Without Precedent. Geoffrey Kirk

      Feminists, on the other hand, think that Jesus’s supposed habitual inclusion and encouragement of women simply demonstrates that his choice in the matter of Apostles was not his own. He was conditioned by the ambient culture. Jesus wanted to appoint female apostles; but knew in pragmatic terms that they would be unacceptable to those among whom they must work. His choice, in consequence, has little or no significance for the future.

      Notice that both sides are agreed that Jesus envisaged a future in which his choice in the matter of apostles would be significant (or not!). But what if he had no future in mind? Of course it will be necessary to examine in detail every recorded encounter of Jesus with women in order to assess the credibility of the claims made about them. But it will be as well to begin by explaining that the cross-party consensus—that Jesus differed in his attitudes to women from those around him, and that his choice of male apostles had enduring significance—challenges some recent trends in the Quest for the Historical Jesus.

      There are two kinds of truth about Jesus. The first is the truth attested by faith and found in the Gospels and later in the formularies of the Church. It involves, amongst other things, a wholesale acceptance of the place of Jesus in a salvation history extending through the Old Testament and beyond. The second kind of truth can claim less certainty than faith; it hangs on “scientific” historical inquiry. The second kind can claim no finality; historical research can never retrieve more than a part of the truth. It may even prove to be a very small part. The first kind of truth deals in metaphors, assertions, and affirmations; the second in guesses, surmises, and speculations. The Jesus Seminar, for example, which has made a significant contribution to the Quest for the Historical Jesus, even puts its conclusions to the vote. An important part of the search for an historically credible Jesus is the development of a technique for determining which of the sayings in the Gospels are his own words and which are the embellishments of the gospel writers, in the service of their own distinctive theologies. Two conflicting techniques have recently held the field. We will call them techniques of dissimilarity and similarity.

      Similarity first. In the 1970s, fuelled by some remarkable archaeological discoveries, the Quest shifted gear. The early twentieth century emphasis had been on form criticism and the Hellenistic background of the early Church. Now the Jewish context came to play an increasing part, as the titles of more recent books show: Jesus the Jew (1973); Jesus and Judaism (1985); The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991); A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (1991–2001); and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (1999). With help from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the voluminous works of Flavius Joseph, and new insights into early rabbinic literature, Questers were beginning to identify the “authentic” sayings of Jesus as those which blended well into his Jewish background and could easily be distinguished from the Hellenistic overtones of the evangelists, who were Greek speakers, writing for a largely Gentile audience.

      At the same time other scholars, mostly in the United States, were taking an opposite tack. Dissimilarity was the watchword of the Jesus Seminar. They placed an equal and opposite emphasis on the separation of Jesus from his cultural context. The Seminar put considerable emphasis on irony and the adversative character of Jesus’s preaching: a characteristic of his style, they thought, was the desire to outrage or to reverse expectations: “Love your enemies.” In consequence, they assumed that if a saying was rooted in traditional Judaism, without that controversialist element of surprise, it was unlikely to be his. Naturally, this assumption had its critics. It excised Jesus from his environment, it was said, in a way which would surely have made it the harder for him to have influence on it. It posited an eccentric Jesus, said others, “who learned nothing from his own culture and made no impact on his followers.”

      Then there is the matter of eschatology. Largely under the influence of Albert Schweitzer and Johannes Weiss, the majority of Questers in the early part of the twentieth century accepted the idea that the Jesus Movement was an apocalyptic movement, expecting the Kingdom of God (however that was envisaged) to arrive by some dramatic intervention during the ministry of Jesus. This was, of course, an acute embarrassment to Christians, for if it were true then Jesus had been misguided. The English scholar C. H. Dodd developed an ingenious theory of “realized eschatology”: Jesus, he claimed, thought that the kingdom was in some sense in the future and yet that, in some sense, it had already come in his own words and deeds. The notion did not fly for very long. More recently the Seminar has concluded that Jesus did not expect a future kingdom in any sense at all. His message was about the here and now, and he did not expect any dramatic intervention by God. Instead his ministry was one of political, social, and economic reform. The Jesus Seminar has, of course, been accused (as Schweitzer had accused earlier Questers) of creating a Jesus in its own image. Certainly, following on from its characterization of him as a master of paradox, a sort of peasant Oscar Wilde, the idea that he was a social reformer with no practical agenda for the implementation of his program stretches the imagination somewhat.