Past scholarly approaches to ‘historical’ Jesus explored in first Theologian lecture

Dr. Travis Williams speaks during the first session of the annual Theologian-in-Residence series on Tuesday at Tusculum College.

The various ways that scholars have approached the gospels and their search for the “historical Jesus” were explored Tuesday during the first session of the annual Theologian-in-Residence lecture series.

Dr. Travis Williams, assistant professor of religion at Tusculum College, is presenting the series of lectures, “Jesus in Early Christian Memory: Remembering, Reconstructing and Rehearsing the Past.”  In its 26th year, the series is sponsored by Tusculum College with support from Ron Smith.

During the first session, Dr. Williams summarized beliefs about the Gospels and its accounts of Jesus during recent centuries and scholars “historical quests” for Jesus and the approaches they have taken in their studies.

“What I would suggest in this series is that there is an alternate approach, which applies insights from memory studies to the early traditions about Jesus,” he said.  “In this series, we are not going to focus on whether the gospels are authentic, but rather on this alternate approach to the gospels, a way to read the gospels better.”

Questions of how closely the Gospels reflect what actually occurred in the life of Jesus have divided Biblical scholarship for many years. However, Dr. Williams noted, both skeptics and apologists believe that the validity of the gospels is grounded in the accuracy of their transmission and the historical events they record.

Up until the time of the Enlightenment, this was not an issue as Christians considered the spiritual claims in the Biblical to be more important than the historical details and did not separate the two, he explained.

However, after the Enlightenment when reasoning was considered the ultimate source of authority, many scholars began to take a historical approach toward the gospels using critical methodologies of modern scholarship.  These scholars questioned whether the spiritual claims in the Bible are true if the historical details are inaccurate, Dr. Williams noted.

As a result, there have been a series of academic searches for the historic Jesus. During the first quest, which began around 1778, scholars were skeptical of the Jesus presented in the gospels and asserted that a search must be made beyond the gospels to find the true personage of Jesus. “Scholars thought that the Christ of faith was different than the Jesus of history,” he said. “They argued that the historical Jesus was concealed in multiple layers added by church tradition and dogma.”

One of the first books questioning how Jesus was portrayed argued that Jesus was a political figure rather than a spiritual figure and was espousing the overthrow of the Roman government.

As one would expect, Dr. Williams said, there were many repercussions to the publishing of the work. Two major groups formed in regards to how the gospels were viewed. One group, the supernaturalists, asserted that the gospels recorded events that actually happened in history even though some are of a supernatural character. These were opposed to the rationalists who argued that the gospels recounted natural, historic events that were misperceived or misinterpreted, and thus described as miraculous.

Then came the influential work of Strauss, who proposed a middle way, introducing the category of myth, which set up a new paradigm for looking at Jesus. Strauss described the gospels as a history-like story whose purpose is to convey a religious truth that is important rather than a record of historical events, he said.

The first quest was brought to an end by the publishing of a book by Albert Schweitzer in 1906, which pointed out that how Jesus’ life was described was a reflection of the ideology of the scholars who wrote them.

This began a period that lasted until 1953 in which most scholars were of the opinion that nothing concrete could be known about the historic Jesus and the focus should turn to the Christ of faith, Dr. Williams explained

However, in 1953, there were some scholars who began to argue there were some things that could be known about the historical Jesus – that a clearer picture could be obtained of Jesus if the distortions of later Christian interpretation could be cleaned away.

Thus began the second quest for Jesus, from 1953 through the 1980s. A first step in their efforts was the creation of a list of indisputable facts about Jesus, as well as a method for judging the authenticity of the gospel stories as ways to try to peel back the layers that have been added through tradition.

These efforts have led to the third quest, which is still in progress. Scholars now are espousing the study of Jesus in the Jewish cultural background of the time, Dr. Williams explained, and are using new methods to look at Jesus, drawing from other fields of study to adopt new approaches.

Scholars are using social-scientific approaches to look at the culture of the time and are using literary criticism to analyze Biblical narratives, and new source materials are helping build the picture of life in Jesus’ time such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, the apocryphal gospels and archeological finds.

Dr. Williams will begin looking at one of these new approaches in the next session on Tuesday, Feb. 14, as he discusses the various process involved in the cognitive formation of memory and the different ways that distortion would have shaped memories of Jesus. The lecture will begin at 10 a.m. in the Chalmers Conference Center in the Niswonger Commons on the Tusculum College campus. Reservations are requested. Please call 423-636-7304 to make a reservation or email eestes@tusculum.edu.