Quest For The Historical Jesus
The quest for the historical Jesus mean steps historiographical successive study of the life of Jesus of Nazareth as a historical figure.
We distinguish in general three "quests". The first - also called "search services" was begun in the late eighteenth century - has consisted of various attempts to reconstruct a "life of Jesus" as a major figure in human spirituality, by ridding it of Christian dogma. She stumbled on the fact that the sources almost exclusively on Jesus, the canonical Gospels are theological writings to further witness to the faith of early Christian communities to bring the biography of Jesus. She has given disparate portraits of Jesus "according to a priori philosophical implied or not writers and generations" .
The main sources on the life of Jesus of Nazareth are the four gospels Canonical. Three of the Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke), known as synoptic , are close, while that of John is radically different. Christian tradition and the Order of New Testament after the explanation of Augustine of Hippo that have inspired Matthew Mark Luke would have inspired. But in the reconstruction of a life of Jesus, the comparison of these four texts shows many differences and contradictions of time.
The first attempt to make a harmony of the Gospels , that is to say to merge the four Gospels into a single text, is the Diatessaron of Tatian in the second half of the second century.
The canonization of the four gospels imposes the idea of divine inspiration that become sacred texts. However, there will always be a debate among Christian theologians from a literal interpretation of texts and a more flexible interpretation , the validity of the interpretation still within the tradition and magisterium of the church. The reliability of the texts themselves will not be challenged until the eighteenth century.
With the Reformation , the free interpretation of scripture leads Lutheran theologians to return directly to the texts. Luther has no interest in establishing a sequence of events reported in the Gospels : about the expulsion of the merchants from the temple, which, in John is at the beginning of the public life of Jesus in the Synoptics and in the end, he concluded : "The Gospels do not follow any order relating to the acts and miracles of Jesus and, after all, material is not of great importance. If any difficulty arises concerning the Holy Scripture that we can not solve, just drop it. "From the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century , however, will spend the treasures of ability to compile all reported events and organize them in chronological order. And Andreas Osiander ( one thousand four hundred ninety-eight - 1,552 ), in its harmony of the Gospels, ( 1537 ) argues that "no word of the Gospels should be omitted, nothing foreign should be added, and the order shall be no gospel amended. This leads to the principle that an event reported in different contexts in the Gospels happened several times: we have two expulsions and merchants from the temple, several resurrections of the daughter of Jairus , etc..
An important step in critical analysis of texts of the Bible begins with the Oratorian Richard Simon , with his Critical History of Old Testament (1680), whose first edition will be burned under the influence of Bossuet and will be published by the Following Holland. It will publish in 1689 the Critical History of the New Testament text). . One of his successors will be Jean Astruc , with Conjectures on the original papers which it appears, that Moses was used to compose the book of Genesis (1753) .
During the eighteenth century with the Enlightenment in France, Germany and England, the critical analysis of texts will be a weapon of rationalism against the dogmatism of religion. One hand it points out the contradictions and improbabilities, rejecting the eternal truth of the Gospels, and other differences between the Jesus of the Gospels and the Christ of dogma . These tenets are opposed by the atheists , and the deists who see them as obstacles to the natural religion.
The first quest for the historical Jesus
The first quest is that attempts at historical reconstruction of Jesus' life . It begins in 1774-78 with the publication by Lessing work Reimarus and ends with the synthetic work of Albert Schweitzer in 1906. It is intimately linked to the early formulations of the synoptic problem , and is initiated mainly by liberal Protestants in Germany.
It is particularly marked in Germany by the impact of the work of David Strauss : The life of Jesus or critical examination of its history (1835) and one in France La Vie de Jesus of Renan (1863).
It is subdivided into various schools.
Reimarus
Reimarus Hermann Samuel (1694-1768), professor of oriental languages, deist initiates the first quest. Before him, nobody tried to design a life story of Jesus.
4000 pages of his book The Aims of Jesus and his disciples was not published until after his death, from 1774 to 1778, the philosopher Lessing.
For Reimarus, Jesus was born and died a Jew, and never wanted to found a new religion or church. He preached the imminent arrival of the kingdom of God , that is to say the restoration of the kingdom of Israel, then occupied for centuries. In this sense it was considered the messiah by his followers. These, after his crucifixion and the apparent failure of his prophecies transferred their hopes in one of his return. This thesis, which Jesus fully reinstated in the Judaism of his time, and undermines the foundations of Christian faith, scandal , . It is the first to have stressed the importance of eschatology in the message of Jesus, and have searched for causal relationships in the story of Jesus and early Christianity .
From the rationalist school Reimarus
In the tradition of rationalism, Reimarus to Paulus, there is Johann Jakob Hess (1774), Franz Volkmar Reinhard (1781), Karl Bahrdt (1786) , made famous with his explanation of the loaves that Jesus begins sharing provisions while others follow and share food from bags of those who were provisioned, Johann Gottfried von Herder (1797) and Karl Heinrich Georg Venturini (1806), which presents Jesus as an agent of the sect of Essenes.
School rationalist
The rationalist school rooted in the work of thinkers of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, with the exception of Rousseau and Kant .
Represented by Heinrich Eberhard Gottlob Paulus in Das Leben Jesu als Grundlage einer reinen Geschichte des Urchristentums (1828) and Friedrich Schleiermacher (1832) rationalist school denies or rejects the supernatural explanation of the miracles and resurrection of Jesus, and seeks to explain the facts as perfectly natural that the contemporaries of Jesus would not have understood .
Paulus built a figure of Jesus healing people who find a certain continuity School mythological In the first half of the twentieth century , grew the mythistes theories , which deny the historical existence of Jesus. Their main proponents were the German philosopher Arthur Drews , the British journalist rationalist John M. Robertson , the French Louis-Paul Couch and Prosper Alfaric. These arguments were rejected by scholars of the time (including the atheist writer Charles Guignebert and Maurice Goguel ), and since the beginning of the second quest, no longer receiving support or outside academia, in circles or rationalist atheist fundamentalism. Indeed, the thesis of the lack of historical Jesus, which appeared in the late eighteenth century , remained marginal in historical research academic is totally rejected by the academic specialists of ancient Christianity from the late 1930's . Now outdated , it has continued to be repeated regularly by writers outside the academy, "to some press marked by ideology and not enough scientific knowledge" , including diffusing Internet . David Strauss (1808-1874) was first influenced by Schleiermacher. In 1835 he published The Life of Jesus, considered a critical point of view . This publication had a considerable impact and marks an important milestone in the history of Gospel criticism . Guided by the philosophy of Hegel , it departs radically from dogma. He distinguishes Jesus reduced to meager outline of personal history and the Christ of the Gospels. For him the basic idea of the Christian religion is the incarnation of God, and the first gospels were not written in a historical purpose but to express this idea through myths. The myth is not simply a fiction, but a symbolic expression of a belief. Rejecting both the supernatural explanation of miracles, explanations of the rationalists, it is the result of the use by the early Christians of Jewish messianic ideas, expressing the belief that Jesus is the Messiah . The Life of Jesus by Strauss also introduces for the first time the problem of the relationship between the Synoptics and the Gospel of John. Strauss for these two traditions are irreconcilable, and he concludes the detriment of the historicity of the Gospel of John . In 1846 the book was translated into English by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans). The distinction will Strauss in 1865 in his book Christus und der Glaubens of Jesus der Geschichte (The Christ of faith and the Jesus of history) is still widely used. Strauss's argument is criticized by Ferdinand Christian Baur because it does not rely on textual criticism sufficiently precise. Baur for the Gospels reflect the theological conflicts between early Christians and allow to trace the history of this controversy . This work will be done by Baur and his followers, the Tbingen school , which inspired by the Hegelian philosophy of history rejects both the doctrine of the historical truth of the Gospels, and their rational interpretation that deprives them of their mythical sense . The analytical work of the texts will also be continued by opponents to the thesis of the Tbingen school , as Christian Hermann Weisse , Christian Wilke , Joseph Eugen Reuss , Albert Reville , Heinrich Julius Holtzmann , Bernhard Weiss . The result of these discussions was a consensus in favor of the hypothesis of two sources: the sources of literature are the Evangelical Gospel of Mark, in its current form or in a primitive form called proto-Mark, and a collection of words (LOGI). The Gospel of John is generally regarded as arising from a later tradition, and dominated by dogmatic and allegorical ideas . In 1774-1775, Johann Jakob Griesbach published the first synopsis , publishing in parallel columns, allowing the playback of a single glance of the first three Gospels. It also offers the first critical formulation of the synoptic problem , distinguishing itself from the assumption Augustinian. Matthew would be the first gospel that Luke would have been inspired, then Mark would have used the other two. Around 1780, GE Lessing , who published the work of Reimarus, suggests that the three Gospels were written by an abbreviation of a Greek translation of an original gospel (which might be the Gospel of the Hebrews or the Gospel of Nazoreans spoken of the Church Fathers ). But it was in 1838 that Christian Hermann Weisse introduced the assumption of two sources that inspired Matthew and Luke both Mark and a now lost collection of words (logia) of Jesus. This hypothesis will be developed in 1863 by HJ Holtzman, and the second source will be called Q source (short for the German Quelle: source) by Johannes Weiss in 1890. Many other assumptions were made, but it is she who now has the support of most experts. These theories place the evangelists in a second or third generation of disciples who have taken over from earlier traditions, and not as close or even direct control of the life of Jesus, as did the Christian tradition, including the apostles "Matthew" and " John. In line Baur, found Bruno Bauer , who argues in 1841 the priority of the Gospel of Mark, the differences from other texts is the result of the "creative invention of the evangelists," in which he clearly shows the part played by theological and dogmatic notions . But he pushed his argument further by arguing that these notions have changed the evangelical tradition, were also the source of the Gospel of Mark. According to him Christianity did not appear until the early second century a syncretism of Jewish schools of thought Greek and Roman, and Jesus is a literary fiction, a product and not the origin of Christianity . These ideas had little influence at the time. It will resonate in the work of the Dutch school of radical critique and mythistes modern . Departing from the mythological school, the authors of the liberal school will make Jesus a great spiritual figure. Ernest Renan (1823-1892) obtained the chair of Semitic languages at the College de France in 1862. In 1863 he published The Life of Jesus - the first in France and throughout the Catholic world. It receives considerable success (eight editions in three months, and five German translations in the year), and scandal: Pope Pius IX , considers him a blasphemer Europe. In 1864 , Minister of Education Victor Duruy removes his chair, he will recover in 1871 with the Third Republic. Renan resume and popularizing historical and philological works of German critics. The literary quality of life of Jesus that unites the positivist view of history and the romantic imagination , is universally recognized . Renan made Jesus a dreamer, a walker in the countryside of Galilee, smiling and surprised by the drama which it participates. After his death, the passion of a woman gives birth to a resurrected During the next 40 years, many popular books appear with diverse views on miracles, but all attempt a psychological explanation of the Messiah Jesus. For example, David Friedrich Strauss. Daniel Schenkel Karl Heinrich Weizsacker. , Heinrich Julius Holtzmann Theodor Keim Karl Hase Willibald Beyschlag and Bernhard Weiss A new change of perspective occurs. The issue highlighted is that of the Messianic consciousness of Jesus in clear, Jesus was he aware of being the Messiah awaited the end of the kingdom to Israel? In this question, Israel must be understood as the northern kingdom of Syria Palestine, the last king is attested archaeologically Omri in the ninth centuryBC. AD Founded by Hermann Gunkel (fr) and Wilhelm Bousset (1896), the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule observes the birth of Christianity in a historical and social context that takes place under the influence of various religions around. It establishes Its representatives are Richard Reitzenstein August (in) (1910) and Julius Wellhausen (1894), one of two authors of the Graff-Wellhausen theory for the Old Testament. In France, as a result of Renan and with the Third Republic, the turn of the nineteenth century and twentieth century saw the development of secular studies on religion: a section of religious studies appear in the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes and Chairs of History of Religions opened in Sorbonne and College de France. The opposition between secular and religious exegeses will be marked by the personalities of Father Alfred Loisy and the Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange and in 1903 around a small book. He popularized the German historical and textual criticism and the theory of two sources. He is the famous phrase "Jesus announced the Kingdom and that the church is coming." Despite the openings of the encyclical Providentissimus, (1893), stiffening of the Biblical Commission, Vatican encyclical Lamentabili leads, and leads to the modernist crisis and Loisy's excommunication in 1908, which is subsequently appointed to the College France, and published in 1910 Jesus and the Gospel tradition. The other figures of the "independent exegesis" free thinker will Guignebert Charles , a student of Renan and Professor at the Sorbonne, and Maurice Goguel (1870-1955) , a professor at the Protestant Faculty of Paris. The latter, referring to a sentence of Renan in 1849: "Hardly, perhaps, of expressing all the Gospels that they contain real, we get a page of history about Jesus" says: "Where Renan spoke of a page, some critics do not speak more than one line. " The side of "Catholic science," the Dominican Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855-1938), founder of the French Biblical and Archaeological School of Jerusalem , is opposed to the radical critique of Loisy, the questioning of the historicity of the Gospels. It supports the apostolic tradition of their writing and opposes their late composition by the second generation of Christian communities. However, it is suspected of modernism and its work will be blacklisted. However it is organized around Catholic exegesis that will analyze the relationship between the divine inspiration of the Gospels and their various aspects and literature. In the tradition of Lagrange there are liberal Jesuits as Leonce de Grandmaison (1868-1927), which provides an equation of proportion between cause (the reality of Jesus Christ) and effect (the spread of Christianity). From the 1920s, developed what was called the school of criticism of literary forms (Formgeschichte) whose initiators are the German Protestant theologians with Martin Dibelius , Die with Formgeschichte of Evangeliums (1919), and Rudolf Bultmann, Die Geschichte der synoptischen with Tradition (1921). This is in line to Willhem Bousset and school "history of religions." The conclusions of this work were summarized by Maurice Goguel : Yosef Klausner published in Hebrew in 1922, translated into English three years later Jesus of Nazareth: His Life Times and Teachings London: George Allen and Unwin, 1925 and German 5 years later Jesus von Nazareth. Seine Zeit, sein Leben und seine Lehre. Walter Fischel, Berlin 1930, and the origins of Christianity, From Jesus to Paul London: Allen and Ulwin, 1942. Joseph Klausner, Jesus went to his Jewishness. It shows that his teachings are rooted in the soil Pharisee school of Hillel. Start: Ernst Ksemann around 1950 end: to 1980-85 Name: Gnther Bornkamm , Joachim Jeremias , Eduard Lohse , Herbert Braun , Heinz Schrmann , Stephen Trocm , Norman Perrin After the deadlock of the first quest proven by Schweitzer and Wrede in the early twentieth century , it will take fifty years for a new quest for the historical Jesus is launched. It will build on the work of the school's history forms, which showed that the gospels were the primary sources for the study of the history of early Christianity, but only secondarily to the story of Jesus. This will involve a restriction of what is meant by "historical Jesus", which is more Jesus of Nazareth as it was (as opposed to the Jesus Christ of Christianity), but what we can know Jesus objectively using scientific methods of historians The second quest has developed mainly in Germany, while emphasizing its many commentators on the rift between Jesus and Judaism . This step attempts to ensure the foundations of a valid historical approach by seeking what differentiates Jesus and singles from its environment . She strives to find the historicity and authenticity or not words and gesture Jesus' Christological irrespective of the varnish. This work has several common features : they give to describe the details of biography and psychology of Jesus, focusing on certain aspects of his preaching (lyrics, parables, controversies and gestures), between the encounter with John the Baptist and the Crucifixion. The focus of the preaching of Jesus is coming, imminent or near, the kingdom of God. Jesus had no messianic claims and his identification with Christ (especially in John's Gospel) is that of Christians after death. They focus on the criterion of historicity of dissimilarity, which identifies the uniqueness of Jesus as against Judaism and Christianity primitive. Historians have developed a number of criteria for the analysis of historical sources. They should be used jointly and are not absolute, and are used to systematize the arguments. Ksemann Ernst draws an important first test of discernment, called criterion of dissimilarity: Other criteria are added to this initial test: The quest closes around 1985 when it opens is called conventionally the third quest, which originates mainly in the United States and who, in a dramatic turnaround, but rather focuses on the membership of Jesus Judaism It begins in the 1980s, mainly in the United States by incorporating three new aspects : the main one is that Jesus returns to his Jewishness (as opposed to the second search that focused on the break), the adding sources of literature apocryphal in addition to the canonical gospels, and the introduction of sociological methods. The work of the 3rd quest for the historical Jesus will be popularized in the United States from the mid-1980s by the Jesus Seminar, and France from the mid 1990s by the documentary series Corpus Christi. The Jesus Seminar (Jesus Seminar) is a group founded in the United States in 1985 by Robert Funk under the . approximately 200 people , most academic experts in biblical studies or religious studies , often authors in their specialties (including himself Funk, John Dominic Crossan , Marcus Borg , Harold W. Attridge , Arthur J. Dewey , Stephen L. Harris, John S. Kloppenborg, Robert M. Price, James M. Robinson ... Jesus and Judaism The work of the second search had focused on the failure of Jesus and his teachings with a rigid and legalistic Judaism . The more recent research (based on the study of Hellenistic Judaism ( Philo , Josephus , and on the Qumran Scrolls discovered in 1950), reveal a far more diverse Judaism (with the Pharisees , the Sadducees , the Essenes the Zealots , and various prophetic movements ...) that the rabbinic Judaism that appear after the destruction of the Temple in 70, new context in which the gospels are written. Some researchers speak of Judaism in the plural. It is in this context that the work of the third quest reposition Jesus, a Jew "marginal", like many others, conflict within Judaism, not against Judaism. Methodologically, the criterion of dissimilarity, which is essential in the second quest, will be tempered by a criterion of historical plausibility, introduced by German Gerd Theissen : the reconstruction of the historical Jesus must be credible with the Judaism of his time, and together with the evolution of early Christianity. The Gospel of Thomas is a text apocryphal Gnostic , some fragments in Greek (dated ~ 200), were found in the Oxyrhynchus papyri of the early twentieth century , and including a nearly complete version in Coptic (dated ~ 350) was discovered in 1945 in the library of Nag Hammadi. There are 114 words of Jesus. The issue that divides scholars today, is whether it is a secondary creation of the late second century , or whether it is based on a tradition independent of the Synoptics, and prior to their composition , which would have been grafted considerations Gnostics. In the work of the Jesus Seminar, where the gospel of Thomas was regarded as a fifth gospel, and where the essential criterion of historicity has been that of multiple independent certification, this has led to the elimination of substantially all of the words the Gospel of Mark (considered the most historically reliable in the second quest). Thus, while only a few words from the Gospel of Thomas have been considered authentic, everything concerning the proclamation of the Kingdom of God is also excluded because of missing Thomas. What remains of Jesus is a master of wisdom rather than an eschatological prophet. The Gospel of Peter is an apocryphal text of the second century, traditionally attributed to the apostle Peter , but condemned by the Fathers of the Church for heresy docete. It was known only by a few quotations. In 1886-87 a manuscript of the eighth century is found in the tomb of a monk, on the site of Akhmim in Upper Egypt. This manuscript contains an account of the trial, crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Two other brief fragments were found among the papyri of Oxyrhynchus. Many works of textual criticism have been made to reconstruct the source Q , that is to say, the second source, now lost, which would have been used with Marc for the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. Following Lhrmann, the work of John S. Kloppenborg , The Formation of Q. Trajectories in Ancient Wisdom Collections (1987) were significant. It would have been a collection of sayings (logia) as the Gospel of Thomas. The study of the different strata of writing show that the layer is essentially the most archaic sapiential, apocalyptic elements have been added subsequently. In 2000, James M. Robinson , Paul Hoffman and John S. Kloppenborg published The Critical Edition of Q: Synopsis Including the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, Mark and Thomas With Franais, German, and French Translations of Q and Thomas. In Europe , these authors have a greater awareness that the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar without fully achieve the general public. See the detailed article Unlike the deified image that began to be elaborated from the Apostle Paul , Jesus was a simple man, modest. It is a prophet in the tradition of Elijah and Elisha in the Bible , also active in the outlying provinces of northern Palestine. Like them, Jesus has a great charismatic power. The Gospels show: it is a healer capable of alleviating the disease (paralysis, blindness ...), an exorcist who casts out demons, a miracle worker. A status which in itself has nothing unusual at the time, the literature cites the Rabbis and other healers known at the time, Josephus speaks of Jesus as a "wise man" who knew work wonders. Guy G. Stroumsa is Professor of Comparative Religion at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. We can classify it, strictly speaking, among the thinkers of the quest for the historical Jesus. Yet throughout his book The End of Sacrifice (Ed. Odile Jacob, 2005), it casts a historian on the character of Jesus, defending a concept: the figure of the prophet perfect. The thesis mythiste (eighteenth century to the 1930s)
David Strauss
Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Tbingen School
The synoptic problem and the theory of two sources
Bruno Bauer
Liberal School
Ernest Renan
The liberal lives of Jesus
School apocalyptic
Francophones
Other Europeans
School History of Religions
The quest for the historical Jesus and the Catholic science: the modernist crisis
The school of criticism of literary forms
"- The Gospel accounts of the framework is artificial, the transitions are schematic and editorial, they do not achieve organic web and only mask the fact that the Gospel account was originally formed from a multiplicity of elements isolated from each other.
- The Gospels are not historical documents. They have not been made or retained to publicize the Jesus who lived and taught in Galilee and Judea and died in Jerusalem. They are religious documents that show that Jesus was the faith and piety of the communities in which they were composed.
- The various forms in which materials are evangelicals show they have been developed for the various functions of church life, they are so narrowly tailored that it would be unrealistic to pretend to reach a historic core. " Joseph Klausner and the school's Jewish New Testament
The 2nd quest for the historical Jesus: the new quest
The criteria for historicity
From the second to the third quest
The 3rd quest for the historical Jesus
The Jesus Seminar
The New Springs
The Gospel of Thomas
The Gospel of Peter
The reconstruction of the source Q
Other authors
Geza Vermes
Guy G. Stroumsa
Other authors
References
External Links
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