Christology and history: A review essay

Theology Today, Jul 2000 by Keck, Leander E

Powell too begins by recalling briefly earlier searches for the Jesus of history, but he then uses the work of William Wrede, Burton Mack, and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza to ask, "How did Jesus get lost?" This important question still awaits a thorough treatment, though it is not Powell's purpose to explore it. Still, he helps one see that it was precisely through the various reconstructions of the history of early Christianity, and of its christologies, that scholars claimed that the Jesus of history was lost until they found him: The patriarchal church obscured the egalitarian Jesus (Fiorenza), Mark created a redeemer myth with historical verisimilitude but without real history (Mack), and Mark invented the messianic secret to portray a non-messianic Jesus (Wrede). These samples suffice to show that the greater the disparity between the Christ of faith in the Gospels and the alleged Jesus of history, the more necessary it is to provide a historically convincing account of how the latter produced the former. Otherwise, in effect, one replaces the miraculous birth of Jesus with the miraculous birth of christology.

After providing a lucid discussion of the sources and the criteria commonly used to identify information about Jesus that is historically reliable, Powell uses the work of Richard Horsley, Geza Vermes, Morton Smith, Ben Witherington III, and Gerald Downing to locate "contemporary images of Jesus": social prophet, charismatic Jew, magician, sage, and Cynic philosopher, respectively. In the heart of the book, however, Powell presents and comments briefly on the Jesus portrayed by each of the following: the Jesus Seminar, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, E.P. Sanders, John Meier, and N.T. Wright. The last chapter identifies issues in the continuing quest: method, Jesus' relation to Judaism, Jesus' eschatology, his relation to the politics of the day, "Jesus and the supernatural," and his self-consciousness and intent-ample evidence that almost nothing is really settled. Throughout, Powell's presentations are fair and his assessments irenic. By including the scholars' critiques of each others' work, Powell gives the reader a sense of the volatile and convoluted character of the current debates.

The issue that concerns Schwarz-the nature and extent of the continuity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of the church's christology-- receives but scant attention here. Powell places the scholars on a spectrum that runs from sharp discontinuity (Mack) to continuity that allows for difference (Meier, Wright), with Crossan, Funk, Vermes, and Horsley closer to the former and Borg and Sanders between them and Meier and Wright. Powell ends the discussion by saying that "for the majority of historical scholars, reports of Jesus' subsequent resurrection caused his followers to think of him and his message in new categories. His ultimate significance, then, took on dimensions that transcended anything that he himself may ever have imagined." This simply points to the persistent issue-the relation between the "new categories" and those that Jesus himself may have used to express his identity and mission. Powell goes on to distinguish the Jesus of history from the Jesus of story (that is, of the gospel message and the church's liturgy and hymnody), claiming that while they can, and do, overlap, "the story will have the last word." That may well prove to be the case, despite the agenda of the Jesus Seminar. If so, then the divergence between the historical reconstructions of Jesus and "the Jesus of story" needs careful attention, for also the latter can lead to a docetic christology.