The Resurrection of Jesus: a Methodological Survey and Introduction to the Present Volume

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The Resurrection of Jesus: a Methodological Survey and Introduction to the Present Volume STR 3/1 (Summer 2012) 1–13 The Resurrection of Jesus: A Methodological Survey and Introduction to the Present Volume Robert B. Stewart and Heath A. Thomas New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary and Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary Introduction The resurrection of Jesus is a central tenet of historic Christian belief, and, for that reason alone, a matter of great historical significance. Virtually no biblical scholar, early church historian, or theologian disputes this point. However, a great deal of disagreement follows from that initial agreement. A divergence of opinion has existed in serious historical study of Jesus for over 200 years concerning the historical reliability of the four canonical gospels. During much of this time most scholars have leaned to the skeptical side of the ledger concerning this question. No gospel stories, save, perhaps, the virgin birth narratives, have been as critically scrutinized as those con- cerning the resurrection. As a result, in the minds of many, the resurrection of Jesus, which undoubtedly lay at the heart of the earliest Christian confes- sion of Jesus as Lord, is often either removed from the picture altogether or moved to one margin or another. Such skepticism is largely the result of methodological presuppositions founded upon enlightenment thinking. Although many of those whose work was responsible for this sea change were not outright enemies of Christian faith or practice, the law of unintended consequences applies to historians as much as it does to those in other professions, and their skepticism had the effect of either reducing the importance of resurrection in Christian theology or redefining the meaning of resurrection. In what follows we shall attempt to paint a backdrop of roughly 200 years of historical scholarship concerning Jesus and his resurrection. A Brief Survey of Resurrection Scholarship In 1778 G. E. Lessing’s edition of Hermann Samuel Reimarus’s essay, “On the Aims of Jesus and His Disciples” was published. 1 Prior to Reimarus 1 Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (trans. W. Montgomery; pref. F.C. Burkitt; London: Adam, Charles and Black, 1910), 13- 14. Hermann Samuel Reimarus, “Concerning the Intention of Jesus and His Teaching,” in 2 SOUTHEASTERN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW there were many harmonies of the gospels, 2 but there had been no scholarly attempt to study the gospels as historical documents. All that changed with G. E. Lessing’s posthumous publication of Reimarus’s work in a series Lessing named Fragmente eines Ungenannten (Fragments from an Unnamed Author), commonly referred to today as the Wolfenbüttel Fragments. 3 The influence of Deism upon Reimarus may be seen in his attempt to ground understanding of the historical Jesus in reason ( Vernunft ). Reimarus held that the preaching of Jesus was separate from the writings of the apostles and thus argued that the gospels, written by the evangelists, i.e., historians, not the New Testament epistles, written by the apostles, i.e., theologians, were where one found the historical Jesus. Reimarus defined the essence of religion as “the doctrine of the salvation and immortality of the soul.” 4 No wonder then that denying Jesus’ resurrection seemed no great loss. Reimarus believed that after Jesus’ death his disciples stole his body and declared his resurrection in order to maintain their financial security and en- 5 sure themselves some standing. He maintained correctly that Jesus’ mindset was essentially eschatological in nature. He rightfully discerned that the his- torical Jesus is never to be found in a non-Jewish setting, but wrongly saw Christianity as discontinuous with Judaism. Unfortunately he failed to grasp that resurrection was part of the Jewish hope in Jesus’ day. Despite his con- cern to free Jesus from theology, Reimarus’s Jesus was not free from the grave. David Friedrich Strauss, influenced by Hegel’s philosophy, pioneered an approach to understanding the gospels in which Jesus’ resurrection was un- derstood as myth. Jesus understood mythically is the synthesis of the thesis of supernaturalism and the antithesis of rationalism. As a committed Hegelian, the early Strauss maintained that the inner nucleus of Christian faith is not 6 touched by the mythical approach. Strauss emphasized not the events (mira- cles) in the gospels (although the book is structured as an analysis of Jesus’ miracles), but the nature of the gospels. Unlike Reimarus, he was not interest- ed in explaining (away) how events in the gospels took place. Neither was he interested in uncovering the sequence in which the gospels were produced. His interest lay in revealing the nature of the gospels as literature. By focusing on the literary nature of the gospels he anticipated several critical methods Reimarus: Fragments (ed. Charles H. Talbert; trans. Ralph S. Fraser; Lives of Jesus Series; ed. Leander Keck; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1970), 59-269. 2 See: Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus , 13-15. 3 See H. S. Reimarus, Reimarus: Fragments . At the time of publication, Lessing was librari- an to the Duke of Brunswick at the ducal library in Wolfenbüttel, hence the name of the series. 4 Reimarus, Fragments, 61. 5 Reimarus, Fragments, 243-50. 6 David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined (ed. Peter C. Hodgson; trans. George Eliot; Life of Jesus Series; ed. Leander E. Keck; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1972), lii. THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS 3 that would arise in twentieth-century New Testament studies. Whereas Reimarus had proposed two possibilities: natural or supernatural; Strauss proposed two different categories for interpreting the gospels: mythic or his- torical. Unlike Reimarus Strauss did not attribute the non-historical to delib- erate deception on the part of the apostles, but to their unconscious mythic 7 imagination. Strauss maintained that the biblical narratives were written well after they occurred and were embellished through years of oral retelling and 8 religious reflection. The biblical myths, according to Strauss, are poetic in 9 form, not historical or philosophical. In his second book on Jesus, Das Leben 10 Jesu: für das deutsche Volk , Strauss abandoned Hegelian categories for moral categories. Eventually Strauss repudiated entirely any attachment to Christian- 11 ity, and died a committed materialist. Albrecht Ritschl and Adolf von Harnack are representative of a number of scholars who understood Jesus primarily as a great moral teacher whose life and teachings had a decisive impact upon the psyche of the early church. Conditioned by Kant’s critique of rationality and the subsequent Protestant reaction of stressing ethics and piety, they combined ethics with something akin to pop psychology in an effort to understand the historical Jesus with the result being that the historicity of the resurrection was irrelevant for them. Both men understood Jesus primarily as a great moral teacher, whose life and teachings had a decisive impact upon the psyche of the early church. Accord- ing to Ritschl the proper object of study is the observable experience of the church because the statements in Scripture become “completely intelligible only when we see how they are reflected in the consciousness of those who believe in Him.” 12 He also taught not only that the kingdom of God and the message of Jesus were ethical in nature, but also that Jesus was the bearer of God’s ethical Lordship over humanity. 13 Ritschl’s moralizing theology fo- cused on Jesus’ death, not his resurrection. For von Harnack, Jesus’ message of the kingdom emphasized: (1) the kingdom of God and its coming; (2) God the Father and the infinite value of the human soul; and (3) the higher right- eousness and the commandment of love. 14 In other words, Ritschl and von 7 Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined , 39-92. 8 Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined , 49. 9 Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined , 53. 10 Strauss, Das Leben Jesu: fur das deutsche Volk. Bearb. von David Friedrich Strauss (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1874). 11 Robert Morgan, “Strauss, David Friedrich,” in Historical Handbook of Major Biblical In- terpreters (ed. Donald K. McKim; Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 367. 12 Albrecht Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation: The Positive Devel- opment of the Doctrine (ed. H. R. Mackintosh and A. B. Macaulay; Clifton, NJ: Reference Book Publishers, 1966), 1. 13 Ritschl, The Christian Doctrine of Justification and Reconciliation , 385-484. 14 Adolf Harnack, What Is Christianity? (trans. Thomas Bailey Saunders; New York: Har- per & Row, 1957), 19-78. 4 SOUTHEASTERN THEOLOGICAL REVIEW Harnack combined ethics with psychology in an effort to understand the his- torical Jesus. The historicity of Jesus’ resurrection was simply not an issue for either man. William Wrede responded to such ideas by insisting that the psychologi- cal theories of 19 th century life of Jesus work were derived from somewhere other than the text. Wrede wrote: “And this is the malady to which we must here allude—let us not dignify it with the euphemism ‘historical imagination.’ The Scientific study of the life of Jesus is suffering from psychological ‘suppositionitis’ which amounts to a sort of historical guesswork.” 15 Wrede’s chief concern was with the messianic secret. He believed that the early church understood historically that Jesus was made messiah at his resurrection, not that he was revealed as messiah through the resurrection. 16 The idea that Jesus was the messiah before his resurrection was merely the result of the early church’s theological reflection on his then-evident messiahship. 17 Simply put the mes- sianic secret was Mark’s attempt to harmonize history with theology. 18 According to Wrede one must distinguish between historical and liter- ary-critical questions, and literary-critical questions should be dealt with be- fore historical ones.
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