Category:Historical Jesus Studies

Main Page -> Historical Jesus Studies (HJS) Home Page

Historical Jesus Studies is a field of research in Second Temple Judaism, that specializes in the study of Jesus of Nazareth. It includes scholarly works by international specialists, as well as selected fictional and non-fictional works by authors who have influenced the development of scholarship in the field.

Historical Jesus Studies -- History of research -- Overview

Martin Luther

Pietro Aretino

Hermann Samuel Reimarus

David Friedrich Strauss

Ernest Renan

Johannes Weiss

Johann Sebastian Bach

Georg Frideric Haendel

File:Pier Paolo Pasolini.jpg

James H. Charlesworth

See Historical Jesus Studies 1400s & Historical Jesus Studies 1500s

The earliest Lives of Jesus of the Renaissance were theological or poetical harmonies of the four Gospels, authored by humanists like Antonio Cornazzano and Pietro Aretino. A more critical approach emerged with the Reformation. Martin Luther discussed the Jewishness of Jesus and by the end of the 16th century the work of Bartolomeo Dionigi located the life of Jesus within Jewish history.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1600s

At the beginning of the 17th century the tale of the "Wandering Jew" spread into Europe. The anti-Semitic implications of the myth of the impious Jew cursed by Jesus and condemned to wander until the end of time would greatly affect even the scholarly and fictional narratives of the life of Jesus based on canonical sources.

The most popular Lives of Jesus of the century were those authored by French Jesuit Bernardin de Montereul and Nicola Avancini, in 1637 and 1666 respectively. They were harmonies of the four gospels.

Fictional works were popular representations of the events surrounding the birth and passion of Christ.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1700s

Jesus remained an important subject in the arts, as attested especially by the production of numerous oratorios, including Bach's Matthäuspassion, Haendel's Messiah, and the many based on Metastasio's libretto, The Passion of Jesus Christ. In 1768 Scottish preacher John Cameron published what is regarded as the first modern novel on Jesus

The Enlightenment brought about a more rationalistic approach to scriptures. The historical investigation of the origins of Christianity began with the British deists (John Locke, John Toland, Thomas Chubb, Thomas Morgan, Thomas Woolston, Peter Annet). By the end of the century the idea emerged that the gospels might not have told the "true" story of Jesus. Maybe Jesus was a Jewish religious leader (Voltaire) or a political revolutionary, whose failure prompted his reinterpretation as a religious figure (Hermann Samuel Reimarus), or maybe Jesus did not even exist and his biography was a completely mythological construct (Constantin-François Volney).

The unpublished work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in 1795 shows how in light of Emanuel Kant's thought Jesus had become to be interpreted in German philosophical circles as a teacher of a morality founded on reason.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1800s

At the beginning of the 19th century the first critical approaches to the Life of Jesus were characterized by the attempt either to "eliminate" the supernatural elements in the Gospel narratives (Jefferson) or to "explain" them in rationalistic terms (Paulus). The breakthrough came with the work of David Friedrich Strauss (1835) who showed that the Gospel narratives ought not to be taken as "objective" reports but as "mythological" retelling of historical events. Strauss defined what would become the "scholarly" approach; the success of his work marked the beginning of contemporary research on the Historical Jesus. The Emancipation of the Jews in Western Europe led to the emergence of Jewish scholarship and Joseph Salvador was in 1838 the first Jewish scholar to deal with the historical Jesus.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1850s

Ernest Renan's Life of Jesus had a sensational impact in mid-19th century. Based on the premise that Jesus’ life should be studied critically like that of every other man, Renan interpreted jesus as a teacher of morality, downplaying the apocalyptic and supernatural elements of Gospels narratives.

The interest in Jesus' Jewish background was fostered by the scholarly work of Alfred Edersheim and by the extraordinary success of the novel Ben Hur by Wallace.

Against the "Liberal Theology," Johannes Weiss argued that the proclamation of the Kingdom of God by Jesus should be interpreted in light of Jewish apocalypticism.

More conservative theologians, like Martin Kähler, argued that the "real" Jesus was not the so-called "Historical Jesus" but the Christ proclaimed by the Christian faith.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1900s

In 1901 William Wrede drew attention to the motif of the Messianic Secret in the Gospel of Mark. He proposed that the author of Mark invented the notion of secrecy to reduce the tension between early Christian beliefs about Jesus being the Messiah, and the non-Messianic nature of his ministry.

In 1903 Ferdinand Zecca and Lucien Nonguet directed the first feature film covering the entire life of Jesus, from his birth and ministry to his death and resurrection. The movie was inspired by tradition Catholic iconography and had no ambitions of historical authenticity.

The work of Albert Schweitzer in 1906 marked a turning point in the history of research on the historical Jesus. Not only he surveyed the results of earlier scholarship but also submitted them to critical analysis. His conclusion was that by eradicating the (Jewish) eschatological elements modern (Christian) scholars had made a Jesus at their own image and likeness.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1910s

The work of Albert Schweitzer continued to dominate the scholarly debate, with the publication of the English tr. in 1910 and the second ed. in 1913. New voices enriched the international landscape. Jewish scholarship emerged in England with Claude G. Montefiore, Gerald Friedlander, and Israel Abrahams. Italian scholars also joined the debate with Baldassarre Labanca, Felice Momigliano, and Pietro Chiminelli.

Movies began having a huge impact on the popular understanding of the figure of Jesus. Three films on Jesus (From the Manger to the Cross, Christus, and Intolerance) generated much interest and were influenced by the most recent developments in critical research, seeking "historical accuracy" in their "Oriental" settings and customs.

The Jesus Survival Theory was revived in fictional (George Moore) and esoteric circles.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1920s

The 1920s were characterized by the success of some very popular fictional works on Jesus--La storia di Cristo (1921 Papini), novel; The King of Kings (1927 DeMille), film, Jesus, the Son of Man (1928 Gibran), poetry, and The Escaped Cock (1928 Lawrence), novel. There was now a global market that included authors of different countries, serving an international audience.

Among scholarly works, the most significant contribution was that offered by Joseph Klausner. His Life of Jesus, published in 1922 in Hebrew and translated in 1925 into English by Herbert Danby, was the first consistent attempt to reclaim Jesus from the perspective of the Jewish orthodox tradition. However, a general skepticism about the possibility and even the theological significance of the search for the Historical Jesus became dominant, supported by the authority of Rudolf Bultmann, who in his 1926 book on Jesus concluded that the only Jesus we can know is the risen Christ of the Christian faith. Besides his historical existence, virtually nothing can be recovered of the historical Jesus. The quest for the historical Jesus had therefore to be abandoned as both historically impossible and theologically superfluous.

In a long essay published in 1929 in the Harvard Theological Review, Luigi Salvatorelli offered a most detailed survey of "The Historical Investigation of the Origins of Christianity ... from Locke to Reitzenstein."

See Historical Jesus Studies 1930s

Rampant anti-Semitism and Christian theological skepticism about the Historical (Jewish) Jesus led to the decline of Jesus research in the 1930s. The burden of proving the relevance of the historical Jesus was left almost entirely on the shoulders of Jewish scholars and authors and of a few Christian scholars (mostly French and British), who struggled to keep alive the interest in the subject and in the close historical (and religious) relationship between Judaism and Christianity.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1940s

As part of the "final solution," Nazi Germany sponsored at Jena the activities of the Institut zur Erforschung und Beseitigung des jüdischen Einflusses auf das deutsche kirchliche Leben / Institute for the Study and Eradication of Jewish Influence on German Religious Life (1939-1945), directed by respected German theologian Walter Grundmann. The notion of the "Aryan Jesus" was promoted in Nazi propaganda (notably, Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew / 1940 Hippler), arch-fi documentary), but was not foreign elsewhere, even in democratic Great Britain or America, where anti-Judaism (if not anti-Semitism) had also strong roots.

In difficult wartimes, religious retelling of the life of Jesus offered some consolation and hope to suffering (Christian) people on both sides. The Life of Jesus by Catholic priest Giuseppe Ricciotti in Italy and the radio-play The Man Born to Be King by playwright Dorothy L. Sayers in England played such role in those years.

After the war, fiction regained its freedom to surprise and scandalize with King Jesus by Robert Graves. Scholarly activity resumed with the seminal work of Joachim Jeremias on the "lost" sayings of Jesus; see Unbekannte Jesusworte (Unknown Sayings of Jesus / 1948 Jeremias), book. It couldn't be, however, as if nothing had happened. French scholar Jules Isaac not only denounced the influence of Christian anti-Judaism on scholarly research but also exposed the direct responsibilities of the Christian teaching of contempt for the spread of Nazi anti-Semitism and the tragedy of the Holocaust; see Jésus et Israël (Jesus and Israel / 1948 Isaac), book.

See Historical Jesus Studies 1950s

Time was ripe for a new beginning. The first step was to reissue the works of French scholars Maurice Goguel and Charles Guignebert, which had been overlooked in the 1930s.

The lecture Ernst Käsemann delivered on October 20, 1953 to an annual gathering of alumni from the University of Marburg, is commonly regarded as the beginning of the Second Quest for the Historical Jesus. Departing from the teachings of his former professor Rudolf Bultmann, Käsemann argued that although the gospels were theological works, they nonetheless may contain some reliable historical memories. A distinction between the historical Jesus and the risen Christ does not make sense as the gospels themselves implies a continuity between these two figures.

The enormous success of Günther Bornkamm's 1956 book Jesus of Nazareth gave momentum for the second quest. The discovery and publication of the Dead Sea Scrolls offered promising contributions to the understanding of ancient Jewish messianism and even to some difficulties in the chronology of the gospels.

By the end of the decade scholars were persuaded that a new Quest had started (see James M. Robinson).

See Historical Jesus Studies 1960s

In the 1960s we see, on one hand, the first signs of a rediscovery of the Jewishness of Jesus and, on the other, a stronger emphasis on his humanity and his involvement in political and social issues.

The success of the works of Robert Aron and Nikos Kazantzakis relied exactly on their attempt to explore some "hidden" aspects of Jesus as a human being. In the movies, Jesus became younger, more approachable and more engaged in the social life of his own time. In 1964 Pier Paolo Pasolini earned international acclaim with his sensitive portrait of a very human Jesus as the champion of the poor and the destitute. On the scholarly level, Samuel G.F. Brandon drew attention to the affinities of the Jesus movement with the revolutionary party of the Zealots and to the strong social and political implications of Jesus's preaching.

Jewish scholars, like Robert Aron and Schalom Ben-Chorin showed how the figure of Jesus fully "belonged" to first-century Judaism, and should no longer considered a taboo in Jewish studies. David Flusser in particular emphasized the great diversity of the Jewish experience in the Second Temple period and located Jesus "on the periphery of the Essenes."