Is the Quest for the Historical Jesus a worthwhile enterprise for Christians?

Is the Quest for the Historical Jesus a worthwhile enterprise for Christians?

 

Nak Moo Jun

 

Introduction

 

According to Encyclopedia Americana, history is defined as “the past experience of mankind,” and more exactly, “the memory of that past experience as it has been preserved, largely in written records.”[1] With these definitions, we can say that historical Jesus is “Jesus experienced by mankind and traceable through written records.” The historicity of Jesus is emphasized clearly in 1John 1:1, in which John the Apostle described the Word of Life as “what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and our hands have touched.” Although calling him the Word of life, which is highly symbolic and metaphoric, the Apostle is introducing Jesus as a historical figure whom they heard with their ears, saw with their eyes, and touched with their hands. Following this introduction, John said, “This we proclaim concerning the Word of life.” This suggests that the Apostle is basing the authenticity of his proclamation on the historicity of Jesus. Furthermore, he is saying that he proclaims not what he visioned in a dream but what he experienced through his five senses. This indicates the unique feature of Christianity as well as the importance of the quest for the historical Jesus. Christians believe that in Jesus Christ God actually entered into human history. Christianity is a historical religion in the sense that the actual occurrence of certain events like crucifixion and the resurrection is a necessary condition for its truth.[2] That is, a large part of the Christian religion consists of events that happened in human history, and the earthly life of Jesus is the core of Christianity as a history. In this sense, Christians’ faith is inseparable from the historical Jesus who walked around by the Sea of Galilee 2000 years ago. Thus, in this essay, I will suggest a few reasons why the quest for the historical Jesus is worthy in relation to Christian faith. The reasons proposed in this paper are: first, for digging out historical evidence; second, for rebuilding the original cultural setting; and third, appreciating the true meaning of incarnation.

 

1.      For digging out historical evidence

 

First of all, the study of the historical Jesus is crucial because, as mentioned above, Christian faith is mostly rooted in what happened in the Palestinian region 2000 years ago surrounding a man named Jesus. That is, Christians believe historical events such as Jesus’ birth from Virgin Mary, his crucifixion, his resurrection, and many other things that he did and said on earth. Our belief assumes that all these events were historically authentic. Therefore, the quest for the historical Jesus can provide historical evidence that may be useful to strengthen Christian faith. With regard to this, Nash said, “Some Christian thinkers go so far as to claim that historical evidence can actually prove the truth of many Christian beliefs. …… But this appeal to historical evidence is a coin with two sides. Nonbelievers get equally excited about the possibility that historical evidence might falsify essential Christian claims.”[3] If this is the case, the study of historical Jesus is another fierce battlefield surrounding the root of Christian truths. As to Jesus’ crucifixion, for example, we should not only present the meanings of Jesus’ death on the cross but also establish (or, at least, maintain) the historicity of the crucifixion as the starting point and base of theological discourse on Jesus’ sacrifice. Paul reproached the Galatians, saying, “You foolish Galatians! Who has bewitched you? Before your very eyes Jesus Christ was clearly portrayed as crucified.” Here, Paul appealed not to their heart but to their sight. This may signify that Paul is treating Jesus’ crucifixion as an objective historical fact to be portrayed clearly and to be accepted without question. The truth maintained by Christianity is not in individual believers’ heart. It is in the history of mankind. Therefore, it should be preserved more as objective historical facts rather than as subjective personal beliefs. In this sense, the quest of the historical Jesus can play a crucial role in guarding and fortifying the Christian truth and, ultimately, Christians’ belief in the truth.

 

2.      For rebuilding the original cultural setting

 

In his lecture, Dr. McDonough said, “It is certainly the biblical text that gives us the definitive portrait of Jesus for the life of the church. But the original authors could assume much social, cultural, and theological knowledge which we lack.” To my understanding, this means that the Bible portrays Jesus and his works clearly but our understanding of Jesus and his works is spoiled by our insufficient knowledge of cultural background in Jesus’ days. Today’s Christians are quite familiar with biblical stories but not with the cultural background of the stories. Thus, we may suppose that biblical stories themselves might reflect the overall cultural atmosphere of those days. This supposition, however, compromises the radicality of Jesus’ teachings until his Gospel becomes good news to us no longer.

 

In Luke 5:29, for example, Jesus was invited to a great banquet held by Levi at his house, and he and his disciples ate and drank together with a large number of tax collectors. Seeing this, the Pharisees and the teachers of the law complained to Jesus’ disciples, “Why do you eat and drink with tax collectors and sinners.” We, grown up in the Christian world view, intuitively know that tax collectors are good guys and the religious people are hypocrites. As we have read the stories of Jesus from a bird’s eye view, most of Christians know how mischievous these Pharisees and teachers of the law are, and how humble tax collectors are as represented by Levi, Zacchaeus and the tax collector in Jesus’ parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector (Luke 18:9-14). Then, it becomes too sensible and barely radical that Jesus accepted “good guys” and rejected “mischievous scoundrels,” and we lose the Gospel that Jesus accepted “sinners” and rejected “righteous ones.”

 

In his study on tax collectors, Wright explained why tax collectors were classified into the category of ‘sinners’ by the Jews. It was partly because they were collaborators with Rome and Herod, but the real problem was simply that tax collectors were widely regarded as dishonest and rapacious.[4] In the Jewish society, tax collectors were literally sinners, and this notion is supported by John the Baptist’s admonition to tax collectors, “Don’t collect any more than you are required to” (Luke 3:13), and by Zacchaeus’ penitent pledge, “…… and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount” (Luke 19:8b). As suggested by these verses, tax collectors were really corrupt and were “the moral equivalent of lepers.”[5] only when we see how disagreeable they were, we can appreciate how graceful Jesus was to them and how radical it was for Jesus to eat and drink together with them. That is, we should understand the Gospel of Jesus not in light of today’s Christian culture but in light of ancient Jewish culture. In this sense, we need to rebuild the original setting of biblical stories in order to perceive the dynamics of the stories fully, and this is what we can expect from the quest of the historical Jesus.

 

3.      For appreciating the true meaning of incarnation

 

Incarnation is probably the most crucial heart of Johannine theology. In John 1:14, he declared, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” Moreover, he upheld the incarnation as the touchstone for recognizing the Sprit of God and identifying deceivers or antichrists by saying, “This is how you can recognize the Spirit of God: Every spirit that acknowledges that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1John 4:1), and “I say this because many deceivers, who do not acknowledge Jesus Christ as coming in the flesh, have gone out into the world. Any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist” (2John 4). Why is the incarnation so important in Christian belief? In his book Incarnation, Thomas Torrance said, “The mystery of Christ is presented to us within history – that historical involvement is not an accidental characteristic of the mystery but essential to it”[6] and added, “Apart from that historical act of God in history, there is no knowledge of God, no real experience of God’s help and redemption.”[7] This suggests that the incarnation is the essence of God’s revelation, and apart from it there is no way for us to know and experience God.

 

There is an episode illustrating the significance of “being flesh.” I found this episode in Sinclair Lewis’s novel Elmer Gantry in which there is a conversation between the oldest faculty member of Terwillinger College and the dean of the college, which happened in 1903:

 

“Dean, in another forty years, by 1943, men will be up in the air in flying machines, going maybe a hundred miles an hour!”

“My dear fellow, if the Lord has meant men to fly, he’d have given us wings.”

“But there are prophesies in the Book ….”

“Those refer purely to spiritual and symbolic flying. No, no! Never does to oppose the clear purpose of the Bible, and I could dig you out a hundred texts that show unquestionably that the Lord intends us to stay right here on earth till that day when we shall be upraised in the body with him.”[8] 

 

In this conversation, the dean believed God’s prophesies in the Bible literally, and expected that in the near future men would fly in the air and be able to travel a hundred miles an hour. However, the oldest faculty member rebutted it, saying that such prophesies refers purely to “spiritual and symbolic” flying. If there are truly God’s prophesies on flying machines in the Bible, now we know that the prophesies have been fulfilled “literally” and therefore the dean was right. With the oldest faculty member’s spiritual and symbolic understanding, we cannot experience the power of God’s words. only when the Word is fulfilled in the form that we can experience with our ears and eyes, we can access deeper knowledge of God. We can imagine how the dean would respond when he saw the appearance of real flying machines that could travel hundreds of miles an hour. He must have been amazed not at the flying machines but at the Word of God that had been realized as it is. In this way, it is only when the Word becomes flesh that we have real experience of God.

 

There is a similar story in the Bible. In John 11, when Jesus said to Martha “Your brother will rise again” Martha answered, “I know he will rise again in the resurrection at the last day.” Jesus was about to raise her brother Lazarus from the dead literally, Martha understood it spiritually. It was not because she was spiritual but because she did not have faith in Jesus and his power. Spiritual interpretation of God’s word does not strengthen our spirituality. Rather it deprives us of all excitements that we can have with the Word of God. Often, in fact, “spiritual interpretation” is merely a different ｅxpression of “unbelieving” as shown by Martha. Then, we can grasp why the incarnation or Jesus’ being flesh is so important for Christian faith, why there have been many heresies denying Jesus’ incarnation into a true man such as Gnosticism, Marcionism, and Docetism, and why John the Apostle insisted on the truth of the incarnation so vigorously.

 

I have also my own story. When my daughter entered the university, she left home and moved to the dormitory in the campus and it was her first separation from the parents. She had a difficult time at the beginning. one evening, she called me and cried on the phone, saying that she wanted to go home. As an effort to comfort her, I told her how much I loved her, how heartedly I was praying for her, and how eagerly I was missing her day and night. But the effort was of little use. Then I decided to visit her in person. I prepared some food for her and, leaving home at about midnight, I drove for over six hours and arrived at her school early in the morning. I spent the whole day with her, having breakfast at a table by the window flooded with morning sunlight, walking around the campus and taking photos, enjoying Korean dishes at a nearby Korean restaurant, having a Bible study over a cup of coffee in a café, staying in the library while she was working there as a student worker, and having dinner together at the dormitory cafeteria. Then, she was comforted greatly and looked happy. This visit became a history between my daughter and me, and she remembers every moment of this history as an authentic token of my love to her. I was with her in flesh and then she experienced my love to her and believed it.

 

Jesus’ incarnation is God’s infiltration of human history. Without knowing and believing in the historical Jesus, our religion is nothing but powerless and meaningless speculation. The Word became flesh. Going further, flesh was broken into pieces literally to be our bread of life. “Being flesh” is “being spiritual” in the real sense. Without the historical Jesus, there is no theological Jesus. I believe this is the most important reason for the quest of the historical Jesus.

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[1] Robert V. Daniels, “History,” Encyclopedia Americana (Danbary, Connecticut: Grolier Incorporated, 1997), v. 14, 226

[2] Ronald H. Nash, Christian Faith and Historical Understanding (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing, 1984), 12

[3] Ibid, 12

[4] N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God (Minneapolis, Minnesota: Fortress Press, 1996), 266

[5] Ibid, 266

[6] Thomas F. Torrance, Incarnation (Downers Grove, Illinois: IVP Academic, 2008), 6

[7] Ibid, 8

[8] Sinclair Lewis, Elmer Gantry (New York: Penguin, 1967), 77