Transcript
ANDERSON: Dr. Cooper, ladies and gentlemen, it's a very great pleasure and privilege for me to be back here in Princeton for the summer institute in theology. The bonds between Princeton Seminary and the University of Edinburgh and New College are, of course, very longstanding and very strong, and so it is always good to have this kind of exchange. The bonds were strengthened recently when Edinburgh honored
Dr. McCord with a doctor of divinity degree and we were all very delighted to have him there with us in Edinburgh. So, it's good to be here. I look forward to the opportunity of meeting some of you at closer quarters and in a more intimate and friendly way. Since we went back to Edinburgh from Duke in 1966, my wife and daughter and myself have sought to come here each summer and have succeeded in
doing just that. In fact, it's rather expensive for me. My wife insisted that she would go back from North Carolina to Edinburgh only if she had the opportunity to come back here every summer. So, I've got to arrange a lecture or two in order to make that possible. You know, it's very interesting. In the years when we were in North Carolina, there at that delightful campus at Duke, we used sometimes to have nostalgia for home, for
the hills and glens of Scotland. I felt kind of homesick now and again. But, the strange irony and paradox of human existence is that many a day in old, grey Edinburgh, we are haunted by the same kind of nostalgia for the clear blue of the Carolina sky and the limpid yellow of the Carolina moon, which I think is a very profound lesson for us. We're never absolutely and completely at home on this side anywhere; strangers,
sojourners, and pilgrims, and exiles. But, at any rate, for my family and myself, we rejoice in having two homes; one here and one back in Scotland. So, it's good to be back in one setting. Oh, I must tell you that on Friday night, I flew down, later on from Edinburgh to London, slept for two or three hours in a hotel in London, flew out to New York on the Saturday, feeling rather tired, slept overnight
in New York, then came down here by bus from the Port Authority Terminal on the Sunday morning, about noon. I must have fallen asleep on the bus and then eventually went forward and ventured to say to the driver, "Have we reached Princeton yet?" He said, "Are you something kind of crazy, man? We're only a mile this side of Trenton." I had slept right through Princeton after coming --
after coming all the way from Scotland. It seems a crazy thing to do, right enough. But, I must say the driver was very kind to me. He stopped a local bus going in the other direction, helped me to transfer my cases, and I was met with a very great deal of kindness and eventually arrived back here. I suppose that anyone who can come from Scotland and sleep through Princeton deserves to be called a member of a phantom faculty.
Enough -- too much by way of introduction, I am not proposing on these few meetings that we'll have together the normal kind of Bible study. I'm not proposing to take up a particular document of the Old and New Testament and make some homiletical devotional notes on it. These you can find in any commentary. I
propose, in fact, to do something rather more exacting and I hope it will not weary you. I want to take up with you some study of Jesus of Nazareth and the political realm. This will be a historical, critical study in the origins of Christianity and the themes will be the status of Jesus research today,
Mark's witness to Jesus Christ, Jesus and revolutionary activity, and Jesus and revolutionary hope. These will be the themes on which I shall be touching and I don't feel the need to make any apology for taking this kind of line. We're living in an age in which there is a very great deal of
impatience with any kind of historical inquiry and that, I think, would be true particularly of the younger generation today. They are terribly impatient with any talk of the past. Any talk, for example, generally about the Scripture irks them and frets them because they feel it's such old hat now and some of our more radical and well-intentioned youngsters, certainly in Europe
-- I suppose the same is true here -- have some sort of strange feeling that you can begin from scratch, that you can move out from nowhere, as it were, that you can begin entirely "de novo" and make some kind of new movement, which might be peripherally associated with the Christian church as we have known it. Now, I believe that is quite an impossible thought and we have a job to
teach our young people that in the Church as in our individual existence, we are compounded of past, present, and future. But, there is no present and there is no future without our past and that is particularly true of our place in the Church of Jesus Christ. There simply is no way to begin from nothing, to break from what has gone before. That is true, no matter what
denomination of the Church in which you stand. We have a past. We have a pit from which we are digged and it stands, and we must be concerned about our past. This is the main point of recent process theology. It is teaching us if we need it taught that we are part of an ongoing process of a covenant people of God that began with Abraham, the code
of God in all the ages and there simply is no way to break with our past. The true radical, I believe, is the person who is deeply conscious of his roots in the past and has a starting point from which he may launch out into new adventures. But, you need to know, for your own sanity and balance, where you're rooted. That is why I am proposing this kind of inquiry
into the very roots of our faith, I think -- the best of all possible subjects -- Jesus of Nazareth Himself. In our first two meetings, I want to try to outline for you -- I hope it's not too heavy going -- the status of research into Jesus of Nazareth as of now. It is a fact that the theme of revolution is
a part of the present outlook across the world. That doesn't need any documentation and it is quite interesting that recent theologies of hope have taken over the notion of revolution in attempting to explain how Christian hope and faith conceive of the future. Now, these theologies of hope
which have been quite numerous in our time stand in a political dimension. The theology of hope is sometimes characterized, in fact, as political theology -- political theology. In working out a political theology, theologians of hope have focused almost entirely on the full-blown Christological formations of the early church,
on the incarnation of Jesus Christ, or on the cross and the resurrection. Engaged as they are on the systematic study of the centralities of incarnation, cross, and resurrection, for our understanding of the world and its future, these theologians have asked only incidentally and, indeed, minimally, about the man, Jesus of Nazareth,
what He said, what He thought, and what He did; that is, the focus has been on the great centralities of the Christian proclamation; incarnation, cross, and resurrection, and not on the man, Jesus. But, in New Testament studies now, the question of -- if you might use this phrase -- the politics of Jesus has been coming to the forefront. Witness the growing tendency of late
to depict Jesus as a religiopolitical revolutionary. This question as to whether Jesus was, in fact, a revolutionary is of great interest and importance, I think, and it is to the historical Jesus that we are going to restrict our inquiry, seeking to try to find out whether he really can be claimed as an ally in the social revolutionary struggle of
our time. We propose to investigate what political ambitions and affiliations, if any, Jesus had in the course of His earthly ministry. But, the trouble is that it's not possible to define or describe any one particular phrase of the ministry and message of Jesus without first investigating the whole problem of what, if anything,
can be known about Jesus generally and, in this fear, as in all historical study and interpretation of figures of the past, everything hinges on the sources and the nature of the sources at our disposal. If you want to ask about Jesus, you have first of all to ask about the sources which
speak of Him. Now, sometimes, the historian is faced with a great many sources for his use and sifting; sometimes faced, in fact, with a volume of sources so bewildering in their complexity and variety that definitive understanding of a historical personality is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible to attain. So, for example, with the Tudor monarchs,
there has been a great resurgence of interest in Britain and Europe, generally in the Tudors. I don't know whether you've seen here in the United States the BBC series of plays on Henry VIII'S wives. Has that been -- oh, well, you two will be familiar with the resurgence of interest in the Tudors. Now, if you examine the history of the Tudor monarchs, you find that there are available parliamentary statutes,
diaries, lawsuits, dispatches, state papers, public and private correspondence. This tremendous wealth of material makes the historian's task both easy and difficult at the same time. If you take Henry VIII, for example, historians have variously assessed his contribution. For a long time, Henry VIII was held
in very low esteem by historians and it was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that J. A. Froude revised the king's image as one who, by his personal gallantry and diplomacy, set the state on a secure footing. Since then, the image of Henry VIII has been greatly sharpened, refined, or modified. Similarly, with Elizabeth I,
it has taken the recent researches of Sir John Neale to create a climate of understanding in which the queen can be viewed as a woman not torn by conflicting inner drives but as a woman who was, at the same time, a superb Renaissance statesman. In the case of Jesus, the problem of historical understanding and interpretation is of
a different order and even more acute. Here we are faced with an extreme rarity of sources. Aside from a few fleeting references to Jesus in Jewish and Roman historians of His time or later, we possess only the gospels of the New Testament and, as you are well aware, as documentary sources for the life of the human
Jesus, the gospels are woefully inadequate and problematic. They are so theologically loaded. The traditions about Jesus that eventually found their way into the written gospels were from the first in the process of their transmission in the Christian communities deeply impregnated with the theological confession of the believing congregations and with their
faith in Christ as living Lord and Master. All that He said in the gospels turns the searchlight more directly on the living Lord and Master than it does on the past of the man, Jesus. Accordingly, there is no way to the actual Jesus of history save by trying to penetrate behind the palimpsest of missionary propaganda
which has created the gospel image of Christ. The more the gospels have been studied, the more they have come to be viewed not as chronicles but as dramatic propagandist productions of the early Christian missionary movement, and the more they have been so viewed, the more difficult has it become to see Jesus as He really was.
You can confirm such an assessment of the situation by a brief look at Mark's Gospel, which is still widely held to have been the earliest one written. How anyone can maintain today that Mark presents a relatively straightforward account of the human Jesus is very hard to fathom and I am astonished to find that my good friend and colleague, William Barclay,
of the University of Glasgow, does just this in his translation of the New Testament which may be known to some of you. In his brief introduction to the various books, he says, quite simply in his own inimitably simple way that Mark is a straightforward account of the human Jesus. Well, I have told him and so I can say it in public. That is nonsense. In fact,
approximately one-third of Mark is given to miracle stories and in that regard, suffice it to quote here some recent words of Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper. These are quite shocking words put by a secular historian but they're good for us. They're cathartic. "If a secular historian told us that an army of 5000 men had gorged themselves
on 5 loaves and 2 fishes and that 12 hampers were needed to carry away the scraps, we should be very skeptical about anything else that he told us, even if he insisted that he had been there at the time." I'm simply trying to illustrate the fact that the gospels are no straightforward accounts of the human Jesus. Then, again, the Passion
narrative occupies a sizable block of Mark's Gospel and it can scarcely be regarded as straightforward history for it is shot through with allusions to the Old Testament and to the fulfillment of Old Testament prophesy, and this itself indicates a theological apologetic aim rather than a purely historical concern. Even
where, in its narrative sections, Mark's record does seem to bring us in touch with actual happenings, they are related not for their intrinsic interest as memorabilia of Jesus' ministry but for their evangelistic importance. The gospels are out not to tell the story of a good man but to proclaim the significance of a living Lord and Christ. We have a good
example in the account of the Baptism of Jesus by John in Mark, chapter one, verse nine. Now, I believe that it is irrefutable that Jesus was baptized by John at the Jordan; that, out of its allegiance to a sinless Lord, the community of faith could have invented a report that placed its Master in the company of sinners going out
to John's Baptism of repentance for the remission of sins -- that is hardly conceivable. The church could never have invented that story. It would not have put its sinless Lord in the position of having to go down for the Baptism of sinners. Still, the point I want to make is that it is not the fact of Jesus' Baptism in itself that interests the Evangelist.
Rather, he fuses into the story the supernatural symbolism of the dove, the voice from heaven, and the Messianic formula, "Thou art My Son," and whereas these trappings really reveal Jesus in the transfigured raiment of the Son of God, they are presented as though they were an integral part of what actually
happened in the Baptism. All that I have been saying about the gospel has long been recognized, yet, even today when one puts the matter in this way, the first question on some people's lips often is, "Are you then accusing the Evangelist of double-talk, distortion, and dishonesty?" Perhaps, we have invited this attitude by
our persistence in talking about whether and to what extent the gospels are biographical. Is it not high time we stopped looking at these gospels through modern biographical spectacles and conceded finally that they are products of a world very different from our own world in the twentieth century? They are the products of the world of the first century in which their strange amalgam
of the historical and the supernatural, the actual and the mythical was commonplace. The first thing we need to do if we are going to take the present generation of young people with us is to concede to them quite frankly that the gospels which witness the Jesus Christ are first century documents and the first century was not our own, and the miraculous supernatural element in the gospels is part
and parcel of the thinking of that first century. Now, if you confess honestly, I find, to young people that this is so, they will begin to see that you are not claiming the miraculous supernatural elements of twentieth-century products. You are allowing the gospels to stand where they really belong in that very strange and remote, ancient, Near Eastern world of the first century. That is why
I think environmental studies in the New Testament are of the greatest importance. Environmental studies help us to place the gospels where they really belong. In that age of the church when the church was first founded and the early Christian missionary movement got underway, the movement that produced the gospels, the world was covered with a great multiplicity of beliefs, supernatural elements, magical elements, mythical
elements. There was no accurate scientific study of history such as we are familiar with in our time. The point I want to make is particularly this -- that if the evangelists were to get Jesus across to the world of their time, they had no option but to present His career amid the trappings of the supernatural and the mythological, which were the only
way to commend anyone in that time to other people. Wilhelm Bousset, the great German history of religion scholar of the 1913 period whose work has recently been translated by an American scholar from German into English just a few months ago, in fact, said in his work in 1913 -- said this, "Only
in that, behind the gospel of Jesus, the community placed the figure of the heavenly Son of Man, the Lord and Judge of the world and let His glory half-veiled and concealed by His history shine through in transparent fashion, only in that it sketched the picture of the wandering preacher on the gold background of the miraculous and surrounded his life with the charm of the half-disclosed
secret. Only thus did the Christian community make the picture of Jesus influential." I am emphasizing that the gospels are the products of the first century and they participate in first-century ways of thinking. They would burningly convince these men that the Savior of the world had come in this Jesus and their first interest was to proclaim Him as the Savior of the world,
and they did so in the mythological symbolism that was part and parcel of the thought of their time. But, the mythological symbolism is but the outward integument and trapping of the inner secrets of Jesus' being. We must, I think, try to grasp this. Does it follow, therefore, that the church in enlisting the aid of symbols and ideas prevalent in the environment really created
Christ? Did the church take the simple life of a Jewish rabbi or a Jewish prophet, Jesus of Nazareth, and weave around it the high celestial trappings and myths of the time in order to make Him into a divine figure? These are the questions which our historic faith poses for us and I think it is salutary for us in our time to try to think them through more clearly, fully, and comprehensively
than we have done. Let me say again that is why I have chosen this not altogether easy theme for our study here. Does it follow that the church created the Christ? I think the answer is yes. If we mean by this that by its own selection and rejection of materials the Church decided as the secular historian puts it,
what image Christ should present in order that Christianity should compete with all those other religions which flourished in the spiritual California of the Middle Roman Empire. I hope there are not too many Californians present. But, even they would agree, perhaps, to this analogy. I think it's a valid analogy; the Middle Roman Empire not
entirely unlike, in terms of the plurality of its religious outlook, in terms of the strange admixture of the historical, the mythological, the miraculous. But, it is one thing to claim that the church created Christ and that bold statement needs correction. It is quite another thing to say that the church created Jesus and it's Jesus I'm after
because that is, again, why we take up this inquiry because I think the churches are groaning and yelling for a grasp of the humanity of Jesus of Nazareth. We have gone on too long with vague notions of a phantom-like Godman who is neither God nor man and I think we need to grasp again the reality of the flesh of Jesus. The Church did
not create Jesus. Yet, you know, there are people around us who still think that Jesus was a myth; that there was no historical figure called "Jesus." The view has appeared at intervals since the close of last century that Jesus is an entirely mythical figure and the gospels altogether fictional reports. There would be no need to mention this were it not that in the last year or so, different
forms of the Jesus myth theory have received considerable publicity. I don't know how much publicity one's former colleague, John Allegro's book on the mushroom and the cross received on this side of the Atlantic but it received a good deal of publicity in the United Kingdom; also, in Scotland, but the Scots are canny and they just dismissed it with a shrug of the shoulders. One ought to mention it, perhaps,
because the people who are on the fringes of the church or even some young people in the church are taken up with this kind of thing, aren't they? They fasten onto it and they think everything is debunked. John Allegro's thesis is that certain New Testament names, including that of Christ, can be traced back to Sumerian roots associated with the hallucinogenic mushroom, "Amanita
Muscaria," to give it its technical, botanical name. The name of Christ is but a cryptogram for "Amanita Muscaria," this hallucinogenic mushroom. Long before John Allegro wrote, I had heard in this country from some student of mine a thesis about the resurrection in this connection. I don't know where he got it but this might bear out the analogy one was using about California. I don't know but
he had the idea that the Last Supper was a supper of mushrooms which had hallucinogenic properties and the visionary appearances of the risen Christ were entirely conditioned by a big diet -- a too-heavy diet of this particular mushroom. Now, where would that come from -- that idea? Not California. I heard it at Duke but I don't think it originated there.
Christianity, according to Allegro, conceals within itself, particularly in the translation of names, the secret names for the sacred fungus which was a potent phallic symbol and the Christ of the saved, and Christianity can now be seen as an important type of phallic drug cult. I had a very learned friend in Harvard who wrote a review of Allegro's book for The Boston
Globe, and he wanted to entitle it, in a rather ironical way -- they wouldn't allow him to do it but he wanted to -- "Fungus Dei: Miserere Nobis." But that, I think, was too sacrilegious for them. They wouldn't have it. Allegro -- in short, on the basis of questionable findings about the more linguistic origins of a few
names and there are a host of others in the New Testament Allegro never considers, we are asked to believe that every item in the New Testament is a cryptogram for a hallucinogenic mushroom. I am not competent to judge Allegro's competence in Sumerian linguistics, although I gather from experts it is distinctly shaky.
But, I do believe there are rather good grounds for denying that Jesus is no more substantial than a sacred fungus and I believe also that the author of this weird fancy has simply lost his mind and he is simply bending the normal laws of evidence to make room for an otherwise undocumented, phallic cult centering on the use of the mushroom drug.
We can only suppose that a dearth of source materials is much more perilously stimulating to the fevered imagination than an abundance of source materials for not even the wildest historian of the Tudor monarchs we referred to earlier could reduce any one of them to a plant. At any rate, Allegro surely stretches our credulity very far, indeed;
much further than the simple pietist who wants us to swallow whole every gospel story, nature miracles, and all. I should very much rather swallow that than swallow Allegro's mushroom. Much more sober and -- by the way, Allegro just incidentally has retired on the proceeds of his book and has
gone to live on the Isle of Man where the income tax is much lower than it is in the mainland of Britain but hopes to live fairly comfortably for the rest of his days. So, it has sold. It just shows you there's a public for bad stuff. If you write a sober book on Christian origins, it sells a few hundred copies and you have to pay the publisher.
Much more sober and more significant is the recent book of Professor George Wells of London University, a former keen member of the Anglican Church, not that that says very much about him but there's nothing very novel in his work. It just came out a few months ago
but it's another form of the Jesus myth theory, and it has received wide publicity in Oxford and Cambridge and in the south of England, particularly. We are confronted with the familiar argument that there was a great lapse of time between the first missionary thrust of the church and the writing of the gospels, which he dates as late as the late second century, whereas at the earliest stage, men like Paul
showed no interest whatsoever in the historical Jesus. The evangelists later sought to give the new faith respectability by actualizing the divine figure of the cultic Lord of the church as a figure of real history. But, the arguments against all forms of the Jesus myth theory are really very weighty. From the fact
that much in the gospels may be deemed to be non-historical, it is not proper to infer that nothing at all can be historical. Although the Evangelists are engaged in adapting the traditions about Jesus to their own missionary propagandist purposes, they do not always succeed and they seem sometimes to be dealing with bedrock facts. This is true as we have seen of Jesus'
submission to Baptism by John. This story, in fact, of Jesus' Baptism was found so difficult and so scandalous by the early church that Luke passes it by in a participle clause. Matthew adds a short explanatory conversation between Jesus and the Baptist, and John omits the incident altogether. The later Gospel according to the Hebrews
puts on the lips of Jesus the direct challenge, "In what sense have I sinned?" The church was troubled, so troubled about this thing that it could not have invented it. It had to find a way around it by explaining it somehow and it still leaves us with a theological problem. If our confession is the confession of a sinless Lord in Christ, you are left with the problem of how to deal with this fact that at the very beginning of His public ministry, He goes down
with a group of sinners for John's Baptism of repentance. You're faced at that point with a bedrock fact which there's no doing away with; that this Jesus lived and that He was baptized by John is as irrefutable as that Caesar crossed the Rubicon around 44 B.C. The same applies to the trial and death of Jesus. The death of Jesus constituted such a terrific scandal
for the early church that it could not have invented the fact that He was crucified as a Roman criminal on a Roman gibbet by a Roman procurator. Then, again, the early church generally and the Gospels in particular seek to present the life of Jesus or certain events in it as the realization of Old Testament prophesies. Now, if Christ were an entirely
fictitious person created by the church, we should expect an exact one-to-one correspondence between the Old Testament text and what is said about Jesus, if Jesus were an invention. In point of fact, to get anything but a one-to-one correspondence, you find the early church doing conjuring tricks with the Old Testament texts to make them conform to certain facets of the life of Jesus, and that,
again, would indicate that we are in touch with some bedrock facts. Then, finally, if Christ were an altogether legendary, cultic figure like Dionysius, Isis, or Mithras, he would have been assigned to a distant and nebulous past instead of to a very recent time and place. It is not difficult, in other words, to argue against any kind of Jesus myth theory.
Although current versions of the Jesus myth theory are no more persuasive than earlier ones, perhaps they do have a value for us in that they constrain us to recognize the great complexity of our sources and the need to apply ourselves to them with all critical rigor. We have
set too lightly to the intellectual challenge of the gospel. The health of the church depends on an intellectual awakening today as much as it depends on a spiritual awakening. The commitment of the mind is called for just every bit as much as the commitment of the inner life of the Spirit, I believe. That is why our young people are asking us questions and I think the possibility of a new day of health for the
church is latent in their questions. Where there is openness and questioning, there is the possibility of health. Where there are no questions and only answers, the church is as good as dead already. No society can be dynamic where there are no questions anymore. So, these books, even one such nonsense book as Allegro's at least challenge us to be critical, to be as open
to the problems of our sources as we possibly can. Be all this as it may, we are now beginning to see more clearly that rigorous criticism of the gospels as sources involves the attempt not only to get behind them to the facts about Jesus but also to measure
and assess the theological and mythological elements with which stories about Jesus are interfused. In retrospect today, we can observe that in their quest of the historical Jesus, the liberal theologians of the nineteenth century made the mistake of cutting out altogether the miraculous and the mythological.
They asked no questions about the structure and logic of mythology and they concentrated only on the God consciousness of Jesus and the force of His religious personality. They have left a legacy, most particularly an American religiosity where the object of devotion for a great many Christians in this country still is the God
consciousness of Jesus, the great force of His great personality. But, that leaves entirely open and on one side the whole question about the mythological, its structure, and its logic. If you hack out the miraculous, if you hack out the myths, then you are left simply with the personality of Jesus. The myths are seeking
to express some deeper truth about this Jesus and, therefore, demand attention. In the years following the First World War, perspectives on the nature and intent of the gospels were greatly changed by the rise of so-called "Form Criticism," and the vigorous reaction, notably of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann, to the liberal theologians' quest of the historical Jesus
looks not in the least surprising to us now. Barth and Bultmann, each in his own way, protested that the true object of Christian faith is not a Jesus whose personality or the specifics of whose biography can be reconstructed by the historian. The true object of Christian faith is the Christ to whom the gospel takes
bear witness. Both Barth and Bultmann, each in his own way, wanted to protect faith in Christ from the uncertainties of historical research. For Barth and Bultmann, faith is a passion which becomes comic or distorted if it tries to rest on the approximation process of historical investigation.
So, Bultmann, particularly, put the barrier up against asking questions about the human Jesus and Bultmann insisted that we must concern ourselves only with the Christ of the cross and the resurrection, the Christ of the church's faith. But, unlike the liberals who were all for discarding completely the gold background of the miraculous in the gospels,
Bultmann takes the miraculous and the mythological very seriously. He sees in it a means of releasing what the sources are actually saying about Jesus Christ and in his own theology, he has tried to show how the mythological elements in the gospel story express a quite particular understanding of the nature of human existence.
It is quite significant that, in his earlier years, Bultmann himself wrote a book on Jesus of Nazareth, on the man, Jesus, in which he came to the conclusion that He was something like a Jewish rabbi and prophet. But, having done that, one has the impression that Bultmann was troubled by it and embarrassed by it all the rest of his life. He never quite knew what to do
with this picture of the human Jesus that he had, so great was his emphasis on the Christ, the exalted Christ of the church's faith. At the beginning of his "Theology of the New Testament," Bultmann states that the historical Jesus is no more than one presupposition among others for Christian theology and I want to take exception to that. I stand radically opposed to this position
of Bultmann's because, as I've said earlier, when the quest of the historical and the human Jesus is foreclosed, the churches are starved for the flesh and the humanity of Jesus and I, for one, am not unhappy that this particular phase of existentialist theology is passing and that we might be on the way towards a rediscovery of the humanity of Jesus.
That is a good point at which to stop if you feel you've had enough. If not, I can carry on for a few minutes more. What do you think?
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER 1: Carry on. Carry on.
ANDERSON: Another five minutes, huh? It has been left to the so-called "new quest" of the historical Jesus in recent years -- this new quest by which the period of eclipse of the Jesus question has lately been overcome. It has been left to the so-called "new quest" to seek purposefully,
to try to repair the breach between Jesus and the proclaimed Christ of the Christian message or the Christian proclamation. Some of Bultmann's pupils, if I may just try briefly to explain the situation, in the early 1950s, felt that the old man had gone too far in refusing any questions about the human Jesus. He had put altogether too much emphasis on the exalted Christ of the church's faith.
They wanted to rehabilitate the question about Jesus of Nazareth and Bultmann's leading pupil, Ernst Käsemann of the University of Tübingen, suggested in a lecture at that time in the early 1950s that it was time to take up again questions about what manner of man was Jesus because they felt the proclaimed Christ of Bultmann's theology was too empty of content, too much of a skeleton, too ratified, too much of a
thin air thing. It needed flesh and bone. One can only sympathize with this declared intention of some of Bultmann's leading pupils to take up again the question about Jesus. This is what we call the "new quest." It has been pointed out that the new quest is concerned primarily with investigating the area in which the human Jesus and the church's proclamation
of the Christ overlap, and in the most comprehensive and influential book to come from the hands of the new questers, Professor Günther Bornkamm declares that our task is to seek the history in the proclamation and in this history, to seek the proclamation. In other words, he's bringing into focus again the actual history of the man, Jesus, and he wants to ask the question,
what was there in the man, Jesus, that led the church in its post-Easter situation to say about Him, as the Christ, what it did say? That, by the way, is the basic problem of the origins of the Christian faith and the Christian movement. What was there in this Jesus that led the church in the post-resurrection situation to say about Him what it did say? Was He simply a rabbi, simply a prophet? Was He
a millenarian prophet or was He Schweitzer's kind of figure who expected the near end of world history and gave Himself to the death in order to precipitate that end so that the symbol of the cross and his martyred death is left to us as an embodiment of the great idea of a suffering humanity which, through its pains and agonies, will bring in God's final day eventually? What was there in Jesus that led the church in the post-Easter
situation to proclaim Him as the Christ? This is the question that the new quest sets out to investigate and I think I want to take up that very briefly tomorrow with some concern that this is a rather heavy matter and with some haste to get to what will be the meat of the case; the question of Jesus and active revolution and the question of Jesus and revolutionary hope.
But, it would not be respectable at any scholarly level simply to rush into these questions without showing you or trying to show you how complex the nature of any inquiry into Jesus of Nazareth really is. I would be less than true to my conscience if I just took up the question of whether Jesus was an active revolutionary or proclaimed the message of revolutionary hope without showing you that it isn't easy to define anything about Jesus. Thank you very much.