Without Precedent. Geoffrey Kirk

early twentieth century emphasis had been on form criticism and the Hellenistic background of the early Church. Now the Jewish context came to play an increasing part, as the titles of more recent books show: Jesus the Jew (1973); Jesus and Judaism (1985); The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (1991); A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (1991–2001); and Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity (1999). With help from the Dead Sea Scrolls, the voluminous works of Flavius Joseph, and new insights into early rabbinic literature, Questers were beginning to identify the “authentic” sayings of Jesus as those which blended well into his Jewish background and could easily be distinguished from the Hellenistic overtones of the evangelists, who were Greek speakers, writing for a largely Gentile audience.

      At the same time other scholars, mostly in the United States, were taking an opposite tack. Dissimilarity was the watchword of the Jesus Seminar. They placed an equal and opposite emphasis on the separation of Jesus from his cultural context. The Seminar put considerable emphasis on irony and the adversative character of Jesus’s preaching: a characteristic of his style, they thought, was the desire to outrage or to reverse expectations: “Love your enemies.” In consequence, they assumed that if a saying was rooted in traditional Judaism, without that controversialist element of surprise, it was unlikely to be his. Naturally, this assumption had its critics. It excised Jesus from his environment, it was said, in a way which would surely have made it the harder for him to have influence on it. It posited an eccentric Jesus, said others, “who learned nothing from his own culture and made no impact on his followers.”

      Then there is the matter of eschatology. Largely under the influence of Albert Schweitzer and Johannes Weiss, the majority of Questers in the early part of the twentieth century accepted the idea that the Jesus Movement was an apocalyptic movement, expecting the Kingdom of God (however that was envisaged) to arrive by some dramatic intervention during the ministry of Jesus. This was, of course, an acute embarrassment to Christians, for if it were true then Jesus had been misguided. The English scholar C. H. Dodd developed an ingenious theory of “realized eschatology”: Jesus, he claimed, thought that the kingdom was in some sense in the future and yet that, in some sense, it had already come in his own words and deeds. The notion did not fly for very long. More recently the Seminar has concluded that Jesus did not expect a future kingdom in any sense at all. His message was about the here and now, and he did not expect any dramatic intervention by God. Instead his ministry was one of political, social, and economic reform. The Jesus Seminar has, of course, been accused (as Schweitzer had accused earlier Questers) of creating a Jesus in its own image. Certainly, following on from its characterization of him as a master of paradox, a sort of peasant Oscar Wilde, the idea that he was a social reformer with no practical agenda for the implementation of his program stretches the imagination somewhat.