I will be Reviewing Several Jesus Quests in the Near Future....

Over the past few months I have found that I receive more email feedback on my religious book reviews than anything else, most of it has been very stimulating and interesting. In keeping with that I shall be reviewing a number of Jesus Quests. Before I begin my reviews I want to make a couple of observations.

(1)
Yeshua contains us. All western irony begins with the first becoming last. Turning the other cheek, and suffering for a cause are concepts that are derived from Jesus’ paradox and dark speakings. Refusing him as a savior does not diminish his importance in our consciousness—indeed it can magnify it. The quest for his historical personage must continually bring us face to face with our own assumptions, and presumptions.

For starters, I recommend Charlotte Allen’s book “The Human Christ.” Allen, a Catholic gives a very fair and balanced account of the human comedy of Jesus searching, from the very beginnings of Christianity all the way to the insane present. After reading Allen it occurred to me that the greatest irony of Jesus’ contribution to us is the searchers tendency to uncover himself. Jesus is a concave mirror, reflecting back what we wish to see. The real “historical” Yeshua of Nazareth most likely is alien to us.

(2)
Medicine bottles and Soup recipes don’t lend themselves to postmodern literary criticism, but the Bible certainly does. Enigmatic texts like Jewish literature with their many plausible interpretations are prone to simplifying narrative explanations, which continually mislead us. It is human nature to want an answer, preferably one we like. Do we find meaning first and then search the facts? It seems that we do.

‘Incredulity toward meta-narrative’ is a relatively safe conjecture when dealing with the Bible, since historically, virtually every “narrative” has been shown to be historically flawed in one-way or another. I observe that no questing scholar is fully content with his precursor’s view. Each narrative seems to require “tweaking” when we deal with Jesus, particularly when we talk about his self-consciousness, and his own sense of meaning with words like “Kingdom” or “son of man.” His sense of meaning must always look like our own, or one we can reasonably find.

(3)
Does an interpreter illumine a text, or does the text illumine an interpreter? One could say that it depends upon the text, and our distance to it. The more we focus on a text, the more its meaning can be called into question, particularly as it is bestowed political or religious importance. The search for Jesus is the quest for present social, political, and religious vindication (both by Christians and secularists). It is in every sense a human “will to power,” as Nietzsche superbly termed it, the human desire to inflict us with an interpretation that will compel us. Goethe’s Faust who re-interprets John 1 with “In the beginning was the deed” persistently moves me.

The free thinker should be on guard, and the sympathetic scholar should be generous.


(4)
The Quest for the historical Yeshua is a magnificent quest. I predict that many quests will become great literature in future generations, despite their flawed histories. Narrative history, like Narrative religion falls into literature given enough time. It is no accident that Edward Gibbon is considered to be more literature now than history, just as Greek mythology, once a vibrant religion is now all literature. Perhaps our assumptions about history, religion and literature need to be re-examined, and more philosophical inquiry should begin here.

(5)
A quest can be evaluated by its own sense of honesty, and good will, towards its subject. Some questers sought to do damage to Jesus and movingly found him whole and complete. Others sought to find him and poignantly lost him. In each case the quester uncovered something new about Jesus. Historically real, or literarily imagined, he cannot be ignored.