Quest For The Historical Jesus - Third Quest

Third Quest

As the Bultmann school faded, it became increasingly clear that the "new quest" was one-sided. Scholars of the new quest had a theological agenda, and they attempted to separate Jesus from Judaism and from the earliest Christian heresies. As such, they preferred orthodox sources. The scholars of the third quest have also been accused of mixing apologetics with scholarship. John Meier has said "...I think a lot of the confusion comes from the fact that people claim they are doing a quest for the historical Jesus when de facto they’re doing theology, albeit a theology that is indeed historically informed. Go all the way back to Reimarus..." The "third quest" appeared first among English-speaking scholars, and sociological investigation replaced the theological orientation of the "new quest." There were, however, earlier important works by Jewish scholars such as Constantin Brunner (Our Christ: The Revolt of the Mystical Genius, original in German, 1921) and Joseph Klausner (Jesus of Nazareth, original in Hebrew, 1922). The three characteristics typical of the "third quest" are an interest in the social history, a Jewish context for Jesus (especially restoration eschatology), and attention paid to non-canonical sources. The "third quest" is split between those scholars who advocate a return to a non-eschatological picture of Jesus and those who see him as leading an eschatological restoration movement.

These scholars tend to focus on the early textual layers of the New Testament for data to reconstruct a biography for the Historical Jesus. Many of these scholars rely on a redactive critique of the hypothetical Q Gospel and on a Greco-Roman "Mediterranean" milieu as opposed to a Jewish milieu and tend to view Jesus as a radical philosopher of Wisdom literature, who strives to destabilize the economic status quo. Some scholars also rely on a critique of non-canonical texts for early textual layers that possibly evidence Jesus. See, for example, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, Robert Funk, and Burton Mack

Some scholars of the third quest prefer to examine the historicity of Jesus through the lens of the Jewish heritage he may have come from. These scholars use the archeology of Israel and the analysis of formative Jewish literature, including the Mishna, Dead Sea Scrolls, New Testament (as a Jewish text) and Josephus, to reconstruct the ancient worldviews of Jews in the 1st-century Roman provinces of Iudaea and Galilaea, and only afterward investigate how Jesus fits in. The focus on Jesus' social environment rather than on Jesus himself is an intentional methodology to increase the influence of verifiable scientific criteria for evaluating Jesus and to reduce the influence of personal subjective criteria. Such scholars include David Bivin, Raymond E. Brown, James D. G. Dunn, Robert Eisenman, Paula Fredriksen, E.P. Sanders, David H. Stern, Geza Vermes, and N. T. Wright.