Jesus in the Nineteenth Century: Schweitzer’s Attempt to Make Sense of the Quest
Each “Life of Jesus” had some powerful effect on its author.
Reimarus evaded that woe by keeping the offence to himself and preserving silence during his lifetime—his work, “The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples,” was only published after his death by Lessing. But in the case of Strauss, who, as a young man of twenty-seven, cast the offence openly in the face of the world, the woe fulfilled itself. His “Life of Jesus” was his ruin.6
There is a literary Jesus, a synoptic Jesus, an eschatological Jesus, a Messianic Jesus, a Son-of-Man Jesus, and, for our purpose, a historical Jesus. There are implicit problems with all of them. The best place to begin is to attempt to give answer to the question, how did Jesus think of himself?
1. Did he define himself as the Messiah? If so, in what sense? The Jewish view of Messianic reality was of political and military predominance. The Messiah is not one who would suffer and be crucified and buried in a cave. Emphatically, the Jesus of history did not conform to the Jewish idea of Messiahship. Did Jesus think of himself as the suffering servant of Isaiah? If so, this was quite foreign to the Jewish idea of stately, political, and religious stature. The Jewish Messianic vision was absolutely foreign to the suffering servant of Isaiah as developed in Isaiah 52:13–53—53:1–12.
2. Did Jesus think of himself as the Son of Man? The Son of Man idea emanates from the Old Testament book of Daniel: “To him was given dominion and glory and kingdom . . . one like a son of man” (7:1–14). Was the Son of Man a metaphor for the deliverer of Israel? Did Jesus adopt this term in reference to himself?
3. What about the kingdom of God? There is no question that Jesus taught about the coming of the kingdom. Was the kingdom a place or a state of mind in which one commands and conducts oneself to be always under God’s rule? Or, was the kingdom the product of the eschatological end-times? Of course, not everyone would be admitted to the future kingdom. Only those who survived the final judgment. Jesus taught about the coming Messiah and the Son of Man, but he always stopped short of self-identification with these concepts. There is little question that his favorite oratorical theme was the kingdom of God. The question remains, did Jesus actually identify himself as being the incarnation of the concepts about which he taught?
4. We must also note that the evidence, both internal (biblical) and external (including the Apocrypha, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and personages such as Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, and Josephus) almost always points not to a full lifetime of Jesus, but rather only to his two-to-three years of teaching, healing, and public ministry.
The truth is, in terms of historical veracity, we know very little about the life of Jesus. The seventy “lives of Jesus” reflect, according to Schweitzer, not only the different epochs of time, but also the various points of view of the individual researchers. This is to say, if Professor x is a rationalist or spiritualist, he/she will come up with a rationalistic or spiritualistic Jesus. If Professor y is one who believes in the millennium, he/she will somehow find a Jesus who believes in the coming of the millennium. If Researcher z is an apocalyptic personage, he/she will somehow end up with an apocalyptic Jesus. Schweitzer says, “There is no historical task which so reveals a man’s true self as the writing of a life of Jesus.”7 He also comments that:
The critical study of the life of Jesus has been for theology a school of honesty. The world has never seen before, and will never see again, a struggle for truth so full of pain and renunciation as that of which the Lives of Jesus of the last hundred years contain the cryptic record.8
If this conclusion by Schweitzer is accurate, then we have an excellent illustration of how constructivism works!9 In truth, each researcher, from Reimarus to Paulus to Strauss, has constructed the version of Jesus his scholarship has led him to see and to create. The work of deconstruction includes the study of each individual who has endeavored to write a life of Jesus. Who is he? (Yes, they were all men.) What is his background? What is his life story? What shade of theological assumptions tended to color his hermeneutic, his interpretation of the events and sayings of Jesus?
Reimarus, Paulus, and Strauss
Reimarus was not published until after his death. Paulus, the second of our noted scholars, was denied several academic positions and stripped of others. Strauss, perhaps the greatest of the scholars, was practically run out of town.
Herman Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) wrote seven fragments. Today we call them essays.
To say that the fragment on “The Aims of Jesus and His disciples” is a magnificent piece of work is barely to do it justice. This essay is not only one of the greatest events in the history of criticism, it is also a masterpiece of general literature.10
Reimarus was a deist and a rationalist. He did not believe in miracles. Reimarus believed Jesus to be a product of his time who believed in the Jewish expectation of a forthcoming Messiah. Jesus was absolutely human. Reimarus portrayed Jesus as one who spoke forth about the kingdom of God being at hand: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand” (Matt 3:2). Baptism and the Lord’s Supper must not be interpreted as meaning there is a new religion.
Baptism in the name of Jesus signified only that Jesus was the Messiah . . . for the only change which the teaching of Jesus made in their [the Jews’] religion was that whereas they had formerly believed in a Deliverer of Israel who was to come in the future, they now believed in a Deliverer who was already present.11
According to Reimarus, Jesus fully expected people to respond to his message about the kingdom of God being fulfilled in himself, e.g., Jesus, the Messiah.
Heinrich Paulus (1761–1851) was a thoroughgoing rationalist. Every miracle ascribed to Jesus, including the feeding of the five thousand, the walking on the water, and his resurrection from the dead can be explained. Many miracles are ascribed to simple misunderstandings. Everybody followed the lead of Jesus and his disciples, who shared their food with each other. This served as an invitation for the crowd to also share their baskets of food. The boat failed to go very far out in the water because the wind was blowing inward toward shore. Jesus was wading as he tried to help Peter get back in the boat. The resurrection didn’t really happen because Jesus was not really dead.
When I was a student at Princeton Seminary (1953–1956), I often found myself trying to explain the miracles by coming up with explanations such as those rendered by Paulus. In bull sessions with other students, I seemed to be the loner. Like Paulus of old, I believed that Jesus was only a man. He was human. My own time in the pastoral-preaching ministry was devoted to this type of interpretation. My goal was to help bring the carpenter, the son of Joseph and the leader of men, to life in the eyes and hearts of my congregants. I tried to be completely rational in my approach to the miracles, especially in matters pertaining to the alleged virgin birth and the resurrection. I would attempt to spiritualize that which I could not otherwise explain. Healing miracles seemed to give me more latitude than other types of miracles. I dwelt heavily on the parables and teachings of Jesus, always concerned with making the scene and the situation come alive. I certainly neglected (ignored) the apocalyptic Jesus messages and behaviors. I always celebrated the Jesus who reputedly gave us the Sermon on the Mount.
According to Paulus, Jesus seemed to work miracles only because people did not fully comprehend his movements and his ability to help people gain perspective and resolution of their dilemmas. Jesus sometimes used the power of suggestion. Sometimes, according to Paulus, Jesus used medicines known only to him: “The truly miraculous thing about Jesus is himself, the purity and supreme holiness of His character, which is, not withstanding, genuinely human, and adapted to the imitation and emulation of mankind.”12
Schweitzer says that, for Paulus, the question of miracles can neither
