Radical Apocalyptic Jesus

Go to your local Barnes and Noble or Borders or any bookshop of fine taste and you will find a section on Jesus, and the books about Jesus make one subtle or not-so-subtle promise: the book will reveal who the real Jesus was and what the real Jesus was like. These books belong to what scholars call the “quest for the historical Jesus,” and most know that this Jesus is not the Jesus Christ of Christian faith but someone less, someone more human, someone far more Jewish, and someone many like to shove in the face of orthodox Christians who believe Jesus was Son of God. This raises a question for many of us.

On what does faith rest? On the Gospels or on the believability of the Gospels? On what the Church has been led to believe about Jesus or on what we can construct as reliable on the basis of what the Gospels say? Do we believe in the Jesus of history or the Christ of the Gospels/the Christ of faith? (Of course these are dichotomous expressions -- to bring out the force of the questions.)

Today we look at the rise of what can only be called the radical apocalyptic Jesus.

It begins at a time George Washington was galvanizing the American peoples into a new country, in 1776, and when Hermann Samuel Reimarus's nephew, GE Lessing, published a book called Fragments of an Unknown Author. Those were the days when gamesmanship was the mood -- the author was neither unknown and these were hardly just fragments. Reimarus, a lifelong resident and teacher at the high school in Mecklenburg, was a man of reputation. He chose not to make his real thoughts about Jesus known, so he nursed his doubts -- and serious doubts they were -- privately by writing out his ideas about Jesus. He died in 1768, and GE Lessing published the "fragments" in 1776. The seventh fragment was called "On the Intention of Jesus and His Disciples." These fragments of thoughts about Jesus shook European theology and nothing has been the same since.

Now the major points this book, and those which followed it, raise…

1. Critical thinking about Jesus meant analyzing both the orthodox faith (Nicene Creed) and the Gospel records on the basis of sifting the evidence.
2. Sifting the evidence meant sitting in judgment on the facts of the Gospels to see if Jesus really did say such and such and if he really did do such and such.
3. Once one had sifted through the evidence, one could salvage those parts that one thought were historically authentic and then compose a picture of Jesus on the basis of that sifted evidence.
4. The major result of this critical thinking process is that the Jesus of the Gospels is different from the Jesus of critical thinking. In other words, the Jesus of history is not the same as the Christ of faith.

This last point is the whole point of historical Jesus studies. Whatever you call him -- historical or "real" Jesus -- is not the same as the Gospels and not the same as the orthodox faith. Of course, there are soft historical Jesus books (all lives of Jesus from even orthodox Christians) and hard historical Jesus books (those in the wake of Reimarus).

This post is a little on the long side, and no other post this week will get this long, and you can read either about Reimarus or Schweitzer to get the big drift ... but here goes....

What about Reimarus? What did he think the "historical" Jesus was like?

1. Jesus was aspired to be the messianic king on the throne of Jerusalem but he was a political pretender.
2. Jesus' aspirations were frustrated by the outworkings of history and he died in despair crying out to God in wonder of why God had abandoned him.
3. The notion of a spiritual resurrected Messiah was invented by his disciples.

Tomorrow we will look at Albert Schweitzer.