The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels by Luke Timothy Johnson (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 645 The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. By LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON. San Francisco: Harper San Francisco, 1996. Pp. vii +182. $22.00 (cloth). ISBN 0-06064177 -0. New Testament scholarship usually identifies three waves of research, most often referred to as "Quests" for the historical Jesus. All of these have been characterized by the application of the methods of historical research to the Gospels and other first-century material in order to reconstruct the life of Jesus. The first such quest was initiated by the posthumous publication of H. S. Reimarus's study, then promoted by D. Strauss's The Life ofJesus Critically Examined (1835) and ended by Albert Schweitzer's assessment of the whole enterprise in 1906 in his Quest ofthe Historical Jesus. The second quest began with the 1953 Marburg Lecture by Ernst Kasemann, "The Problem of the Historical Jesus." Seeking to overcome the pessimism cast by Schweitzer and repeated by Bultmann regarding what can be known historically about Jesus, the second quest also produced "Lives" of Jesus, often tinged with notions of the existential relevance of the Jesus who emerges from these studies. The original momentum of this quest began to wane in the 1970s. The third quest began in the 1980s. Its character has been intimately linked to the Jesus Seminar under the direction of Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan, and it has resulted in several critical historical studies that purport to give us the "real Jesus." It is from this starting point, and with reference to this particular reconstructive effort, that Luke Timothy Johnson undertakes a critique of "the misguided quest for the historical Jesus." Johnson's work is one of several that have criticized the methods and goals of the "third quest." It has several advantages over most of the others: clarity, brevity, a popular and engaging style, and especially theological clarity. Chapter 1, "The Good News and the Nightly News," introduces the primary target of Johnson's critique. It is the messianic pretensions of the Jesus Seminar as these have found their way into public consciousness through an astute manipulation of the media and the publication of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words ofJesus (Macmillan, 1993). Johnson identifies the goal of all these efforts by chronicling various press statements of Funk himself. It is to produce a "new narrative, a new Gospel if you will" (8) which, in contrast to the "mythic" or "cultic" Jesus whom most people want, will produce the "real Jesus" (7). Chapter 2 briefly analyzes seven different historical reconstructions ofJesus whose divergence from one another is enough to alert anyone to the fact that not only is the "historical Jesus" nothing more than the Jesus reconstructed by the methods of history, something commonly acknowledged, but that the methods themselves can be used to produce a Jesus who looks remarkably like the particular ideal of the one who employs the methods. Most telling among the six consistent deficiencies Johnson finds in all these studies are the privileging of non-canonical over canonical material on 646 BOOK REVIEWS the dubious presumption that these latter are earlier; the ignoring of any canonical material except that found in the Gospels; the obvious theological agenda which presides over the way the material is presented; and the premise that historical knowledge is normative for faith. Later, Johnson will also point to another manifestation of the hermeneutics of suspicion, namely that the structure of the canonical Gospels is ignored and (some of) the discrete pieces isolated by source criticism are reassembled to suit the presuppositions of each investigator. After the two chapters of critical survey, the remaining four chapters of the book deal with questions of philosophical and theological principles. Chapter 3 presents two sets of perceptions regarding Jesus, each possessing its own internal logic: on the one hand, "faith," and, on the other, the Enlightenment presuppositions of "historical criticism" (58). This distinction is pivotal, though it is seldom averted to. Faith is a God-given interpretation of reality, particularly historical reality, and as such it is a way of knowing. While it does not replace or suppress the...