Period of "No Quest"
Schweitzer's critique of historical Jesus research significantly undermined the two-century-old attempt to discover a historical Jesus who conformed to the tenets of Enlightenment Era rationalism. This period lasted from the time of Schweitzer until the Ernst Käsemann's 1953 lecture "The Problem of the Historical Jesus.". Boyd suggests four significant factors contributing to this malaise;
- Schweizer's critique of the Old Quest "produced a Jesus that was unappealing to modern minds" whilst at the same time his emphasis on the nonhistorical motivations of the researcher undermined confidence in the idea that one could write an objective account of the historical Jesus.
- The Old Quest had relied heavily upon the purported reliability of Mark as a source document but confidence in this thesis was decisively undermined by Wrede's critical analysis of Mark's historicity in The Messianic Secret (first published as Das Messiasgeheimnis in den Evangelien: Zugleich ein Beitrag zum Verständnis des Markusevangeliums in 1901).
- The rise of form criticism, with its emphasis on oral transmission and development of Jesus traditions together with adherence to a naturalistic world-view, "served to place an apparently immovable wall of early Christian distortion between the Gospel texts and the historical Jesus".
- A new theological perspective on the importance of historical Jesus research. Following Martin Kähler, it was increasingly accepted that "the vicissitudes of historical research with their more or less probable results could never provide a foundation for faith." This led to the widely proclaimed distinction between "the Jesus of History" and "the Christ of Faith." (Evans, 1996)
The most prominent figure from the period of "no quest" was Rudolf Bultmann. He was intensely skeptical regarding the historical Jesus and argued that the only thing we can know about Jesus is the sheer "thatness" (German: Dass) of his historical existence, and very little else. He considered the Gospels conveyed the meaning of Jesus proclamation in the dress of a "mythical" 1st-century world-view and argued that the Gospels must be stripped of these mythical forms ("demythologised") in order that scientifically literate persons might encounter Jesus message. By appealing to Heidegger's existential philosophy, Bultmann was able to lay an emphasis upon response to Jesus message, whilst downplaying the significance of Jesus as a historical figure. Through this period British scholars tended to be less radical than their German counterparts and retained some confidence in the possibility of "reaching assured knowledge of the historical personality of Jesus."
Read more about this topic: Quest For The Historical Jesus
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