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Historical Jesus
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The Historical Jesus is the "actual" ancient person, but is only accessible to the extent that later people can reasonably and reliably describe him. The quest to attempt to use scientific principles to reconstruct a verifiable biography of Jesus has progressed for more than two centuries, and the Quest is often conceived of as having several phases:
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When examined, the “Historical Jesus” movement of the last 100 years has unearthed nothing that undermines the Gospel accounts. There is no "new evidence" supporting the idea that Jesus was merely a “good man.” There is no “new evidence” debunking the accounts of miracles and the resurrection based on new analysis of “myth theory” over a long period of time. To the contrary, recent discoveries have given more credibility to the nature and content of the New Testament record than ever before. Actually, except for the propagated view of the mainstream media, the trend in the last two decades has been for liberal scholars to become more conservative in their views on the reliability of the New Testament record, not less. Recent finds in archaeology are showing more (not less) consistent detail of the time, culture, religion and politics at the time Jesus walked the earth. At the same time, Biblical manuscript credibility has taken great leaps forward (not backward).
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The Old Quest for the Historical Jesus spanned the years 1778-1906. Samuel Reimarus (1694-1768) wrote an article entitled "On the Intention of Jesus and His Disciples", and it was published posthumously, ten years after his death most probably because the ideas were considered extremely controversial during his lifetime. On the Intention was one of the series of articles Reimarus wrote which later came to be known as the "Wolfenbuttel Fragments". The publication of Reimarus’ paper roughly marks the beginning of the Old Quest period. He proposed a distinction between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of Christian faith was proposed, and was probably one of the first such scholarly distinctions, modern scholars have since followed suit. Reimarus believed that one could know Jesus without having to believe in miracles.
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The "Second Quest for the Historical Jesus" was inaugurated by the Tuebingen New Testament scholar Ernst Kaesemann in a lecture for alumni of Marburg University given on October 20, 1953. The background to Kaesemann's lecture was 25 years of extreme skepticism in Europe concerning the historical Jesus, which had reached a climax in 1926 with the publication of Rudolf Bultmann's Jesus. Ever since that book, which would issue five years later in an even more radical 1931 lecture entitled "The New Testament and Mythology," it had been almost taken for granted, and increasingly so among American scholars, as well, that contemporary people could know almost nothing about Jesus as he actually was and lived and taught.
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Historical Jesus