The Historical Jesus: Five Views

Written by James K. Beilby and Paul Rhodes Eddy, eds. Reviewed By Robert W. Yarbrough

Both of the editors of this book are professors at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota. They kick off the discussion with a substantial essay, “The Quest for the Historical Jesus: An Introduction” (pp. 9–54). This covers the history of the quest starting with Reimarus and his precursors. It then moves to the current state of play—“play” too often being an apt word to describe an academic enterprise that has cast Jesus in some eighteen different identities, from “an eschatological prophet” to “an Essene conspirator” to “a paradoxical Messianic claimant,” to name just a few (p. 53). In addition, some Jesus-understandings combine one or more categories. The result is an ideological agora at times having more points of contact with a flea market than with an intellectually serious academic exchange. Beilby and Eddy do a good job of bringing order to the chaos. Relatively full footnotes complement the essay’s terse descriptions and comparisons of positions. In the end, this excellent introduction could serve as the skeleton for a course syllabus on the subject of historical Jesus studies.

The meat of the volume, however, is the interchange between five scholars who are generally well known for their publications in historical Jesus research: Robert M. Price, John Dominic Crossan, Luke Timothy Johnson, James Dunn, and Darrell Bock. The exception here is Price (“Jesus at the Vanishing Point”), who does not think Jesus existed. It could be questioned whether his quirky claims, often wielded with a dismissive attitude, deserve to be dignified alongside the relatively plausible construals advanced by other contributors. The answer is probably yes, for two reasons. First, more and more people grow up with little exposure to the Bible and biblical history. They are susceptible to the arguments that writers on the fringe like Price dredge up. Second, non-Christian apologists, and in particular some Muslims, will continue to find ideas drawn from Western “Christian” writers like Price useful in their attacks on the integrity of the NT’s presentation of Jesus. It is instructive to observe how a range of scholars as wide as Crossan, Johnson, Dunn, and Bock respond to the proposition that none of the ancient evidence suffices to demonstrate that Jesus of Nazareth existed. This is an issue that could creep out of the margins of discussion and toward the center in years ahead, much as atheism has currently become a focal point of discussion after decades of relative dormancy. This book does well to take seriously the outlook Price represents.

Specialists will find little new in this book, but that is not the aim of a “five views” format. Informed lay and student readers are obviously the target audience, and they are well served. Even Price’s essay bears reading, as he resurrects D. F. Strauss’ attempt to dissolve NT narrative into midrash, cavalierly dismisses evidence troublesome to his cause, and relies heavily on ad absurdum argumentation.

Turning to Crossan’s essay, “Jesus and the Challenge of Collaborative Eschatology,” a new generation of readers can sample his distinctive hermeneutic in approaching the Jesus-question, without having to wade through the numerous prolix volumes he has produced over the past generation. Then after his and every essay, there is the advantage of immediate cross-examination from other scholars, as Johnson, for example, notes regarding Crossan, “it may be the force of the ideological framework that makes Crossan’s arguments appear to work, more than the actual historical evidence” (pp. 138–39).

Johnson (“Learning the Human Jesus”) is pessimistic about the value of the four Gospels “as sources for historical reconstruction” (p. 176) and seeks refuge in a literary approach. Bock insightfully responds, “A carefully balanced both/and approach takes one farther than Johnson’s either-or choice between the literary and historical approaches” (p. 197).

Dunn (“Remembering Jesus”) takes historical Jesus research to task at key points and offers his own constructive counter-proposals. For example, Dunn protests “the assumption that ‘the Christ of faith’ is a perversion of ‘the historical Jesus’ ” (p. 200). Crossan counters that the “Jesus of history” who taught love of enemies in the Sermon on the Mount (a Jesus whom Crossan reveres) is “perverted by the Christ of faith who will return as a transcendental killer in the book of Revelation” (p. 234, Crossan’s italics). Crossan pits NT texts and traditions against each other in ways Dunn does not find justified.

Bock (“The Historical Jesus: An Evangelical View”) in his preliminary remarks seeks to show how historical Jesus research can be fruitful within an evangelical outlook, “even if its results will always be limited in scope” (p. 253). Crossan responds by reasserting that “Jesus proclaimed and incarnated the nonviolent power of God’s kingdom as here and now present on this earth in direct confrontation with Rome’s Empire” (p. 291). Bock’s Jesus is about divine dominion and soteriology; Crossan’s is about politics. Johnson dismisses Bock with the withering declaration that Bock “has not yet grasped what historical analysis requires” (p. 296); the requisite entailment is presumably that Bock affirm Johnson’s view of historical analysis. Dunn finds various ways to restate Johnson’s charge against Bock; Bock’s essay moves Dunn to pontificate on the need for “responsible evangelical scholars” (in contrast to Bock?) to defend rigorous historical inquiry “in a day when evangelical, and even Christian, is often identified with a strongly right-wing, conservative and even fundamentalist attitude to the Bible” (p. 300, Dunn’s italics). And so the book ends, thanks to Dunn, with Bock being associated with this problem and Dunn nobly transcending it.

This is an adequately diverse, informative, and stimulating interactive display of recent approaches to “the historical Jesus” question. It accomplishes all that could be hoped for in such brief compass.


Robert W. Yarbrough

Bob Yarbrough is professor of New Testament at Covenant Theological Seminary in St. Louis, Missouri, an editorial board member of Themelios, co-editor of the Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament as well as the Exegetical Guide to the Greek New Testament (Broadman & Holman), and past president of the Evangelical Theological Society.

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