Jesus of Nazareth: A Person Like Us?

CHAPTER ONE

There was a time when Jesus of Nazareth was only thought about and written about uncritically, in keeping with church piety. Then came the Enlightenment and with it Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768). He was an absolute innovator, the first for more than fifteen centuries who dared to undertake an historical-critical investigation of the content of the Gospels and, in so doing, to follow reason. His thoughts have proved to be for the most part fundamentally correct. In the 250 years since his work was published, much that was contained in his then new ideas has been accepted. But the concrete conclusions he drew from his interpretation of the Gospels were often wrong: for example, that he interpreted the Resurrection of Jesus as a scheme which his disciples organized so as to profit, as long as possible after his death, from the veneration the people had for Jesus. He knew that his interpretations of the life of Jesus would arouse vigorous criticism and antagonism. For this reason he did not publish the results of his studies himself, but gave them to some friends to read. Only after the death of Reimarus in 1768 did Lessing, one of the great thinkers of the German Enlightenment, decide to publish part of it, although in a tame form as “Fragments” from the work of an anonymous author.

The appearance of these so-called “Wolfenbüttel Fragments” 1774-1778 led, as was expected, to a flood of polemical writings and aggressive reactions, attacks on the person of the meanwhile deceased author, attempts, at all costs, to defend the supernatural in the Gospels, and rebuttals of these attempts. Clearly, Reimarus had touched a very sensitive nerve.

The Figure of Jesus in the Modern Historical-Critical Jesus Literature

Most of these historical-critical studies from the 19th and 20th centuries led to results in which very little was left of the picture of Jesus as it had been shaped by Western culture. Yet again scientific truth, now in the shape of historical reliability, seemed fundamentally to contradict traditional beliefs. In the 19th century there were even authors who maintained that the historical existence of that figure of Jesus which was always evading the historian’s grasp was a fairy tale or a myth. These authors also intended hereby to deny the Church all credibility, since it was seen as putting the brakes on modernity. Without an historical Jesus there would be no Church which could call on his authority.

Naturally the intention and focus vary with different authors. There are still those who, despite Albert Schweitzer, try to uncover the historical figure of Jesus: for example, with the help of historical analysis of the stormy period, full of uprisings, in which he lived. These authors were convinced that this age would have left its mark on Jesus so that in this way he becomes tangible. That led to the image of a failed socio-political Messias pretender. This is, for example, the way the American Muslim, Reza Aslan, sees him in his successful book The Zealot, to which we will return. Others try to work out, by means of very exact text analysis, what were the original words of Jesus himself and what – amongst the rest of the words ascribed to him – could have been the contribution of tradition. This is the focus of the authors who belong to the American Jesus Seminar. In this they have to move a long way from the field of the canonical Gospels, scour the apocryphal gospels, and also track down the Jesus-words handed down by the Fathers of the Church. Others examine the Jesus images which have come and gone since the Enlightenment and sometimes astound us: as, for example, the image of a Jesus who, during a childhood that is unknown to us, would have become a pupil of wise men in India or in Egypt, or who, after his only apparent death on the cross and recovery, withdrew to the Orient. Again others, like Josef Ratzinger, attempt, with consummate scholarship and profound spirituality, to make traditional dogmatic ideas acceptable.

Most of those modern authors are no longer what the Church deems to be believers; some are explicitly non-believers; but all are fascinated by that puzzling figure which emerges from the Gospels and, for us Christians, constitutes the kernel of our faith. We also call ourselves after him, at least by the second name Christ which we gave him ourselves and which obviously was not his family name. Christus is a Greek name of distinction, a glorifying name, which says what his followers saw in him and still see. It is the passive past participle of the Greek word that means “anointing”. This term “Anointed One” was used in ancient Israel most especially for the king. There kings were not crowned, but anointed. The anointing of young David to kingship by the prophet Samuel, as it is narrated in 1 Samuel 16 with great literary skill, is evidence of this.