As I look back over the long history of the Jesus quest (and its popularized sidekick, Jesus in cinema), I continued to be struck (and I admit ashamed) that Jesus rarely appears as a Jew. There have been occasional voices over the last century that have demanded we remember that Jesus was Jewish, but these have been occasional and against the communal representations of Jesus that were developing in those eras.I am puzzled by this characterization of recent research. If there is one thing that the term "the third quest" has been associated with, I would say that that is stress on the fact that Jesus was a Jew. The pioneering works of the third quest, Vermes's Jesus the Jew and E. P. Sanders's Jesus and Judaism make this their major contribution to the extent that "Jew" and "Judaism" appears in the title. As Tom Wright characterizes "the third quest" (his term), he places Jesus as Jew as its defining element. I realize that DeConick is using the term "third quest" somewhat differently, and applying it to those like Crossan and Funk who are actually excluded from "the third quest" by Wright, but I think this further underlines the problem I was trying to bring forward the other day, that the term is becoming useless, or worse, confusing.
And sadly this includes the Third Quest which largely has been trying to get around the fact that Jesus was Jewish by creating categories for Jesus as a Hellenized person living in Palestine or Galilee, but a person that doesn't look like any other Jew we know of who lived in Palestine or Galilee.
Friday, April 13, 2007
Jewish Jesus and the Third Quest
Continuing her series of interesting posts on the Historical Jesus, April DeConick today posts on Why the Jewish Jesus is Essential (and Dangerous). One element in it underlines the problems over the use of the term "the third quest" on which I commented in my post on abandoning the terminology of "the third quest". DeConick writes:
Mark, I know that you don't like the terms at all, but I think we are stuck with them. So what I am suggesting is a possible redefinition now that we have a bit of a distance from the last fifty years. Vermes in '74 is one of those scholars who brought out the point that the Jewish Jesus needs to be heard. But what happened is that a few heard (like Sanders, Segal, etc.) and the rest went on creating Jesuses who were not Jewish, although they claimed he was Galilean or Hellenized, in some way marginally Jewish. But in the last few years, I have noticed a number of scholars collectively beginning to address this problem. So my question stands, are we seeing the beginning of a fourth quest, one in which Jesus is finally perceived as fully a Jew?
ReplyDeleteApril wrote:
ReplyDeleteVermes in '74 is one of those scholars who brought out the point that the Jewish Jesus needs to be heard. But what happened is that a few heard (like Sanders, Segal, etc.) and the rest went on creating Jesuses who were not Jewish, although they claimed he was Galilean or Hellenized, in some way marginally Jewish.
My perception is very different. It seems that for every scholar who promoted an alternatively Jewish or Hellenized Jesus during the third quest period (Funk, Crossan, Patterson, Horsley, Mack, Vaage) there was someone advocating the more "Jewish" Jesus (Sanders, Fredriksen, Vermes, Allison, Meier, Wright). I see both sides as having equal influence during the third quest period.
What we're seeing now, if anything, is increased caution against invoking Jesus' "Jewishness" as a hot-button item. Even though I lean towards the more "Jewish" reconstructions, I agree with Bill Arnal that a Jewish Jesus can be just as agenda-driven as a Hellenized one.
April,
ReplyDeleteI must confess, I struggle to understand what you mean by "fully Jewish." No matter how one defines "Jewishness" as a historical reality or consciousness in the 1st c. (just to take one period), it is absolutely false to suppose a Greek/Roman/Jewish trichotomy. This makes the criticism that certain scholars make Jesus out to be "not Jewish enough" or "too Hellenized" or "too Roman" question begging. Part of what it means to be "fully Jewish" in this period is to also be a Roman--often with Roman citizenship or an inherited Greek past. Philo, Babatha, the Jews of Aphrodisias or Miletus, or even Tiberius Julius Alexander are all cases in point.
So I wonder, on the one hand, whether this way of phrasing your disagreement is appropriate; on the other hand, I wonder if you wouldn't mind pointing to specific illustrations to clarify what you mean.