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Historical Jesus: Histories
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By shifting attention from the historical Jesus to “the Word,” Bultmann hoped to avoid many of the pitfalls that plagued the various Lives of Jesus. Yet Bultmann was enmeshed in the same trap, because he remythologized the teachings of an ancient Jewish apocalypticist to make them relevant for the twentieth century: Jesus calls us “to decision—decision between good and evil, decision for God’s will or for [our] own will” (83–84). The message of Jesus offered by Bultmann challenged twentieth-century persons who lived through the great wars of that era, but the pitfalls outlined by Schweitzer still remained. Bultmann’s Jesus was to a large extent a reflection of Bultmann, and the partial eclipse of the historical Jesus lasted until Bultmann’s own students proposed a way in which the study of Jesus could once again emerge from his shadow.
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The desire to have a politically correct religion and in particular a politically correct Jesus skews the historical judgement of the Jesus Seminar. They dismiss as unhistorical any aspect of Jesus which they find to be politically incorrect. Historical judgments are ... being made, not on the basis of the evidence, but on the basis of political correctness.
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In truth, the historical Jesus seems after some examination to be utterly irrelevant to parish councils. His uncompromising proclamation of the kingdom--the kingdom which he himself was ushering in--did not hinge upon a consensus which he was trying to win with his followers. The authority of his teaching did not encourage the emergence of shared wisdom. His disregard for local leaders created divisions, even chasms, of opinion. To recommend that council members follow in these footsteps and slight parish leaders would seem to be a recipe for parish council failure.
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Historical research suggests that Jesus came into an oppressive society governed by a strict system of purity laws. The priests and the temple were the center, and observant Jewish males were next out then observant Jewish women, with the deformed, sick and other outcasts on the edge. Foreigners had no place at all.
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The first half of Crossan's major work The Historical Jesus provides an excellent survey of the socio-political context. In addition he draws attention to the use of generic models from social anthropology, such as the likely structure and dynamics of peasant economies (though "peasant" seems hardly to fit Jesus and his group, who appear to be a step higher on the scale) and the Mediterranean honour-shame culture. Such models will always require reality testing against the data available.
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No one has the slightest physical evidence to support a historical Jesus; no artifacts, dwelling, works of carpentry, or self-written manuscripts. All claims about Jesus derive from writings of other people. There occurs no contemporary Roman record that shows Pontius Pilate executing a man named Jesus. Devastating to historians, there occurs not a single contemporary writing that mentions Jesus. All documents about Jesus got written well after the life of the alleged Jesus from either: unknown authors, people who had never met an earthly Jesus, or from fraudulent, mythical or allegorical writings. Although one can argue that many of these writings come from fraud or interpolations, I will use the information and dates to show that even if these sources did not come from interpolations, they could still not serve as reliable evidence for a historical Jesus, simply because all sources derive from hearsay accounts.
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