Why am I actually searching for the historical Jesus? As a believer, you might wonder what you have to do with the man from Nazareth, you have already come to know him as the living Lord, after all. In some ways a completely legitimate question, and in other ways a completely illegitimate one. Because the living Lord is none other than the rabbi who walked the streets of Capernaum, the teacher who visited the local community (the synagogue) of Nazareth, and who called the Temple to account like an old-fashioned prophet. Anyone who separates those two suffers from a kind of religious schizophrenia. For me, Jesus of Nazareth is also the living Lord, but why this historical search?
It all began when a bolt of lightning struck our lives and split our household in two. I mean that metaphorically, but the concrete outcome was that I had to continue alone. I will not go into detail, but it meant that I had to say goodbye to God as provider and happiness-giver. If God is genuine and real, he could only be that with me here in the abyss and nowhere else. Looking back, I was already beginning to deconstruct with some intensity. By that I do not mean unraveling until nothing was left, but genuinely trying to get to the heart of the matter.
The world became a theatre in which everyone merely played a role, maneuvering through life in performance for the amusement of others. In social situations, people outdid one another with the goal of keeping their head above the water they had poured for themselves. It was one great facade, that daily getting up, laughing, talking, working, going home exhausted, only to repeat the same routine tomorrow. What a pointless existence. Nothing of the mythic layer, of the enchanted world, of that horizon sung by Nietzsche's madman, remained painted on the canvas of life. I, or something from outside, picked up the sponge and wiped away the horizon of metaphysical existence. There was only this left: what I see and what I experience.
I began to peel back everything in life like an onion, all the mythic layers fell away. And I did the same in my faith life. The criteria for discovering who the real Jesus of history was did not seem far removed from this. What have we made of him? Did he actually want us to see him as the Son of God, as that supernatural miracle-worker or was he knowable as a person, as the man he really was? We sometimes say that he doubted, that he worried, or even that he wept as he did at the death of his friend Lazarus. But we quickly wrap that in a divine coating, he remains untouchable as the unmoved mover. Either he is essentially human but supernaturally packaged, or essentially divine in a human form, in my view, the two cannot be distinguished.
For a long time, this was my modus operandi. I immersed myself in the Gospels, searching for evidence of his historical existence, because if he existed historically, there is hope: the hope that God knows how we suffer or at least that there was a human being who was good through and through. Then we have something. Then I have something to live for and to die for. If Jesus could genuinely say to the people who killed him that they are forgiven, that we must love our enemies, that we must turn the other cheek and be as good as God whom we may call our Father, then we have something to look up to. If a human being, an ordinary human being, could rise to that height, then we too must climb that moral and divine mountain.
By now I am more engaged in deconstruction than in peeling back, because you cannot separate form from essence. That is my conviction now. I cannot read my little son the biblical stories and tell him they are either all true or all false. They are true, even if they are not all historically accurate. There is a different or higher truth hidden within those stories. And that insight was given to me by John D. Caputo and the Next Quest in the search for the historical Jesus. Where the previous quests, the earlier academic explorations of Jesus, were busy peeling away or cutting off or historically authenticating the mythic layers, the Next Quest leaves them entirely intact as forms in which we may recognize Jesus. That is what deconstruction does: phenomenologically searching for what lies hidden within the stories about Jesus.
I am nonetheless drawn to J. Dominic Crossan's sensitive analyses of Jesus' words through careful criteria of historicity. Often, the shorter the text, and therefore the older the text, the weightier and more authentically Jesus' own the words tend to be. Multiple attestation is decisive: the more independent sources that record the same words, the greater the likelihood that they are genuinely Jesus' own. The methodological logic of historical positivism is appealing. I would very much like to believe that we can thereby arrive at the real Jesus, and with that, at answers to questions like why he was so driven by love of neighbor, by a community of people on the margins, and why he had to die for it. Who in their right mind crucified an innocent peasant?
If I knew who he was, I would know who I am. Because then I would know why and for what purpose I should live, beyond simply being thrown into this life. Now I am beginning a research project, and I hope it will be approved, into the life of Jesus through the lens of John D. Caputo. He says that we always hope against all hope for what is coming, what might perhaps come: the event that carries the unconditional within it. We hope for a miracle, we hope for justice, we hope for genuine love, we hope for truth. And in the person of Jesus, this event came to us in its ultimate form and all we have are his stories. They are stories passed on and written down by human beings, but intentionally, often mythically: partly fictional, partly historical, in a symbol that cannot be separated. And that is what we have to work with. I want to propose a methodology and commit to the view that we always see everything from our limited perspective, but that we can nonetheless discover something about the man who changed the world in a quiet revolution. The effect is there, we have the narrative symbols, and those we can and must examine thoroughly. That search is worth everything. Worth a lifetime.
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