wife and our three sons. Nevertheless, the former life never completely left me, inasmuch as I did not have the intellect to deal with my apostasy or my loss of faith. In short, I was never successful in bringing closure to my earlier life. That is, until I realized that my brain was the product of acquired intellectual acumen giving rise to my imagination. I created this god. I invented it. I worked on it until I was sure I had it right! I had long accepted this Kerygma, this Christian belief system, as myth, but never had I clearly seen the interaction of myth with my creative imagination. It all seems so simple now! I simply failed to see how much of my original faith was anchored in the lore of how I wanted reality to be.
In these pages, I have shared how my personal faithlore and the idea of Jesus being an exemplar came about. I concluded that faithlore was an invention of my imagination, perhaps a figment! Albert Schweitzer helped me. So did David Friedrich Strauss, Bart Ehrman, David Eagleman, Yuval Harari, Andrew Newberg, Ernst von Glassersfeld, and Paul Watzlawick. But finally, I take responsibility for my faithloric conclusion.
4. Crosby, Aftermath; see also Crosby, Flipside of Godspeak.
1 Who Was the Historical Jesus?
Who Was Jesus of Nazareth?
This little volume will outline two major domains of biblical thought that are absolutely necessary for a foundation in studies about Jesus. Who was Jesus and what did he do? (chapters 1 and 2). Additionally, we must address the role of myth and folklore, as these impact what people come to believe as tenets of faith (chapters 3 and 4).
First we must address the following question: who was Jesus of Nazareth? By way of answer, we shall turn to the classic work of Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. This is a late-nineteenth-century–early-twentieth-century work. There are also second-, third-, and fourth-quest endeavors, with several modern contributions. We must start, however, with Schweitzer’s classic contribution to the literature.1
It would be so much easier if all we needed to do was read the four Gospels. Unfortunately the four Gospels don’t tell us nearly as much as we need to know. They were written between ca. 70 ce and 110 ce by men who ascribed their work to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. They each wrote from a different viewpoint or perspective. Mark was a lot like a reporter who wrote with little elaboration. Matthew and Luke, however, were storytellers. Matthew was telling his version of the story to Jews. Luke was telling his version to gentiles. Alternatively, John was probably writing his version of events to Greeks. John was less like a reporter or a storyteller, and more like a poet.
I hesitate to say this, but it even makes a difference which version or translation of the New Testament a person uses. Not all scholars agree on the meaning of the Greek words. Jesus spoke Aramaic. This makes translation even more difficult.2
There has always been, and evidently will be for a long time to come, people who desire (even demand) the following: 1) that the so-called written Word of God—that is, the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments—be held as containing the divinely inspired Word of God, even to the point of believing that God directed the point of the pen; 2) that these books are forever held as being absolutely inerrant, i.e., without error; these two doctrinal tenets of faith held by (practically) all Christian fundamentalists, in spite of the knowledge of ancient languages combined with the disciplines of the higher (historical) criticism and the lower (textual) criticism, reflect not simply a stubbornness to reason, but a preference to dwell in the land of sheer ignorance.
As a result of the Enlightenment, which took place throughout Europe and England (especially in Germany) in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, literally hundreds of scholars began to investigate the Bible in both literary and historical ways. Theology was not neglected, but it slowly took a backseat to historical investigation.
Until the enlightenment, Christendom clung to the doctrines and creeds of the church. After the Nicene Creed and its offspring, the Apostles’ Creed, there reigned supreme among theologians and church fathers the Definition of Chalcedon. Chalcedon (451 ce) attempted to define and describe, once and forever, the relationship between the earthly Jesus and the heavenly Christ—that is, the substantive makeup of the human Jesus versus the divine Christ.
Therefore, following the holy Fathers, we all with one accord teach men to acknowledge one and the same Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, at once complete in godhead and complete in manhood, truly God and truly man, consisting also of a reasonable soul and body; of one substance [ὁμοούσιος] with the Father as regards his Godhead, and at the same time of one substance with us as regards his manhood.3
Approaches to the Historical Backdrop: Super Naturalistic-Rationalistic/Spiritualistic-Mythological
With the publications of the first “Lives of Jesus,” there burst forth a wealth of conjecture and scholarship never before known to humankind. In the wake of the predominant supernaturalists came the rationalists. I include with the rationalists the spiritualists, who attempted to put a spiritual take on the miracles, including the healings, the resurrections, and the water, fish, and feeding episodes.
A third approach to the Jesus narratives, following the supernaturalists and the rationalists, was the way of David Friedrich Strauss. According to modern scholar Bart D. Ehrman,
The supernatural interpretation can’t explain the text and the natural explanation ignores the text. According to Strauss, both modes of interpretation err precisely because both of them see the story as a historical account. In fact, Jesus’ walking on the water is not an actual historical event but a myth—a history-like story that is trying to convey a truth.4
Strauss developed the concept of the myth. We must understand the word “myth” as having several meanings. Following Strauss, we understand that myth, while being untrue in a literal sense, may be a vehicle for the conveyance of truth. We consider fairy tales to be myths because they often convey deep truth. This emphasis on myth would get Strauss into a lot of trouble. Nevertheless, his work remains seminal.
This third category, in addition to the supernaturalists and the rationalists, contains many “Lives of Jesus.” Ehrman states,
One thing has remained constant since Strauss. There continue to be scholars—for most of this century, it’s been the vast majority of critical scholars—who think that he [Strauss] was right, not in all or even most of the specific things he said, but in the general view he propounded.5
Before we look further at these three, let us look briefly at another tribe or school of scholars. I call them the apocalyptics because they bring out into the open the questions to which I referred earlier. Who was Jesus? What was his understanding of himself? What did the Messiah mean to Jesus? Was his Messianic ambition his own view of the Messiah, or the traditional Jewish view of the Messiah? Was Jesus the Son of Man? What does “Son of Man” mean or imply? And perhaps most crucial of all, what was meant by the “kingdom of God”? Was it a future paradise in eternity, or was it a present possibility for those following Jesus?
Increasingly, in the study of the lives of Jesus we face the question of Jesus and his belief in the last times, the echaton facing the demise of the world. As things worked out, Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus essentially ended the quest. It would take two world wars and a revival of faith in the “living Christ” before there would be a renewed interest in the historical Jesus. In the neo-liberal and neo-orthodox periods, personages such as Karl Barth, Rudolph Bultmann, Emile Brunner, Reinhold and Richard Niebuhr, and Paul Tillich dominated the theological scene. Additionally, there were Harry Emerson Fosdick and Norman Vincent Peale, neither of whom were neo-orthodox, but both of whom were ultra liberal in their hermeneutics, their theory and method of interpretation.
Seventy
