The name given to the long series of debates about who was the historic Jesus.
The so-called 'quest for the historical Jesus' began amidst the skepticism towards the Bible in the age of Enlightenment in the late-18th/early-19th Cent. It was argued that the depiction of Jesus we find there in the Gospels was the creation of the early Church's faith imagination rather than eye-witnesses' account that was authentically historical (i.e., the Gospels tell us about Jesus 'the Christ' rather than Jesus 'the man'). Hermann Reimarus, the German professor whose writing was supposed to have begun the debate, e.g., asserted a radical difference between who Jesus actually was and what his disciples proclaimed him to be. From this arose the three (some say four) periods of intense debates or 'quests for the historical Jesus,' the attempts to rediscover what may be authentic about the person of Jesus. These debates have come, hence, to be called the 'First Quest, (approx. 1778-1906), the 'Second Quest' (beginning with a lecture by Ernst Kaseman in 1953, and dying out in the 70's), and the 'Third Quest' (now officially called the 'Life of Jesus Research,' early 1980's to the present, and often associated with the group of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar). Summed up simply, all the quests have so far produced little that is useful, with the proposed solutions more problematic than the perceived 'problem' the quests were meant to resolve.
What was the historical Jesus like is, of course, a vitally legitimate question for the Christian. The extra-biblical witness to Jesus is, however, so scant that any attempt to reconstruct a picture of that Jesus without taking seriously the witness of the Gospels can only produce purely hypothetical and/or imaginative portraits with the intellectual robustness of straws, portraits crafted in the images of those who crafted them and from the 'isms' of the times in which they live. And as a study of the debate over the last two and a half centuries have demonstrated, they quickly burn to cinders under the heat of the debate.
BIBLIOGRAPHY:
Darrell Bock, Studying the Historical Jesus: A Guide to Sources and Methods. Baker Academic, 2002. ISBN 978-0801024511.
Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus. The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1996.
Howard Marshall, I Belive in the Historical Jesus. Vancouver, BC: Regent College, 2001. ISBN 978-1573830195.
N. T. Wright, "Quest for the Historical Jesus," Anchor Bible Dictionary, III. 795-802. New York: Anchor, 1992.
N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1999.
N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God. Christian Origin and the Question of God, Vol. 2. Minneapolis, MN: Ausburg Fortress, 1997. ISBN 978-0800626822
Ben Witherington III, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth. Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1997. ISBN 978-0830815449
Resources:
Darrell Bock, "Quests for the Historical Jesus," The Gospel Coalition, US.
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Darrell Bock, "Answering the Quest for the Historical Jesus," The Gospel Coalition, US.
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Zondervan-Academic - Blog, "The 3 'Quests' for the Historical Jesus." 21 Sept 2017.
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For more resources on the subject see Biblical Studies.org.uk.
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