The scholarly search for the historical Jesus
has a 275 year history. During the last two decades of the twentieth century, it has been invigorated by the work of the Jesus Seminar. The following excerpt from The Five Gospels — a publication of the Jesus Seminar — sketches the history of the various quests of the historical Jesus over
the last three centuries, and introduces the scholars who dedicated their lives—some at the expense of their careers—to this search. 
The question of the historical Jesus was stimulated
by the prospect of viewing Jesus through the new lens of historical reason and research rather than through the perspective of theology and traditional creedal formulations.
The search for the Jesus of history began with Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768), a professor of oriental languages in Hamburg, Germany. A
close study of the New Testament gospels convinced Reimarus that what the authors of the gospels said about Jesus could be distinguished from
what Jesus himself said. It was with this basic distinction between the man Jesus and the Christ of the creeds that the quest of the historical Jesus began.
Most late twentieth-century Americans do not know that one of our own sons of the Enlightenment, Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826), scrutinized the gospels with a similar intent: to separate the real teachings of Jesus, the figure of history, from the encrustations of Christian doctrine. He gathered his findings in
The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth, Extracted textually from the Gospels in Greek, Latin, French, and English, a little volume that was first published in 1904 and is still in print.
Meanwhile, back in Germany, the views of Reimarus and his successors were greatly furthered in the monumental Life of Jesus Critically Examined
by David Friedrich Strauss (first edition, 1835). Strauss distinguished what he called the "mythical" (defined by him as anything legendary or supernatural) in the gospels from the historical. The storm that
broke over the 1,400 pages of minute analysis cost him his first teaching post at the seminary at Tübingen. Critics hounded him up to the time of his death in 1874.
The choice Strauss posed in his assessment of the gospels was between the supernatural Jesus—the Christ of faith—and the historical Jesus. Other
scholars in the German tradition developed a safer, but no less crucial, contrast between the Jesus of the synoptic gospels—Matthew, Mark,
Luke—and the Jesus of the Gospel of John. Two pillars of modern biblical criticism were now in place. The first was the distinction between the
historical Jesus, to be uncovered by historical excavation, and the Christ of faith encapsulated in the first creeds. The second pillar consisted of
recognizing the synoptic gospels as much closer to the historical Jesus than the Fourth Gospel, which presented a "spiritual" Jesus.
By 1900 the third and fourth pillars of modern critical scholarship were also in place. The recognition of the Gospel of Mark as prior to Matthew and
Luke, and the basis for them both, is the third pillar. A fourth pillar was the identification of the hypothetical source Q as the explanation for the "double
tradition" the material Matthew and Luke have in common beyond their dependence on Mark. Both of these pillars will be discussed below.
The tragic and heroic story of those who endeavored to break the church's stranglehold over learning has been chronicled by Albert Schweitzer in his famous The Quest of the Historical Jesus
(1906). Schweitzer himself contributed to that revolt in a major way, following the breakthrough of Johannes Weiss in his Jesus' Proclamation of the Kingdom of God
(1892). For Weiss and Schweitzer, the basic decision that had to be made about Jesus was whether he thought the age was about to end in a
cataclysmic event, known as the "eschaton" (Greek for the "last event"), or whether he took a longer view of things. Weiss and Schweitzer opted for
an eschatological Jesus. Consequently, Schweitzer saw Jesus' ethic as only an "interim ethic" (a way of life good only for the brief period before the
cataclysmic end, the eschaton). As such he found it no longer relevant or valid. Acting on his own conclusion, in 1913 Schweitzer abandoned a
brilliant career in theology, turned to medicine, and went out to Africa where he founded the famous hospital at Lambaréné out of respect for all forms of life.
The eschatological Jesus reigned supreme among gospel scholars from the time of Weiss and Schweitzer to the end of World War II. Slowly but
surely the evidence began to erode that view, which, after all, had been prompted by the revolt, towards the close of the nineteenth century, against
the optimistic theology of progress that then prevailed. Meanwhile, neo-orthodoxy under the tutelage of Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann
suppressed any real interest in the historical Jesus for the better part of five decades (1920–1970). Barth and Bultmann dismissed the quest of the
historical Jesus as an illegitimate attempt to secure a factual basis for faith—an attempt to "prove" Christian claims made on behalf of Jesus.
Even today historical studies of Christian origins still labor under that theological interdiction. The creation of the Jesus Seminar coincides with the reemergence of
interest in the Jesus of history, which was made possible by the wholesale shift of biblical scholarship away from its earlier academic home in the
church, seminaries, and isolated theological enclaves. While biblical scholarship has not lost its interest in and concern for the Jewish and Christian traditions, it has finally won its liberty.
As that interest came back to life in the 1970s and 1980s, scholars were surprised to learn that they no longer labored under the tyranny of either
neo-orthodoxy or an eschatological Jesus. John the Baptist, not Jesus, was the chief advocate of an impending cataclysm, a view that Jesus' first
disciples had acquired from the Baptist movement. Jesus himself rejected that mentality in its crass form, quit the ascetic desert, and returned to urban
Galilee. He took up eating and drinking and consorting with toll collectors and sinners, and developed a different point of view, expressed in the major
parables and root metaphors for God's imperial rule, as the kingdom of God has now come to be known. The liberation of the non-eschatological
Jesus of the aphorisms and parables from Schweitzer's eschatological Jesus is the fifth pillar of contemporary scholarship. Jesus' followers did not grasp the subtleties of his position and reverted,
once Jesus was not there to remind them, to the view they had learned from John the Baptist. As a consequence of this reversion, and in the aura of the
emerging view of Jesus as a cult figure analogous to others in the hellenistic mystery religions, the gospel writers overlaid the tradition of sayings and
parables with their own "memories" of Jesus. They constructed their memories out of common lore, drawn in large part from the Greek Bible,
the message of John the Baptist, and their own emerging convictions about Jesus as the expected messiah—the Anointed. The Jesus of the gospels is
an imaginative theological construct, into which has been woven traces of that enigmatic sage from Nazareth—traces that cry out for recognition and
liberation from the firm grip of those whose faith overpowered their memories. The search for the authentic words of Jesus is a search for the forgotten Jesus.
A sixth pillar of modern gospel scholarship, to be explored subsequently, consists of the recognition of the fundamental contrast between the oral
culture (in which Jesus was at home) and a print culture (like our own). The Jesus whom historians seek will be found in those fragments of tradition that
bear the imprint of orality: short, provocative, memorable, oft-repeated phrases, sentences, and stories. The seventh and final pillar that supports the edifice of contemporary gospel
scholarship is the reversal that has taken place regarding who bears the burden of proof. It was once assumed that scholars had to prove that
details in the synoptic gospels were not historical. D. F. Strauss undertook proof of this nature in his controversial work. As a consequence, his work
was viewed as negative and destructive. The current assumption is more nearly the opposite and indicates how far scholarship has come since
Strauss: the gospels are now assumed to be narratives in which the memory of Jesus is embellished by mythic elements that express the church's faith in
him, and by plausible fictions that enhance the telling of the gospel story for first-century listeners who knew about divine men and miracle workers
firsthand. Supposedly historical elements in these narratives must therefore be demonstrated to be so. The Jesus Seminar has accordingly assumed the
burden of proof: the Seminar is investigating in minute detail the data preserved by the gospels and is also identifying those that have some claim
to historical veracity. For this reason, the work of the Seminar has drawn criticism from the skeptical left wing in scholarship—those who deny the
possibility of isolating any historical memories in the gospels at all. Of course, it has also drawn fire from the fundamentalist right for not crediting
the gospels with one hundred percent historical reliability. These seven pillars of scholarly "wisdom," useful and necessary as they
have proven to be, are no guarantee of the results. There are no final guarantees. Not even the fundamentalists on the far right can produce a
credible Jesus out of allegedly inerrant canonical gospels. Their reading of who Jesus was rests on the shifting sands of their own theological constructions.
In addition to the safeguards offered by the historical methodologies practiced by all responsible scholars and the protection from idiosyncrasies
afforded by peer review and open debate, the final test is to ask whether the Jesus we have found is the Jesus we wanted to find. The last temptation
is to create Jesus in our own image, to marshal the facts to support preconceived convictions. This fatal pitfall has prompted the Jesus Seminar to adopt as its final general rule of evidence:
- Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you.
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