* This article is reproduced in this format with the kind permission of Bible.org, where the article was first published.
** Dr. Michael Burer is Assistant Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary and Assistant Project Director for the NET Bible. He graduated from Dallas Theological Seminary in 1998 with a Th.M. and in 2004 with a Ph.D. in New Testament Studies. His first book—A New Reader's Lexicon of the Greek New Testament, co-authored with Jeff Miller—was published in fall of 2008. An ordained minister, he is active in his local church and ministers frequently in France. His research and teaching interests include Greek language and exegesis, the Gospels, and Jesus studies.
1. The time which this paper covers was suggested to me by Dr. Daniel Wallace, Professor of New Testament Studies at Dallas Theological Seminary. He is also to be credited with using Reimarus and Wright as beginning and ending points for the paper in imitation of Schweitzer's magnum opus.
2. N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, vol. 2 of Christian Origins and the Question of God, (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1996), 13-6, points out the inability of Reformation theology to adequately deal with the life of Jesus as a primary factor for setting the stage for Reimarus. Harvey K. McArthur, The Quest Through the Centuries: The Search for the Historical Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1966), 104, points to the influence of English Deists upon Reimarus with whom he had had contact during a visit to England.
3. W. Barnes Tatum, In Quest of Jesus: A Guidebook (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 71.
4. Albert Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1906).
5. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress From Reimarus to Wrede (trans. W. Montgomery; London: A. and C. Black, 1910).
6. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 17. Wright attributes this tendency to Reimarus specifically, but I see it as representative of the period as a whole.
7. Raymond E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (The Anchor Bible Reference Library, ed. David Noel Freedman; New York: Doubleday, 1997), 819.
8. Charles H. Talbert, ed., Fragments (trans. Ralph S. Fraser; Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1970).
9. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, The Goal of Jesus and His Disciples (trans. George Wesley Buchanan; Leiden: Brill, 1970).
10. Tatum, 68. Colin Brown, "Quest of Historical Jesus," in Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (ed. Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight and I. Howard Marshall; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 326.
11. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 16-7.
12. Ibid., 16.
13. Werner Georg Kümmel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of Its Problems (trans. S. McLean Gilmour and Howard C. Kee; Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972), 492.
14. David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1835-1836).
15. Brown, "Quest," 328.
16. Kümmel, 490.
17. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 19.
18. Tatum, 71.
19. Rudolf Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen Tradition, 2d ed. (Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments, vol. 29; Gttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1931). Rudolf Bultmann, History of the Synoptic Tradition (trans. John Marsh; New York: Harper, 1963).
20. Brown, "Quest," 334.
21. Ibid., 336.
22. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 24.
23. Ibid.
24. Cf. William Wrede, Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelium: zugleich ein Beitrag zum Verstndnis des Markusevangeliums (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1901); William Wrede, The Messianic Secret (Library of Theological Translations, trans. J. C. G. Greig; Cambridge: J. Clarke, 1971). During the time before Wrede wrote, the majority of scholars held that Mark was the first gospel to be written and that the author did preserve historical information. Wrede attacked this by asserting that all of Mark was written within the theological framework of the Messianic Secret; the author concocted the Messianic secret to explain how Jesus was recognized as the Messiah only after his death, not during his life. Thus Wrede removed the last support modern scholarship had for asserting that the New Testament contained any historically accurate writings.
25. The best know writings of the seminar are Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993), and Robert W. Funk and The Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1998).
26. E.g., Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1996), and Richard B. Hays, "The Corrected Jesus," First Things 43 (May 1994), 43-48.
27. "The Jesus Seminar formulated and adopted 'rules of evidence' to guide its assessment of gospel traditions" (emphasis added). Funk et al., The Five Gospels, 16.
28. Ibid., 32.
29. Ibid.
30. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 83-9.
31. Martin Hengel, Studies in Early Christology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), ix.
32. Tim Stafford, "N. T. Wright: Making Scholarship a Tool for the Church," Christianity Today 43, no. 2 (8 February 1999), 42.
33. N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God, vol. 1 of Christian Origins and the Question of God (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1992).
34. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 90.
35. Ibid., 659-60.
36. Funk et al., The Five Gospels, 16.
37. Ibid., 18. Although the text does not date these works specifically, the chart on p. 18 shows general relationships. The Gospel of Thomas is shown to be totally independent from the canonical Gospels, and it is placed on or around 50 C.E. The Gospel of Mark is also shown to be an independent source, but it is placed on or around 70 C.E. This chart reiterates the important place the Jesus Seminar grants to the Gospel of Thomas.
38. By this I do not mean to imply that a portrait of the historical Jesus is inaccurate. I believe that Historical Jesus studies can be very fruitful in describing who Jesus was in his context and what were his ministry and mission. It is perhaps better to say that the historical Jesus is a "subset" of the real Jesus in his fullness, although even this metaphor does not adequately describe the relationship between the two concepts.
39. Stafford, "Wright," 43.