New Testament Scholarship as Historical Jesus Study

Chester Beatty Manuscript (P46):
Ireland gets back in the historical Jesus World Cup?

Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne have gathered an impressive array scholars to evaluate the supposed "criteria of authenticity" that have governed historical Jesus scholarship over the last several generations.

In a stunning introduction, LeDonne retouches an argument that has gained some steam in recent years:  namely, that the various criteria are themselves dependent for their credibility on Form criticism as the explanatory paradigm for the formation of the Gospel texts.

Form criticism aims to make the Gospels intelligible via a comparative analysis of the "forms" that make up the Gospel texts.  This method makes prima facie sense as the Gospels do appear to be composed of stories whose similarities and differences suggest they might be profitably juxtaposed.  In the Gospels, there appear to be "miracle stories," "controversy stories," etc..., and comparing them has brought what seemed to be wisdom into Gospels study.  But just here problems arise.  Form criticism may bring wisdom into the field, but not the kind of wisdom it was intended for.  Form criticism was intended as a way to use the literary genres of the Gospel stories against each other and come up with a literary theory of Gospels, so that one could then distill out the literary elements and deliver the Jesus behind the Gospels.  Confidence that this is possible has dwindled significantly since Bultmann's powerful defenses of the method.  The Jesus that the Gospels deliver is literary all the way down.  Whatever history they deliver cannot be divorced from literary presentation.  There is no Jesus behind the text.

The irony of this fact, so LeDonne argues anyway, is that many of the very people who have challenged the old dominance of Form criticism have even so insisted on the viability of the criteria of authenticity that were used to distinguish literature from history in the first place.  LeDonne cites Dibelius on the question:  "Since the Evangelists merely framed and combined these materials, the tradition can be lifted without difficulty out of the text of the Gospels" (36).  Form critics would attempt to figure out which parts of the gospel traditions reflected the interests of the authors; the criteria were used for just that purpose.  But if that goal is no longer envisioned as likely or possible, what use have these various evaluative techniques?

So much for LeDonne's introduction.  It might seem to follow that the authors are pessimistic about the possibilities of historical Jesus work, but they are not.  They are in broad agreement, however, that historiography will need to change.  There will have to be an exploration of not of some Jesus behind those texts but of the Jesus that caused the texts.  One will have to do historical Jesus work much as one examines a crater in order to speak intelligently about the meteor that caused it.  Although this means that sources will have to be examined differently, it also means that the range of possible sources increases significantly.  Historical Jesus scholars have at their disposal not merely the Gospel traditions and the handful of extrabiblical references but all of early Christianity as a treasure trove of sources.  The revival of the Pauline corpus and the rest of the New Testament as sources, not to mention second-century Christian literature, must be considered especially among the many things that make this revision of historical method exciting for the student of the New Testament.  It may be that all of New Testament scholarship has something to say about the Jesus of history, then, as the question whence ecclesia assumes its proper priority in historical examination.  And since their faith in Christ was the prime motive for the early church's preservation of its own history, the move to bracket out the Christ of faith may one day be seen as the impediment to good history that it always was.