Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research: Previous Discussion and New Proposals, The

Trinity Journal, Spring 2002 by McKnight, Scot

Stanley E. Porter, The Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research: Previous Discussion and New Proposals. JSNTSup 191. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. 299 pp. $85.00.

When Porter, now Principal at McMaster Divinity College in Hamilton, Ontario, puts his mind to a study he spares no effort, and it shows in this complete study of the criteria for authenticity in determining what is authentic in the gospel traditions about Jesus. Porter, who has already demonstrated scholarly competence and innovation in grammar, hermeneutics, Pauline Epistles, the Acts of the Apostles, and various sorts of linguistics, now turns his attention to questions surrounding historical Jesus debates. In spite of his regular claims in this book that this is but a survey, the book functions as a complete examination of the history of the development of the various criteria. In general, Porter's analyses and proposals are successful, though, as will be seen in what follows, I have hesitations and suggestions at each of the three levels of his study. The book is filled with technical details; I found few typographical errors; and the study is quite readable for a subject as arcane as the criteria used in assessing the Jesus traditions of the gospels. A notable feature of Porter's book is his extensive bibliographies (more than is needed quite often), as well as his inclusion of evangelical scholarship on the criteria within the text and footnotes.

First, Porter examines the context for the recent innovations of the "Third Quest." The "Old Quest" describes the attempts by liberal Protestants, mostly European and mostly German, who sought to find behind the gospels a more pristine (and preachable) Jesus. The "No Quest" focuses around the historiography, form criticism, and theology of Rudolf Bultmann, describes the erosion and ending of the Old Quest, and recounts the reconstruction of a different sort of Quest in light of, and in response to, Bultmann's studies. The "New Quest" describes the followers of Bultmann who thought a refashioning of the question of the value of the historical Jesus (the Jesus discoverable through historical studies) was due. It was Ernst Kasemann's famous 1953 lecture before former students of Bultmann that gave this movement its impetus. And finally the "Third Quest," a term coined by N. T. Wright, describes the more recent studies of Jesus following the New Quest but in light of firmer historiographical reasoning and renewed appreciation of the Jewishness of Jesus. This, my summary of the trends, is the context in which Porter makes his suggestions about the unfolding of this scholarly movement as well as about the criteria themselves.

Porter surveys all the major scholars and documents, as he is prone to do, with full bibliographical details. Several points are in order. First, Porter calls into question both the periodization of the history of Jesus scholarship as well as the distinctiveness of each so-called quest. Thus, if it is the case that Schweitzer's study, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu Forschung (The Quest of the Historical Jesus), supposedly brought to an end the Old Quest, Porter observes that, for many scholars, things went on as usual. The so-called ending of the Old Quest applies to one group of scholars (consistent eschatologists) and to one part of Europe (Germany). This is an important conclusion of Porter's and points to the ever-increasing tendency of scholars to pretend that scholarship "advances" always along straight lines and only in certain "schools of thought" that emerge from specific scholars (notably, those like Schweitzer, Bultmann, Kasemann, E. P. Sanders, J. D. Crossan, N. T. Wright). Though not detailed by Porter, perhaps the most significant book on Jesus of this era was that by H. J. Cadbury, The Peril of Modernizing Jesus, and he belonged to no school and acquired no strict followers. More particularly, Porter calls into question the actual contribution of Ernst Kasemann. Porter argues that what Kasemann did was to authorize many of the students of Bultmann to get back into a stream that had continued to trickle along in Germany since the days of the Old Quest! Third, Porter argues that there has "always been just one multi-faceted quest for the historical Jesus" (p. 52). Thus, Wright's claim that the discussion took a significant new path with the Third Quest is unfounded; there are, Porter avers, too many lines of continuity between the various "quests."

There are many important observations by Porter in this section but I think he operates with slightly reified definitions and thus periodizes the various scholars and quests too rigidly. To be sure, some think the various quests are sequestered from one another, but after spending the greater part of the last two decades reading historical Jesus scholarship, I find that very few scholars in fact operate within such rigid categories. The most notable ones, of course, are those who followed Kasemann right out of Marburg and landed in Sonoma, California, arguing that true scholarship accepted Schweitzer completely, endorsed the de-mythologizing program of Bultmann for a while, and then came to their senses with Kasemann, and, along with James Robinson (who coined the phrase "New Quest"), moved into the strict criteriology of Norman Perrin and landed at the table with Robert Funk in discussions about authenticity in the Jesus Seminar. This, I would argue, is what Porter is fighting in the claim that there are more continuities than commonly recognized-and his contest with N. T. Wright is in part correct here, but not totally since it seems to me that Wright sees it more as a "shift" than a radical alternation-and in this claim Porter is absolutely right. The problem is that this view must assume too often that there was a straight-line development, and Porter's careful delineations of those who were doing more than or other than the current consensus (scholars like T. W. Manson and C. H. Dodd) shows that a straight-line development theory needs another paradigm: scholarship develops in schools of thought, yes, theologies and presuppositions, and it is meaningful to talk about development only within such a perspective and orientation. Hence, as one may meaningfully speak of development from Schweitzer to Bultmann to Kasemann to Robinson to Perrin to Funk, so one may speak of development from Sanday to Dodd to Caird to Wright, and from Schleiermacher to Harnack to Deissmann to Dunn to Borg. What I am arguing then is that it is a bit unfair to claim there are no real demarcations when one is talking about scholars who refuse to talk to one another. Porter, in other words, gets it right but he does not go far enough: there are no "real" periods in the general quest for the historical Jesus, there are only periods within a perspective. But there are real periods within a perspective if we see these as having both elements of continuity and discontinuity, and the latter being composed mostly of perspectival shifts permitting new avenues to be explored.