1 Jesus and Historical Studies

Prelude

One of my friends had the opportunity to give a course of lectures at a theological college in Kenya. One of them turned to a movement called the Search for the Historical Jesus, which he said originated in its early forms among German scholars and thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries. My friend had scarcely time to explain what this search meant, when he was suddenly interrupted by one of the students. "Master," he began ("As soon as he called me teacher, I knew that my business was bad," a colleague of mine later said) and then continued, "If the Germans have lost Jesus, it is their own misfortune. We did not lose it. We know and love ero."

The study of the person of Jesus has always caused and continues to cause controversy, including among faithful Christians. Some of them wonder if there is anything in our day that has not yet been said about Jesus, and whether the search will not be a new attempt to refute the traditional teaching of the Church or to question the inerrancy of Scripture. I would like to explain, without delay, why I think it is not only permissible but extremely important to re-examine the question of who Jesus was and therefore who he is today. In doing so, I do not wish in any way to deny or belittle the significance of the knowledge of Jesus of which the Kenyan student spoke, and which has spread throughout the Church for centuries across social and cultural boundaries. I consider historical research as an integral part of cognition: in the process of research, we learn to know and love the one we have followed even better. Even in relationships between people who seek to know and love each other, there may be misunderstandings, misconceptions and concepts that need to be identified and corrected. How much more important does this take place in the relationship with Jesus?

It is my deep conviction that the historical study of the person of Jesus is a necessary and indispensable component of the spiritual growth of every Christian, capable of producing a renewal of our spiritual life and ministry, and I would like to explain and justify my point of view from the very beginning. However, such an inquiry is invariably fraught with serious difficulties and even certain dangers that accompany everything that is aimed at serving the kingdom of God. Therefore, I should briefly dwell on these problems.

Difficulties arise when addressing this topic, and they should not be kept silent. Surrounded by like-minded people, it is surprisingly easy to slide into arrogant complacency. New, more and more ridiculous theories about Jesus are constantly being born in the world. Almost every month, one or another publishing house publishes a bestseller, where he is called another fashionable guru, a member of the Egyptian Masonic lodge or a revolutionary-minded hippie. Almost every year, a scholar or group of scholars publishes a new book, with impressive notes, trying to convince the reader that Jesus was a Cynic peasant, an itinerant orator, or a preacher of progressive values who was in keeping with the spirit of the times. As I was working on the final version of this chapter, an article appeared in one of the newspapers about a recent controversy. It was initiated by animal rights activists who insist that Jesus was a vegetarian.

of course, we can simply say that all this is a waste of time, that we know everything we need to know about Jesus, and that there is nothing more to say. Many believers, reasoning in this way, comfort themselves with a sense of their own superiority: "Unlike these foolish liberals, we have learned the truths, and we have nothing more to learn." Theologians are turned to when another statement in defense of "traditional" Christian truth is required, in the hope that after that they can stop asking "uncomfortable" historical questions and turn to something more productive.

Some, on the contrary, choose alternative, but equally deceptive stereotypes. Statements in defense of the "supernatural" Jesus can easily grow into a caricature, into the image of some ancient Superman. However, it should be remembered that the myth of the Superman itself is a dualistic distortion of Christianity. The modern world offers us a number of images of Jesus, each of which may seem very "religious," even though they have nothing to do with the biblical description of a Nazarene named Jesus and go against the meaning of the words of Scripture in their original context.

As I have said, I consider the continuous study of the historical figure of Jesus to be an integral part of the process of spiritual development of the Christian. But since traditional Christianity has consistently taught that it is only by looking at Jesus that one can know the character of God, I think it would be quite wrong to dispute the need for a constant historical quest to explore the person of Jesus as perhaps a fundamental part of our knowledge of God.

From this statement, of course, quite definite conclusions follow. If Christian faith is impossible without knowing the historical figure of Jesus, it is also true that historical research cannot be conducted in a vacuum. In the Age of Enlightenment, people were told that faith was incompatible with history and that to turn to the former was to reject the latter, and as a result, believers tend to be suspicious of historians, while secular historiography does not pay much attention to believers. True Christianity, however, completely rejects this opposition, a belief that is very difficult to follow for those of us who try to live and teach in both circles at the same time. Moreover, I think that this very difficulty is one of the aspects of the calling of a modern Christian; not to stand aside from the world, but to share the pain of modernity, which at the moment is experiencing the agony of the Enlightenment. I will dwell on this in more detail in the final chapter of my book. I am not a secular historian who believes in Christ, or a Christian who is fascinated by history. It is my conviction that every Christian believer should turn to historical science, which can adequately challenge false ideas about Christianity (including those that their proponents try to pass off as traditional), while at the same time contributing to the revival of genuine orthodoxy. Such a process never ceases to amaze us.