From the Humanity of Christ to the Historical Jesus

        The Council of Chalcedon (451) affirmed dogmatically that Christ is two natures (divine and human) in one divine person. Conventional Christology, founded on Chalcedon, stressed that Jesus was fully human, who suffered and died on the cross for the salvation of mankind. His resurrection from the dead is the core of Christian belief which is a vindication of his divinity as the Son of God. Because of his humanity and human consciousness, Jesus is like us in all things; he grew up physically and had been thinking, understanding and learning things in a human way. In other words, Jesus, despite a divine person, had human limitations during his ministry on earth. Being a human being, he was limited in knowledge, needing to discover what he needed to know. This is the conventional understanding of the humanity of Jesus. Fostered by the neo-Scholastic manuals, however, the understanding of Jesus has been distorted by the docetic and monophysitistic tendencies (which emphasized too heavily on the divinity of Christ and tended to separate him from his Jewish roots), which led to “a movement of recovering the full humanity of Jesus” (Loewe 315). This new Christology paradigm aims to reconstruct the historical Jesus of Nazareth or the “historically reconstructed Jesus.”

        As mentioned above, the initial phase of the paradigm shift was a “corrective movement” to “retrieve from the New Testament portraits of Christ previously neglected features of his humanity, particularly limitations on his human knowledge.” However, when the results of the research were released in the early 1970s, “the boundaries within which this corrective endeavor was carried on began to burst,” resulting in some scholars of the “historically reconstructed Jesus” questioned about the authenticity of the dogma affirmed by the Council of Chalcedon, thus leading to “thoroughly revisionist interpretations of the dogma of the divinity of Christ” (Loewe 316). A notable movement is the “Jesus Seminar” which began in the 1980s, which made the research on the “historically reconstructed Jesus” a topic of public interest. According to Robert Funk, the co-chair of Jesus Seminar, its intended outcome was “a radical reformation, a reinvention of Christianity that would replace traditional faith and practice with à faith constructed on a more rational and historically accurate view of the life and teachings of Jesus.” The actual result of the Jesus Seminar was the dissemination of a set of research findings which suggest that the traditional Christological doctrines are “untenable” and that most of the scriptural sources were “imaginative theological construct” that had distorted the memory of Jesus. The Jesus Seminar also advocates that “the real Jesus lurks somewhere behind Christian Scripture and teaching, and needs to be liberated from the distorting effects of Christian faith by historical investigations.” A key message of the Jesus Seminar is that the “real Jesus” is the “historical Jesus,” who is “the norm for determining what, or even whether, Christianity ought to exist” (Loewe 317-319).

        Despite these reformative developments, many theologians do not consider relying solely on the “historical-critical” methods sufficient for getting the religious meaning from the scriptural texts of the New Testament. David Tracy, for example, argues that the historical-critical methods should be “complemented by hermeneutical-literary methods as well as methods of ideology-critique.” Moreover, he advocates that “the proper function of all such methods in Christian theology is a corrective, not a constitutive one.” He pointed out that the locus of the Christian religion is “in the personal response of faith in the faith-community as that faith is mediated by the community and the tradition.” He opposed to the revisionist approach adopted by the Jesus Seminar which essentially was not correcting the tradition but replacing it with a historically reconstructed Jesus as a different person proclaiming a different set of messages with different meanings. In his opinion, the whole Christianity is based on “the event and person Jesus Christ” as witnessed by his apostles that formed the tradition on which the present Church is constituted. A “reconstructed Jesus” through the historical-critical method should not be the “norm or standard” for the tradition. For Tracy, “faith rests on the encounter with God’s revealing word in Christ as mediated through the Church.” The “real Jesus” is not the “historically reconstructed Jesus” but the Jesus as the Christ, “as God’s self-manifestation,” who is encountered by people in the present age through the mediation of the community of believers originating from the first eye-witnesses. The historical-critical method should thus be contingent upon the Christian faith in Jesus as God’s self-manifestation, aiming to “provide material for postcritical narratives continuous with the apostolic witness and that serve to mediate that witness into the present” (Loewe 319-321).

        Another theologian, Elizabeth Johnson did not subscribe entirely to Tracy’s position. She considered that “the New Testament includes the actual Jesus who lived among the criteria of its own validity.” To her, the “historically reconstructed Jesus” is of theological importance because “it is Jesus whom the Church confesses as the Christ.” The memory-image of Jesus has developed over the past “in response to new cultural contexts and exigencies.” This development should in fact continue with the contemporary research on Jesus through the historical-critical method. As a result, “the constant is the self-understanding of the believer; Christology is the variable.” In essence, she asserted that

the reconstructed image of the historical Jesus not only functions today as the equivalent of the memory impression of Jesus in the early Church, but actually is the equivalent of it, i.e., is the means by which significant segments of the present generation of believers remember Jesus who is confessed as the Christ. As such, it is an element of the living tradition of the present Church (Loewe 322-323).

Yet, both Tracy and Johnson agree that the “historically reconstructed Jesus” should not be used as the basis for faith – as opposed to a much more open stance of the Jesus Seminar. Nonetheless, Johnson contended that the results of the historical research on Jesus “constitute the present form of the Church's knowledge of Jesus in his past actuality,” and therefore “the historical Jesus is intrinsically related to Christian faith” (Loewe 327).

        Another theologian William Loewe defended Tracy’s position against Johnson’s about the use of the “historically reconstructed Jesus” for contemporary Christology. He disagrees that the “historically reconstructed Jesus” should form the foundation for Christology for a few reasons. First, there is a question on what data are relevant to the reconstruction of the historical facts. Are the so-called “reliable historical data” collected and analyzed by the scholars doing historical-critical research relevant and adequate? There is also much uncertainty in determining the dates for these historical sources and correlating them to arrive at an authentic picture of the historical situations. The method and criteria for using such historical facts are also subject to dispute. Second, the task of “extricating from these sources a set of facts about Jesus — what he actually said or did” as well as the question of “what image renders this set of facts about Jesus historically intelligible within the world of the first century” are highly complex and entail much uncertainty. Such a “historically reconstructed Jesus” is indeed “fragile and tenuous,” and always subject to revision in the light of new evidence and judgments. Thus, Loewe considered that the claim of the Jesus Seminar “that the ‘historical Jesus’ is simply to be identified with the ‘real Jesus’ is naïve.” The real and only Jesus is the Son of God confessed by Christians and identified as fully divine and fully human in a tradition which remains unchanged as God's self-communication to mankind. The value of the research on the “historically reconstructed Jesus” is to provide “the material for new Christological symbols and post-critical narratives disclosive of both Jesus’ status as God’s self-presence in the present and of the values inherent in the faith response to this Jesus the Christ.” While recognizing a paradigm shift from the “humanity of Jesus” (a metaphysical category) to the “historical Jesus” (a historical category), a “historically reconstructed Jesus” should not enter into the realm of faith and upset the foundations of Christology. Only in this manner, the “historically reconstructed Jesus” may serve to advance Christological developments instead of disrupting it (Loewe 327-331).

Bibliography

Loewe, William P. “From the Humanity of Christ to the Historical Jesus.” Theological Studies 61 (2000).