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3. THE QUEST OF THE HISTORICAL JESUS

Three centuries in the making, the authority of the canonical gospels as inviolable historical and theological truth went virtually unchallenged until the late eighteenth century. Then, in the age of reason and scientific enquiry known broadly as the Enlightenment, the questions started. The German scholar Hermann Samuel Reimarus was the first to propose that the authors of the gospels had played fast and loose with the historical details of Jesus' life, providing fraudulent accounts of the miracles and the resurrection. Reimarus, who died in 1768, wisely insisted that his conclusions could only be published posthumously. More courageous was another German theologian, David Friedrich Strauss, who published his massive Life of Jesus Critically Examined in 1835. Strauss' efforts to distinguish supernatural myth from history in the gospels got him fired from his teaching position at a German Seminary, and he remained a pariah throughout the remaining decades his life.

In 1863, yet another German writer, Heinrich Julius Holztmann, attacked the universally held belief that Matthew and Luke were the original gospels. Carefully comparing the texts, Holztmann noted that Matthew and Luke were in agreement where Mark's narrative begins and where it leaves off, but told substantially different stories otherwise. Holtzmann not only concluded that Mark had been written first, but that the many sayings Matthew and Luke had in common had been provided by an earlier text. The kind of comparative textual analysis pioneered by Holtzmann was expanded and refined in the next generation, and by the 1890's the term Q (which seems to have originated with the German theologian Bernhard Weiss) was being used to refer to Matthew's and Luke's sayings source; by the turn of the century the existence of Q had been widely accepted. By the first decades of the twentieth century, the so-called Two-Source theory, which held that both Matthew and Luke had been constructed from Mark and Q, had become an article of faith among biblical scholars.

Concurrent with this textual deconstruction were the first efforts to construct an historical Jesus. In 1906, the year he abandoned his career as a theologian and entered medical school, Albert Schweitzer published The Quest of the Historical Jesus, in which he proposed that Jesus had been a Jewish eschatological (from the Greek eschaton, or last event) prophet who had been convinced that human history would soon reach its cataclysmic conclusion. Concluding that Jesus hadn't produced an ethic for the ages but, rather, for the end of time, Schweitzer dropped out and built his renowned clinic at Lambarene in French Equatorial Africa, dedicated to his own ethic of reverence for all life.

The pursuit of the historical Jesus did not begin in earnest, however, until after World War II. Much of the impetus was provided by two entirely unanticipated post-war archaeological finds. The first was the discovery, in 1945, of the Nag Hammadi codices, among them the full text of the Gospel According to Thomas. The immediate effect of this discovery was to remove the last doubts about the existence of Q - here was the ancient text of an actual narrative-less "sayings gospel" much like the still hypothetical Q. But the consequences of Thomas for New Testament scholarship, which we will consider shortly, are likely to be even more far-reaching.

The second great discovery occurred in 1947, near an ancient ruin on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea called Khirbet Qumran, when Bedouin shepherds searching for lost sheep chanced upon a cave containing seven scrolls in pottery jars. An examination of the script quickly established that the scrolls were about 2000 years old, setting off a search of the surrounding caves; eventually ten entire scrolls and fragments of about 800 additional manuscripts were found in eleven caves in the Qumran area. Known as the Dead Sea Scrolls, these documents were written from the second century B.C. to about 68 A.D, when they were placed in the caves, probably for safekeeping during the war with the Romans. The Dead Sea Scrolls include books of the Hebrew Old Testament a thousand years older than any previously known copies; apocryphal writings, some previously known and some unknown, which were never included in the Jewish canon but were extremely popular in Jesus' time; and, most sensationally, the writings of a fanatically devout, militant Jewish sect that probably occupied the dwellings at Khirbet Qumran.

The relationship of this sectarian literature to Christianity was quickly drawn. In a 1955 New Yorker article, Edmund Wilson noted the striking similarities between the messianic expectations of the Qumran sect and early Christians, offering the conclusion that Christian dogma was hardly a unique invention, but had been borrowed almost entirely from contemporary Jewish beliefs.

Wilson's article helped foster the perception that the scrolls held secrets so embarrassing to Christian orthodoxy that the church would attempt to suppress them. That perception was considerably abetted by the actual political controversy surrounding the scrolls. The scrolls had been discovered in what was then Jordanian territory; the government of Jordan organized an international team to translate and edit the texts. The Jordanians allowed no Jews on the team, which consisted largely of Roman Catholic clerics (the Vatican had provided funding for acquisition of the scrolls from their Bedouin discoverers). The seven scholars on the original team divided all the scrolls among themselves, and each scholar's cache became virtually his private property, to which he retained exclusive rights to access and publication. Remarkably, even when the scrolls fell into Israeli hands after the 1967 Six Day War, the Israeli government left the editing team as it was, despite increasing complaints that the editors were working at a dilatory pace, had withheld publication of the results they had produced, and were jealously and often petulantly preventing access to the scrolls by scholars whose views might differ from theirs.

By the late 1980's, the scrolls editing "cartel" had aroused such general outrage in the scholarly community that it became a widely reported public scandal. Changes were made to the editing team in hopes of picking up the pace and increasing access to outside scholars, but they struck many scholars as too little and too late. Taking matters into their own hands, two midwest scholars used a computer and a published concordance (a list of word occurrences) of various unpublished scroll fragments to recreate the texts. These computer-generated texts were published in 1991 by the Biblical Archaeological Society, the most active critic of the scrolls' editing monopoly. At almost the same time, the Huntington Library in San Marino, California, made a startling announcement: It owned, through a private donor, a set of photographs, taken ten years previously, of the original photographs of all the Dead Sea Scrolls (made by the Jordanians during the 1950's); the library would now make these photographs available to all scholars. Two months later, the Biblical Archaeological Society made the scrolls even more public, publishing a complete set of the scroll photographs.

The events of 1991 were as sudden and unexpected as a biblical revelation. Scholars have only begun to sort out what is contained in the newly liberated texts, what they mean for biblical scholarship in general, and what they tell us about the historical context of Jesus. However, several directions are already clear: The sectarian scrolls, previously viewed as the esoterica of a handful of religious extremists, must be moved much closer to the center of a Judaism -- the Judaism of Jesus' time -- that was considerably more varied and more inclusive than previously suspected. And while there is still no scriptural smoking gun to establish a direct connection between the Jesus movement and the Qumran sectarians, their ideological kinship is becoming increasingly evident ( we will discuss that kinship in greater detail later).

The Nag Hammadi codices, a mere two volumes translated and published without scandal, have not been nearly as mediagenic as the Dead Sea Scrolls. Yet a single Nag Hammadi text, the Gospel According to Thomas, has prompted an equally momentous, if considerably quieter, revolution in the study of Jesus. The most visible evidence of this revolution has been the work of the Jesus Seminar, a convocation of more than two hundred biblical scholars, originally convened in 1985. Over an eight-year period the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar evaluated, with all the tools available to modern scholarship, all the sayings attributed to Jesus, then voted on the probability that Jesus actually said them. The consensus of the Fellows was that "Eighty-two percent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the New Testament gospels were not actually spoken by him," including virtually everything in the John gospel. Almost as startling was the attribution of authenticity to a significant number of sayings found in the Gospel According to Thomas, along with the conclusion that often the Thomas version represented the earliest known form of those sayings. So important was Thomas to the work of the Jesus Seminar that their report, published in 1993, is titled The Five Gospels, reflecting the elevation of Thomas to at least equal status with the four New Testament Gospels.

In fact Thomas' Jesus most closely matches the voice extracted by the Jesus Seminar: Often humorously paradoxical, pithy to the point of reticence, never boasting of supernatural abilities or divine descent. This voice also inhabits Jesus the "peasant Cynic" as proposed in a series of popular and scholarly books by John Dominic Crossan of DePaul University, Co-Chairman of the Jesus Seminar (the Cynicism Crossan imputes to Jesus was an extremely ascetic, anti-materialist school of ancient philosophy). Crossan argues that Jesus' followers knew little or nothing of the circumstances of his death; in the end, scavenging dogs ended up with Jesus' body; most of the "good news" is creative writing.

Yet there is a decidedly Christian character to the minimalist Jesus of Crossan and the Jesus Seminar; he is a strikingly original thinker who stands almost as resolutely in opposition to his Jewish tradition as does the Jesus of the John gospel or the Nicaean creed. In that sense the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Nag Hammadi codices are leading many of their modern exegetes in seemingly opposite directions: The former toward a fiercely nationalistic Jewish patriot, the latter toward a quirky Hellenistic wise man.

These two visions are not irreconcilable, however, nor should they confuse the common lesson of both Qumran and Nag Hammadi. Not only must we go outside the New Testament if we hope to understand the historical Jesus, we must also cross the once sacrosanct territory of the Christian canon with great care. That canon is, as we shall see, a landscape strewn with startlingly well-preserved historical artifacts, yet many of its most impressive and best-known monuments -- the infancy narratives, the trial before Pilate, Jesus' claims of divinity -- are false facades erected by and for Christian communities far from Jesus' time and place. Those New Testament literary monuments are inhabited by Jesus the Christ, the divinity whose story could only be constructed when the memory of the man had already been obscured by rumor, legend, and conflicting recollections. But to understand the Jesus who died a generation before the first attempts to write his story, we must look at a different literature.

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