The Historical Jesus: Five Views [Paperback]

James K. Beilby (Editor), Paul R. Eddy (Editor), Robert M. Price (Contributor), John Dominic Crossan (Contributor), Luke Timothy Johnson (Contributor), James D.G. Dunn (Contributor), Darrell L. Bock (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 8, 2009

2011 Christianity Today Book Award winner! The scholarly quest for the historical Jesus has a distinguished pedigree in modern Western religious and historical scholarship, with names such as Strauss, Schweitzer and Bultmann highlighting the story. Since the early 1990s, when the Jesus quest was reawakened for a third run, numerous significant books have emerged. And the public's attention has been regularly arrested by media coverage, with the Jesus Seminar or the James ossuary headlining the marquee. The Historical Jesus: Five Views provides a venue for readers to sit in on a virtual seminar on the historical Jesus. Beginning with a scene-setting historical introduction by the editors, prominent figures in the Jesus quest set forth their views and respond to their fellow scholars. On the one end Robert M. Price lucidly maintains that the probability of Jesus' existence has reached the "vanishing point," and on the other Darrell Bock ably argues that while critical method yields only a "gist" of Jesus, it takes us in the direction of the Gospel portraits. In between there are numerous avenues to explore, questions to be asked and "assured results" to be weighed. And John Dominic Crossan, Luke Timothy Johnson and James D. G. Dunn probe these issues with formidable knowledge and honed insight, filling out a further range of options. The Historical Jesus: Five Views offers a unique entry into the Jesus quest. For both the classroom and personal study, this is a book that fascinates, probes and engages.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Skeptical rationalists such as Reimarus and Strauss would never have guessed that their project of uncovering the historical Jesus would attract professing Christians. But here, in this provocative volume, readers find twenty-first-century Christians actually justifying that project as an obligation of their faith in the Incarnation. Readers thus hear—as one of the five researchers presented here in dialogue—from a Catholic scholar arguing that just as the study of history can help us learn about, say, Napoléon or Socrates, so can it help us understand Jesus of Nazareth. A leading Evangelical researcher substantiates this point by explaining how historical inquiry illuminates Jesus’ place within a first-century Greco-Roman culture. Yet when an Episcopalian participant questions the very existence of a historical Jesus, arguing that the Gospels merely deliver mythic archetypes, not reliable narratives, readers may see why theologians such as Kähler and Barth warned—as the editors acknowledge—against seeking Jesus through historical scholarship rather than through the divine miracle of faith. Certain to spark sharp debate. --Bryce Christensen

Product Details

• Paperback: 312 pages
• Publisher: IVP Academic (October 8, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0830838686
• ISBN-13: 978-0830838684
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #237,320 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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73 of 77 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice Overview of Modern Biblical Scholarship, December 13, 2009

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Ky. Col. - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Paperback)

"The Historical Jesus: Five Views" is a very nice overview of a number of perspectives in modern biblical scholarship. Obviously, five scholars cannot cover every single perspective. However, the contributors are all well known in their fields and often have divergent opinions. For those just wanting a basic overview of some different perspectives on the Historical Jesus in research, I would recommend this book. The book could also be useful for those who want to exprole the issues in depth as other scholars and more detailed works are mentioned in the text or footnotes.

The book itself is divided as follows (please forgive anything I miss):

I. Introduction: A concise but useful section on the progression of Jesus research from the 1700s until the contemporary situation. The sections mentions some of the major players and developments in each "Jesus Quest."

II. Contributing scholars sections (each of the other scholars is provided a brief comment/rebuttal section following the longer contributions).

A. Robert Price: This professor is one of the very, very few well-known scholars who still harbor the idea that Jesus was likely entirely a myth. However, a whole number of "internet atheists" (certainly not all) seem to hold many views in common with Price. While I found Price the least credible of all views expressed in the volume and I found some of his personal tones more than a little too falsely triumphant, his contribution was still interesting (primarily I must confess the rebuttals from other contributors to his material were what I found the most enjoyable).

B. John Crossan: Crossan is a noted liberal New Testament scholar. While I strongly disagree with many of his views, he was generally quite polite when disagreeing with other contributors. His own views center on a Jesus putting himself in peaceful opposition to Rome/power elites in general.

C. Luke Timothy Johnson: A Catholic scholar argues a more moderate poition trying to balance faith with what he considers to be solid facts about the historical Jesus.

D. James D. G. Dunn: This scholar brought up some very interesting points about the oral culture within early Christianity. In particular, I seem to remember that Johnson and Dunn came to disagreement over written materials vs. oral traditional influences. Dunn strongly objected to Price.

E. Darrell Bock: Bock is a theologically conservative evangelical scholar from dallas theological seminary. I will go ahead and admit my own biases favoring his position on Jesus closer than any of the other four from what I perceived. Bock takes a more thematic overview of Jesus's life and tries to examine the "big picture" rather than getting bogged down in disputes over specific verses.

Overall an interesting book presenting differeng perspectives.

26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Historical Jesus: Five Views, March 10, 2010

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T. Eldridge - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Paperback)

This book serves as a forum for a group of esteemed historical Jesus scholars to debate their views with one another in a popular level, accessible format.

This review will contain a summary of the book's contents and the reasons for my five star rating and recommendation. I will attempt to be objective whilst summarising the book's contents, however after reading the book I do find some of the author's arguments more plausible than others and some of the points more worthy of mention than other points made, and this may become apparent as you read this. Nonetheless, I hope this review helps you understand the nature of the book and whether or not it's something you'd like to read for yourself.

The book begins with an introduction to the history of the quest for the Historical Jesus, written by the editors Eddy and Beilby. They summarise the various issues and debates which have shaped the quest by moving through history and showing the effects of the major issues on the direction of the quest. The introduction runs to around 50 pages or so, but this includes extensive footnotes and references. This section of the book was absolutely fantastic, simply because it is an introduction in the true sense of the word. Someone who'd never read any material on the Historical Jesus Quest in their life could pick up this book, read the introduction and quickly be up to speed with all the historical context and have a basic idea of the methodological issues. On the other hand, even a well-educated reader would benefit from the succinct historical summary. Alternatively you could just skip this section of the book and move onto the presentations by the scholars. This section of the book could be seen as a bonus, and a good one at that.

The first essay was by Robert Price, who argues that the evidence for Jesus is best explained by appeal to the invention of copied ancient hero myths combined with a rewriting of Old Testament stories to create a historical figure. He does this by making several arguments and combining them together. The key ones are: the epistles are silent about Jesus, secular sources don't mention Jesus, the principle of analogy compels us to see comparisons between Jesus and other ancient hero myths, much of the New Testament is the Old Testament rehashed but constructed around a supposed historical figure. The other scholars were highly critical of Price's arguments, especially Dunn who was particularly scathing. His was the most effective critique, and the most entertaining- he finished his response by writing that Price's thesis is "at vanishing point", the same claim Price's essay title makes about Jesus. Even the highly sceptical Crossan- who claimed to agree with much of Price's essay- brought such a devastating critique that it rendered Price's position bankrupt, by arguing that Price had ignored the strong evidence from secular sources (Tacitus, Josephus) that makes the existence of Jesus historically certain and establishes four key facts about him.

JD Crossan was next, and he argued that Jesus was a failed eschatological prophet. He bases his approach largely on his understanding of a clash between the Roman and Jewish worldviews, and then places Jesus in the midst of this struggle. He suggests that Jesus started with a worldview similar to that of John the Baptist but then adjusted his theological views after John died. Surprisingly, the criticisms of Crossan were nearly as scathing as the criticisms of Price had been! Virtually all of the other four scholars chide Crossan for creating a Jesus in his own image. They argue that he plays fast and loose with the historical evidence by reading things into the evidence that aren't there (particularly about Jesus's status as a social revolutionary and his fitting into the political clash where Crossan depicts him). There are suggestions that Crossan overplays certain aspects of Jesus and understates or ignores others- for example, where are the calls to repentance from Crossan's Jesus?

Personally, I found Crossan's essay kind of peculiar, his methodology odd, and his approach the most difficult to follow. He spends a fair chunk of his essay going through Roman history, a page or two talking about John the Baptist and Jesus's supposed theology, and a page or two critiquing J P Meier's argument that an eschatological contradiction is acceptable, and then voila- you have Crossan's Jesus. I found the connections he made along the way weren't strong enough, and he often speculated by adding in all kinds of things to his story without really providing solid evidence that they came from anywhere other than his own imagination. But most importantly he didn't mention why kinds of evidence would refute his Jesus, and thus one strongly got the impression that he was only giving us one side of Jesus. Not surprisingly (to me) these ended up being the kinds of criticisms given by the other scholars.

Third up was Luke Timothy Johnson. Johnson begins by contrasting two positions on "the best way of getting to know Jesus" - That of faith and that of historical study. The first "holds that Jesus is best learned through the practice of faith in the church" while the second position claims that "the human Jesus is knowable only through historical reconstructions". The first position holds the "conviction that faith itself is a mode of cognition that makes contact with what is real even if empirically unverifiable" and it "rejects the adequacy of historical study for getting at Jesus as he truly is", while the second position holds that "The Gospel accounts, and for that matter, all New Testament testimony concerning Jesus of Nazareth, must be corrected by critical historiography". The position of faith holds that Jesus is a figure alive in the present, while history holds that he must be "regarded solely as a dead man of the past". The contrast could not be more clear.

Before giving us his proposal for how to actually get to know Jesus, Johnson goes into the next part of his essay where he strongly emphasises the limitations of historical enquiry and how it relates to the Quest for the Historical Jesus. He claims there are a few assertions the historian can make with the "highest degree of probability"- for example, that Jesus existed as a Jew in the first century- another handful of assertions that can be made with a "very high degree of probability"- for example, that he chose twelve followers- and a few more than can be affirmed with "considerable" probability- like his baptism by John the Baptist. But for Johnson this is where the buck stops. Those historical facts are basically all that we can say about Jesus using pure historical analysis, he claims. He then discusses the limits of history and concludes that "the consequences of pushing beyond such limitations in order to construct a historical Jesus are evident in many contemporary publications that regularly distort historical methods and as a result distort the sources as well".

Does this leave us in a state of perpetual despair? At this juncture of his essay, it would appear that Johnson believes that whatever we say about the Historical Jesus, we're saying too much. This certainly appears to be his view of well known questers like Crossan and N.T Wright. However, Johnson claims that "By no means does history's inability to know the human Jesus mean that real knowledge of him is impossible". Johnson finishes his essay by proposing a narrative approach for getting to know Jesus, and using it to understand the character of Jesus. He claims that the essence of character is something that "narrative is distinctly capable of addressing" and that the four gospels, despite their factual differences, show "remarkable convergence when discussing Jesus character".

The criticisms levelled at Johnson focused, not surprisingly on his methodology.

James Dunn and Darrell Bock agreed on the majority of their portrait of Jesus, despite having quite different methodologies. Dunn's emphasis is a strong focus on oral tradition, which was a stark contract to Johnson's emphasis on the narrative, or the written sources. Whereas Bock seems to take somewhat of an apologetic approach to the task- he basically goes about showing that the Jesus story of the gospels are reliable by focusing on several different specific events and arguing for their historical accuracy. Bock copped heavy criticism for his approach from Johnson, who more or less said "Bock isn't even a true historian!" (paraphrase...). Nonetheless, I found most of Bock's argument's very plausible, regardless of the backwards approach he might've taken (ie: Start with: The Jesus tradition is reliable and work backwards to prove it, rather than ask what history can teach us and move forward).

My only real criticism of the book is the inclusion of Robert Price. Price's arguments were very much implausible, in fact that description is probably generous. As I was reading through his essay I regularly found myself wondering how he could write those things with a straight face. Not only did he make implausible arguments but he regularly ignored evidence which would render his line of thinking dead. One is forced to consider whether Price is simply a sensationalist contrarian who doesn't actually believe what he writes, but rather is after the attention and infamous appeal associated with holding his controversial position. The book would've benefited from giving the serious scholars more space to debate their arguments in the marketplace of ideas. For example it'd be great to read Dunn going into a more detailed defense of the reliability of oral tradition, and Crossan's essay could've benefited from more space, to allow him to draw stronger connections between the political scene and Jesus' place within it. Alas, instead we... Read more ›

23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A good book but not for the faint-hearted, December 8, 2009

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Stephen Due (Victoria, Australia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Paperback)

This book is the latest product of a brilliant, long-running intellectual enterprise known as 'The Quest for the Historical Jesus'. It aims simply to answer the question how much can really be known about Jesus the man, as an historical figure.
The 'Quest' tradition of scholarship has attracted some of the best minds of the past two hundred years. However it tends to be sceptical. It asks questions but often gives no answers. Many of its great participants, such as Albert Schweitzer, who gave the 'Quest' its name, have been Christians. But the Quest is not faith-based, and this book is not a devotional tome.
Rather,The Historical Jesus: Five Views is an intellectual tour de force. The five contributors are stellar. There is a wide range of opinion represented. The authors even critique each others' views. Readers with an established interest in the field should buy this book. Others could read about the 'Quest' on Wikipedia before making a decision. The book is a good introduction to contemporary thinking in the field, but not one for the faint-hearted!