Prior to Strauss, myth had been used in Old Testament interpretation, but not in New Testament exegesis or hermeneutic. Strauss reminds his readers that there were no eyewitness reports regarding the sayings, teachings, and movements of Jesus. Nothing was written down at the time of events and episodic happenings.
Schweitzer describes Strauss’s method thusly:
The supernaturalistic explanation of the events of the life of Jesus had been followed by the rationalistic, the one making everything supernatural, the other setting itself to make all the events intelligible as natural occurences. Each had said all that it had to say. From their opposition now arises a new solution—the mythological interpretation. This is a characteristic example of the Hegelian method—the synthesis of a thesis represented by the supernaturalistic explanation with the antithesis represented by the rationalistic interpretation . . . Each incident of the life of Jesus is considered separately; first as supernaturally explained, and then as rationalistically explained, and the one explanation is refuted by the other . . . in these Strauss recognises only the last desperate efforts to make the past present and to conceive the inconceivable; . . . he sets up the hypothesis that these inexplicable elements are mythical.15
As an example of Strauss’s use of legendary mythology, let us now consider the reputed conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary by the Holy Spirit.
• Matthew 1:21–23: “An angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, ‘Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife, for the child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.’ All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet: ‘Look, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,’ which means ‘God is with us.’”
• Isaiah 7:14: “The Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman [Hebrew almah, “young woman”; Greek parthenos, “virgin”] is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel [“God with us”].
Strauss comments:
In the world of mythology many great men had extraordinary births, and were sons of the gods. Jesus himself spoke of his heavenly origin, and called God his father; besides, his title as Messiah was—Son of God . . . In conformity [with the passages above] the belief prevailed that Jesus, as the Messiah, should be born of a virgin by means of divine agency . . . But according to historical truth, Jesus was the offspring of an ordinary marriage, between Joseph and Mary; an explanation which, it has been justly remarked, maintains at once the dignity of Jesus and the respect due to his mother.16
It was . . . a common notion among the Jews . . . that the Holy Spirit co-operated in the conception of pious individuals; moreover, that God’s choicest instruments were conceived by divine assistance of parents, who could not have had a child according to the natural course of things. And if, according to the believed representation, the extinct capability on both sides was renewed by divine intervention (Rom 4:19), it was only one step further to the belief that in the case of the conception of the most distinguished of all God’s agents, the Messiah, the total absence of participation on the one side was compensated by a more complete superadded capability on the other . . . thus must it have appeared to the author of Luke [Luke 1:37, for nothing will be impossible with God], since he dissipates Mary’s doubts by the same reply with which Jehovah repelled Sara’s incredulity. Neither the Jewish reverence for marriage, nor the prevalent representation of the Messiah as a human being, could prevent the advance to this climax; to which, on the other hand, the ascetic estimation of celibacy, and the idea, derived from Daniel, of the Christ as a superhuman being, contributed.17
Strauss develops his mythus, on the order of the above, throughout the entire synoptic narratives, dealing laboriously with almost every episode involving Jesus. Schweitzer’s summation runs as follows:
In the stories prior to the baptism, everything is myth. The narratives are woven on the pattern of Old Testament prototypes, with modifications due to Messianic or messianically interpreted passages. Since Jesus and the Baptist came into contact with one another later, it is felt necessary to represent their parents as having been connected. The attempts to construct Davidic genealogies for Jesus, show us that there was a period in the formation of the Gospel History during which the Lord was simply regarded as the son of Joseph and Mary, otherwise genealogical studies of this kind would not have been undertaken. Even in the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple, there is scarcely more than a trace of historical material.18
The above quotation from Schweitzer serves as an excellent example of Strauss’s methodology. In his entire book, Strauss allows us to see the supernaturalistic explanation, as well as the rationalistic explanation prior to his development of the mythus.
The Jesus Seminar: Funk and Hoover
The most notable event in the modern quest for the historical Jesus is the creation of The Jesus Seminar and its sponsoring agency, the Westar Institute. Led by Robert W. Funk and Roy W. Hoover, its noteworthy publication is The Five Gospels: What did Jesus Really Say?19 This work from 1993 is a search for the authentic words of Jesus, with over one hundred participating New Testament scholars actually voting according to a four-point scale on the likelihood of Jesus speaking or saying the words of a sentence, phrase, or paragraph. One of the three dedicatees is David Friedrich Strauss!
The authors take the view that John the Baptist, not Jesus, was the true eschatological/apocalyptic figure. Funk and Hoover claim that in the seventies and eighties, scholars were free from the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth and the idea of 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.”20 Funk and Hoover state that “Jesus himself then rejected that mentality in its crass form, quit the ascetic desert, and returned to urban Galilee.” Jesus’ new point of view was characterized by the parables and his emphasis on God’s imperial rule.21
Jesus’ followers did not grasp the subtleties of his [Jesus’] position and reverted, once Jesus was not there to remind them, to the view that they 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.22
The Apocalyptic Prophet: Bart Ehrman
Bart Ehrman published Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium in 1999. This work stands today as a landmark study because it considers all of the Jesus material—that is, all of his parables, warnings, prognostications, teachings about the kingdom of God, healing episodes, fishing episodes, and feeding episodes. Ehrman does not utilize the methodology of the Jesus Seminar (that is, attempting to judge the authenticity of material that may or may not “sound” like something Jesus would or would not have said).
As with the primary contributors to the Jesus Seminar, Ehrman is free of denominational or creedal ties and affiliations. He writes from the perspective of sound New Testament scholarship, carefully tracing the lexical roots of the Jesus material, and his bibliography is instructive for all New Testament endeavors.
Ehrman is emphatically not in the supernaturalist camp, nor is he in the rationalist-naturalist sphere of influence. He does not identify with Strauss’s views concerning the mythus, or what I have called legendary myth. Further, he does not agree with Funk and Hoover regarding Jesus’ alleged breaking away from the teachings of John the Baptist and his apocalyptic message.
In Ehrman’s view, there is no other viable explanation for Jesus’ teachings and interventions than as an apocalyptic prophet who believed in the imminent coming of the end times.
The historical Jesus did not teach about his own divinity or pass on to his disciples the doctrines that later came to be embodied in the Nicene Creed. His concerns were those of a first-century Jewish apocalypticist.