(This update is based on a few sources: Marianne Sawicki’s “Seeing The Lord: Resurrection and Early Christian Practices”, Lecture #4 of Sharon Betcher’s “Constructive Theology II: Christology” course at Vancouver School of Theology, and my prior reading of the works of John Dominic Crossan.)
In the 1999 film “Galaxy Quest”, a group of B-list Hollywood actors is abducted by a race of extra-terrestrials who have received transmission of their cheesy sci-fi television series, and misinterpreted the episodes as “historical documents.” This alien culture is entirely credulous and cannot conceive of fictional narrative as an art form, or as a medium of truth. To them, the only alternative to credulous sincerity is “deception” and “lies”.
When Albert Schweitzer assessed the first “Historical Jesus” quest, in 1906, he said something along the lines of the following: in searching for Jesus, these thinkers had looked down the long well of history, and seen their own reflections shining back at them. Regardless of the accuracy of this view, the enterprise has continued largely unabated (though certainly adapted).
There are serious challenges with any attempt to postulate a historical figure of Jesus. We have no access to the man, whatsoever. The narratives that we have about him bear only the slightest resemblance to what we would consider a fact-based “life-story”. Marianne Sawicki insists that it is a modernist error to believe that the narrative gospels “deliver” Jesus to us. Rather, she says, they offer us a way of accessing a present reality of “the Risen Lord”. To use them as historical documents is not only to divert them from their original purpose, but in fact to dramatically misuse and misconstrue them.
If we have no access to an historical figure named Jesus of Nazareth, then any quest to discover him in situ is doomed to failure - as historical practice. However, Sharon Betcher in her course “Constructive Theology II: Christology” at Vancouver School of Theology asserts that they are not therefore bankrupt of value or insight. Rather, they need to be seen through the lenses of constructive christology. In this light, they can be rehabilitated and become a boon to our preaching, teaching, and practice of Christian faith.
The primary assumption of contemporary historical Jesus christologies is that Jesus’ life, death, and teachings represent a social/spiritual/theological/economic program that is defined relative to the programmatic of Roman Imperial colonialism within which Jesus’ ministry took place - and that this Jesus program can be translated into the contemporary context and thus provide us with a way of being faithfully in the world. This is notably contrary to the objectives of the original 19th century “quest” - which was to deliver a Jesus who was capable of being appreciated and appropriated by a non-spiritual, rationalistic, secular culture.
One of the most prominent scholars engaged in this work today is my own teacher, John Dominic Crossan. His method - carefully designed and skillfully adhered to - is to first analyze the best historical information, from archaeology, primary documents, and other sources, in order to establish context, into which he places the textual traditions of the church. The following step, often left unarticulated, is to analogize between that context and this one, and then challenge oneself to apply Jesus' program analogically in our own lives. (In this christology, it is the "program" or "programmatic" that stands-in conceptually for "the Christ.")
Unfortunately for this method, there are no extant texts about Jesus that were composed within living memory of his life, so we are forced to employ some circular reasoning - “I believe this text is early because it reflects what I believe to be early traditions.”
One important limitation of this approach is highlighted by the fact that it seems to be pursued only by men of european extraction. Historical Jesus christologies depend for their relevancy on a primary relationship with Jesus as ethicist, spiritual teacher, and social movement leader. For those whose primary relationship with Jesus is as fellow-sufferer, true God, or mystical lover, however, the precise interface between his purported activities and the socio-political context of his times is not an area of great interest.
The warning here to theologians and those in practice of ministry is that knowledge of the current state of the historical Jesus quest will not necessarily equip us to engage the theological horizon of concern of the people that we may encounter. We run the risk, if we neglect the lessons of post-modern thought, of believing that through this method we can “get” (or get hold-of) Jesus in a way that is somehow more legitimate than other (intellectually defensible) ways.
A second liability is in the fact that, when you examine the scriptural texts for historical relevance, you find only the communities that formed them and not Jesus himself. Therefore, we can speak only in the most general terms about the context from which they arose. Was it Galilee, or Judea, or Samaria, or Perea, or Roman Asia? Was it the 30s, or 40s, or 70s CE? Was it among Greek-speaking or Aramaic-speaking Jews? Each of these details has a necessary impact on the historical framing of a narrative or saying, and any time we attempt to answer them we find ourselves gazing down Schweitzer’s long well of history. We are left with only the umbrella context of the eastern regions of the Empire in the 1st century - which does little to add meaning to individual pericopes or units of tradition.
However, as a constructive christology alongside other such christologies, the historical Jesus endeavour can yield benefits. Post-modernity may become blind to the hidden structures of oppression and colonization that persist in our world, which the careful analysis of Roman Imperial colonialism can reveal. The overlooking of the Empire as a historical context has resulted in a great deal of questionable interpretation. Furthermore, people who are dissatisfied with their exposure to Jesus in mystical or theistic terms may find good news in a Jesus who is an ethicist and a social reformer.
Of course, the Jesus narratives are not equivalent to the imaginary 1970s sci-fi “GalaxyQuest” series. But nor are they historical documents, and we do ourselves a disservice if we try too hard to read them through the lens of post-Enlightenment historical facticity. Ultimately, the historical Jesus scholarship is itself culturally-located and contextually-determined (“Of course it is,” says post-modern thought). If we can keep this in mind, then we can employ its insights carefully and faithfully as we try to “get” not Jesus, but a glimpse of the living Lord who is active in all of history.
