Whose Historical Jesus?

21. Continuing Historical-Jesus Studies: Context

21. Continuing Historical-Jesus Studies: Context Robert L. Webb Larry Hurtado's essay surveys the work of eight scholars who have written monographs on the subject of the historical Jesus between 1984 and 1994: Ed Sanders (1985), Geza Vermes (1993), Ben Witherington (1990), John Meier (1991), Marcus Borg (1984, 1987), Richard Horsley (1987), Sean Freyne (1988) and John Dominic Crossan (1991). His examination of each work focuses on three areas: the methodology used, the picture of Jesus produced and the purpose or hermeneutical concern of the author. Hurtado concludes that in all three areas each scholar is significantly different from the others and that there is no consensus emerging among them. Hurtado does, however, demonstrate three unifying observations on the work of these eight scholars: the diverse character of the evidence, the importance of fully interacting with other scholars and viewpoints and the futility of claiming to approach historical-Jesus research without religious or existential commitments. He closes with the methodological observation that historical-Jesus research is like reconstructing an original reading in text criticism: all variants in the Jesus tradition need to be taken into consideration, and the reconstructed historical Jesus that best explains all the variants is the preferred picture of Jesus. The essay is most helpful. Hurtado's comparison of eight scholars in these three areas provides a necessary matrix for evaluating where scholarship has come from and where it needs to go in historical-Jesus research, and he makes some constructive suggestions to guide this ongoing process. I would like to interact with Hurtado's essay on two points in order to place it within a larger context. The first concerns the focus of the essay: it presents itself as a taxonomy, that is, a classification of individual items into groups based on similarities. Hurtado's taxonomy of these eight scholars consists of eight different categories: for Sanders, Jesus was the restorationist prophet; for Vermes, Jesus was the charismatic hasid; for Witherington, the messiah; for Meier, the charismatic eschatological prophet; for Borg, the social visionary; for Horsley, the social revolutionary; for Freyne, the Jewish universalist; and for Crossan, the Jewish Cynic. What Hurtado offers is a sound description of the individual items. But it is not, in fact, a taxonomy, for it does not seek deeper, underlying similarities among some of these scholars; rather, it stresses their differences. It is right and proper to observe differences between these scholars, but the existence of these differences does not mean that a taxonomy is impossible. In fact there are several possibilities for a taxonomy of recent Jesus research, of which I suggest only two. First, one can perceive similarities among some scholars with respect to the overarching model used to portray Jesus. For example, among the eight scholars Hurtado surveys, three (Sanders, Meier, Horsley) explicitly use the prophetic 270 Whose Historical Jesus? model for portraying Jesus. We could, of course, add the names of other recent scholars who would concur with this overarching model, including as examples Maurice Casey and David Kaylor.1 In addition, while among the eight scholars surveyed only Crossan argues for a Cynic model, other scholars could be included to form a group within a historical-Jesus taxonomy, such as Gerald Downing and Burton Mack.2 Similarly, a group could be observed among those who stress the charismatic element in the life of Jesus, including Vermes, Meier and Borg. A second possibility for a taxonomy of recent Jesus research is one which, rather than grouping scholars based on a similarity (as above), would place scholars along an axis which identifies a continuum with respect to a particular issue in historical-Jesus research. A number of such axes could be combined to form a more complex matrix. For example, one axis might be the extent to which eschatology (and which form of eschatology) played a role in the life and teaching of Jesus. Sanders and Meier would be placed toward one end of this axis while Borg and Crossan toward the other. The other scholars could be located somewhere in between. Examples of other axes one might use include the following questions: Does the concern or vision of Jesus have an individualistic focus or a corporate/national focus? Do Jesus' concerns concentrate primarily around religious or socio-political issues? To what extent does each scholar express hermeneutical concerns, and to what extent do these concerns shape his/her picture of Jesus? This last suggestion leads to the second point with which I would like to...