Here is the previous bread crumb.
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1. Let me sum up two key shifts that had taken place in my understanding as I embarked on my second year at Asbury. One was personal. I had come to view my early approach to faith as one of bondage and legalism. My Easter morning turning point marked a change in the flavor of my faith and my sense of what God was like.
The second turning point was a commitment to truth. Not to my theological tribe. Not to some dogmatized sense of what the Bible meant. But to the most likely conclusion given the evidence and sound reasoning. In my mind, this was what God thought.
In terms of how this was playing out in my interpretation of the Bible, I had come to accept that the King James tradition probably wasn't the most original one. I also was beginning to think that my tradition often made the text say what we needed it to say. Our approach to many issues like the Sabbath were probably instances of special pleading.
I was developing a sense of when an interpreter was "cooking the books," largely based on my own pilgrimage. I was developing a feeling that the causes my mother was now being fed regularly from Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church and the early days of Christian talk radio were likely full of special pleading. They seemed to approach the evidence the way I used to -- to use one's intelligence and the evidence to rationalize my own preconceptions rather than being a real truth seeker who followed the evidence to its most likely conclusion.
2. In the fall of 1988, I took New Testament History and Criticism with Dr. Joseph Wang. I could smell my old approach to truth. It seemed to me, a not-so-hidden goal for him was to go through the history of New Testament criticism and show how it was wrong (except in those cases where we were allowed to say it was right). In other words, it struck me to some extent as an apologetics class disguised as a history of New Testament studies class.
But Dr. Wang -- as Dr. John Oswalt would a year later -- presented the positions of the critics fairly. He argued against them at various points, but he did not pull their punches. He and Dr. Oswalt were fair enough in their treatments that they often convinced me of the opposite side of what they took.
I encountered Reimarus (1694-1768), whose posthumous writings drew a sharp division between Jesus' goals and those of his followers. (He thought Jesus' disciples stole the body.) He saw Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher who expected the kingdom of Israel to be restored immediately and never imagined starting a new religion like Christianity.
(I don't think for one minute that Peter or James or John stole Jesus' body or that the resurrection was some elaborate hoax cooked up by the disciples. That doesn't fit the clear resurrection dissonance that the New Testament embodies.)
3. I encountered David Strauss (1808-74), who marked a turning point in the study of Jesus. Before him, those with a naturalist approach to the Gospels assumed the Gospels were largely historical and tried to come up with alternative explanations (like that Jesus was only mostly dead). But Strauss suggested that the Gospels were full of myth and thus that many of the stories didn't happen at all.
Wang strongly criticized Strauss' understanding of myth, as many later critics of him have. But this opened a new trajectory in biblical studies. What if not all the stories in the Gospels actually happened?
This question was a key one in some of the inerrancy debates of the 1970s. It is pretty much assumed in Chicago Statement circles that inerrancy means that all the stories in the Bible are historical and do not contradict each other. The question of genre of course is a key one. How creative were history writers and biographers allowed to be? [1]
It is a fundamental question. It is not a question asked from the evangelical pulpits of America each Sunday. I have occasionally heard sermons that suggest that the genre of a biblical story meant that it was not meant to be taken literally. But almost every sermon I have ever heard in America lives in the space before Strauss.
Strauss was crude in his critical thinking by later standards, many would say. But he opened a door.
4. F. C. Baur walked through it (1792-1860). Baur was an easy target for Wang because of how hamfistedly he applied Hegel's supposed dialectic to biblical studies (as Wellhausen would for the Pentateuch).
The Jerusalem church is the thesis. Paul is the antithesis. Catholic Christianity is the synthesis. To think that this was all the rage in the late 1800s in German biblical studies is a bit embarrassing. But we shouldn't mistake his German oversystematization for a complete absence of data points. Baur looks amateurish to us now -- he shoved the data into his preconceived template. But that doesn't mean he didn't see some data.
It was also Baur that severed the Gospel of John from the Synoptic Gospels. His ideological scheme located John far too late -- in the second century. But he -- as also had Strauss -- pointed out just how different John was from the other Gospels.
An unfortunate by-product was that the historicity of John was largely dismissed in New Testament scholarship until C. H. Dodd dared to open the question up again in 1953. [2] Could there actually be some historical material in John? He thought so, and I think so -- although its highly symbolic nature means that such questions are best handled with care.
5. I'll go through the sequence of "criticisms" of biblical studies that would follow over the next hundred years in the next post. Here, let me simply sketch out the devolution of historical Jesus studies into early twentieth century oblivion.
At the same time that John's historicity was being detached from that of the Synoptics, scholars like Heinrich Holtzman (1832-1910) were showing the likelihood that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source. By the end of the 1800s, it was a clear consensus of biblical scholarship that Mark was the core source and the other two expansions of it. Another "Quelle" or "source" of Jesus' sayings (Q for short) was also thought by most to be in the mix.
You can see a progression of uncertainty that took place among some scholars. 1) So John isn't as historical as the Synoptics. 2) So Matthew and Luke aren't as historical as Mark and Q.
Now along comes William Wrede (1859-1906). He suggests in 1901 that Mark itself was theological rather than historical. He writes a book on the "messianic secret" in Mark. He sees it as Mark's way of getting around the fact that -- as he concluded -- Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah at all. How do you claim that someone is the Messiah when they never claimed it themselves? You claim that he told his followers to keep it secret. Brilliant.
80 years later, some of these conclusions would be questioned by individuals like E. P. Sanders (1937-2022) in what has been called the "third quest" for the historical Jesus. Perhaps somewhere down the line I'll get to that part of my own pilgrimage. Sanders made a very convincing case to me that Jesus believed himself to be the Messiah, once upon a time. [3]
6. The story above is sometimes called the "quest for the historical Jesus," and it is usually said to close with Albert Schweitzer's (1875-1965) work by that name in 1906. He strongly criticized what he considered the fanciful portraits of Jesus that had come out of the Liberal Protestantism of his day. (That's the actual name they used for themselves, not a slam.)
The Liberal Jesus was the Jesus of Charles Sheldon of "What Would Jesus Do?" fame. For them, Jesus was a great moral teacher. He was the ideal human. He was everything we should aspire to be.
Fundamentalists would critique the Liberal vision of Jesus because they did not necessarily see him as God. They did not necessarily believe in miracles or the resurrection. C. S. Lewis would effectively critique them for not taking Jesus' claims to Lordship seriously (and Lewis assumed that Jesus had made these claims.)
Schweitzer criticized the Liberal portrait of Jesus for not being historical enough. Jesus for him was the end-of-the-world preaching apocalyptic more like Reimarus saw Jesus. For Schweitzer, the historical Jesus was more like the lunatic of Lewis' trilemma. "He comes to us as one unknown," Schweitzer wrote in his 1906 watershed. He's not what we like to think he was, Schweitzer claimed.
7. I suppose most pastors -- let alone most Christians -- have never heard of these names. They were part of my journey in my early 20s, and I didn't feel like I had a guide to lead me. My first instinct was to make fun of them. I wanted to scoff with Wang.
But some of their ideas also made sense. How could I tell the difference between reasonable conclusions and bad arguments? I've had almost 40 years now to sort things out for myself. But it's probably not a conversation most need to have.
[1] Caleb Friedeman has recently published a book arguing that the Gospel writers likely intended their readers to take their stories as historical. Gospel Birth Narratives and Historiography: Reopening a Closed Case (Baylor University, 2025).
[2] The Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel (1953). Dodd is my Doktor Urgroßvater. The lineage will end with me apparently. We wanted to start a PhD program in Biblical and Theological Studies at IWU, but the rights were given to another part of the university that never managed to do it.
[3] Jesus and Judaism (Fortress, 1985).
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