? Yes! If by “yes” we mean it’s possible to assess a variety of possibilities and plausibilities about the historical Jesus, and that these possibilities and plausibilities will necessarily be shaped to no small extent by my pre-existing theological and philosophical commitments.
Before we move on to the second question, let’s remind ourselves of the quote from Bultmann that I mentioned earlier: “I believe, of course, that we can know next to nothing about the life and personality of Jesus” (Bultmann 1926: 8 [my translation]). I’ve said that we need to ask two questions if we want to say whether or not Bultman is right: first, what might it mean to “know” anything about Jesus? Second, who is “we”? I’ve already offered something of an answer to this first question (even if it’s a heavily-caveated and not-entirely satisfying one). And so now I turn to the second question: if Bultmann says “we cannot know anything about the historical Jesus,” who is the we in question?
If, as I’ve suggested, historians make sense of the historical Jesus in conversation with their pre-existing understanding of reality, then the ability of historians to be able to “know” anything about the historical Jesus will also vary in accordance with these pre-given understanding(s) of reality. In other words, the answer to whether and what “we” can know about the historical Jesus will vary from historian to historian, just as historiographical worldviews vary from historian to historian. Since all but the most skeptical of historians are not concerned with “certainty” about the historical Jesus, and since that plausibility is measured in response to pre-given theological and philosophical claims about the nature of reality, then whether “we” are able to know anything about Jesus will depend on those pre-given theological and philosophical claims about the nature of reality with which we approach questions of the historical Jesus.
All this is to say that there is no single, straight-forward answer to whether “we” can know the historical Jesus, since there is no single, straight-forward set of philosophical and theological claims that “we” all hold to and agree on about the nature of reality. Even with identifiable traditions, great variety of thought often exists. For example, in recent years I, alongside a number of other scholars, have sought to make the case for explicitly Christian approaches to the historical figure of Jesus (see Rae 2005; Deines 2013: esp. 1-28; Adams 2015; Heringer 2018; Rowlands 2023; Stevenson 2024). And yet the case has been made in a variety of ways and has reached conclusions not all of us would agree with.
As a result, it’s simply not possible to say with the same confidence that Bultmann seems to, that “we” cannot know anything about the historical Jesus. Instead, different groups of historians with shared or similar historiographical worldviews must come together to decide what “they” can say about the historical Jesus, on the basis of their shared theological and philosophical assumptions about the nature of reality. Once this has been undertaken, then – and only then – can these different groups of historians begin to engage in dialogue with those operating with different theological and philosophical assumptions.
The alternative to this is either 1) the imposition of one specific set of theological and philosophical beliefs upon anyone wishing to approach to historical Jesus, as requirement for entry into the discussion, or 2) the construction of a comprehensive argument that demonstrates the superiority of one specific set of theological and philosophical beliefs over all others. The former is undesirable, as it is little more than arbitrary academic gatekeeping; and I don’t think the latter is possible (although I am happy to be proven wrong!).
The persistently knotty issue of how philosophy, theology, and historiography interweave, then, means that discussions about the historical Jesus are enhanced by diversity of thought. If we confine the conversation to participants only of one particular theological and/or philosophical persuasion, we also reduce the possibilities for what “we” can say about Jesus. “We” as individual historians may have radically different thoughts on what can and should be said about the historical Jesus, but only by embracing the diversity of thought that “we” as the whole breadth of Jesus historians display, can conversations about the historical Jesus truly progress.
Conclusion
The “Quest” for the historical Jesus (as it’s occasionally known) is a long and varied one. Depending on how we understand such things, we might point all the way back to the New Testament texts themselves as a series of attempts to say something about the identity of the historical Jesus and his significance. It has been – and will continue to be – a “Quest” fraught with difficulties and debates. Often, debates about particular sayings or acts of Jesus obscure the more fundamental difficulty the “Quest” raises about the ways in which issues of philosophy, theology, and historiography converge in discussions about the historical figure of Jesus.
It is because of these difficulties that, in 1926, Rudolf Bultmann famously declared: “I believe, of course, that we can know next to nothing about the life and personality of Jesus” (Bultmann 1926: 8 [my translation]). In the years that have followed, many have said that Bultmann is right about this. Certainly, if we seek an historical Jesus without doubts attached, we are destined to be disappointed. However, if historians can embrace more fully their fundamental theological and philosophical differences, then the field of Jesus research might begin to undertake a more fruitful conversation about the plausible Jesus that rigorous historiography might unearth.
References
Adams, Samuel V. The Reality of God and Historical Method: Apocalyptic Theology in Conversation with N.T. Wright. NET. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2015.
Bernier, Jonathan. The Quest for the Historical Jesus after the Demise of Authenticity: Toward a Critical Realist Philosophy of History in Jesus Studies. Library of New Testament Studies 540. London: T&T Clark, 2016.
Bultmann, Rudolf. Jesus. Berlin: Deutsche Bibliothek, 1926.
Carrier, Richard. On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2014.
Casey, Maurice. Jesus: Evidence and Argument or Mythicist Myths? London: T&T Clark, 2014.
Deines, Roland. Acts of God in History: Studies Towards Recovering a Theological Historiography. Edited by Christoph Ochs and Peter Watts. WUNT 317. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2013.
Heringer, Seth. Uniting History and Theology: A Theological Critique of the Historical Method. Lanham, MD: Lexington/Fortress, 2018.
Pew Religious Center. “How the Global Religious Landscape Changed From 2010 to 2020.” 9 June 2025. Accessed 10 July 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/06/09/how-the-global-religious-landscape-changed-from-2010-to-2020.
Rae, Murray. History and Hermeneutics. London: T&T Clark, 2005.
Rowlands, Jonathan. The Metaphysics of Historical Jesus Research: A Prolegomenon to a Future Quest for the Historical Jesus. London: Routledge, 2023.
Stevenson, Austin. The Consciousness of the Historical Jesus: Historiography, Theology, and Metaphysics. T&T Clark Studies in Systematic Theology. London: T&T Clark, 2024.