Posing the questions

Persons in the Western world who have never picked up a Bible are nonetheless apt to have at least a nodding acquaintance with various stories from the Bible - Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark, David and Goliath, the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son. Children used to grow up with Bible story books; those stories are still the staple of much Sunday school instruction. The spells stories cast is not limited to children. How many adults can resist the line, “Once upon a time,” or the standup comic's “On the way over here I ran into …,” or “Then some people came, bringing to him a paralyzed man”? Had most of what we know about Jesus as healer come in the form of sermon or learned treatise, it is unlikely that the image of him as caring and compassionate - and healing - would have exercised the influence it has upon subsequent generations.

Those stories are, however, parts of larger stories, the New Testament gospels. These, too, have had a profound influence, not only in the Western world (one thinks of Gandhi, for example) and not only on believers, for whom these stories were “good news/” but also on persons who had little time for Christianity but yet found much to admire in the gospels’ portraits of Jesus. In the modern period, however, many believers and non-believers alike began to ask whether those portraits were trustworthy. For well over two centuries now scholars have been sifting through the Jesus traditions in the New Testament gospels and other early Christian writings in an attempt to discern there “the historical Jesus”: Jesus as a modern historian might describe him using the canons and criteria of history the way it began to be written in the modern period and especially in the nineteenth century. This investigation has intensified in recent years as scholars have refined historical method, drawing upon scholarship in fields such as sociology and anthropology. The “quest for the historical Jesus” (as it came to be called) went hand in hand with efforts to discover how the gospels came to be, whether one gospel writer used the other(s), what other sources each might have employed. The evangelists were seen as collectors and assemblers of traditions, “scissors-and-paste” people, so to speak.