ROUGHLY EDITED COPY CUENet AUDIO TRANSCRIPTION DOGMATICS 2 LESSON 56 Captioning Provided By: Caption First, Inc. 10 E. 22nd Street Suite 304 Lombard, IL 60148 800-825-5234 *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. *** >> New Testament scholars today speak of the quest for the historical Jesus. Does this have any meaning for Christology? >> DR. DAVID SCAER: The quest for the historical Jesus perhaps is the most important question for the study of the person of Jesus. In one of your previous questions, it was asked about are there any historical evidences for Jesus and for the resurrection. And we answered that question of this is extremely important. The quest for the historical Jesus has a slightly different twist. And that is beginning at the beginning of the 18th Century all the way up to now, New Testament scholars in studying the person of Jesus dismiss anything which is supernatural about him and apply historical methods to his study. Now, this happened -- this happened first in Germany and then in England in the 1700s. To bring it right down to something you would be familiar with, Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, produced his own Bible in which he removed all of the miraculous illusions to Jesus. A copy of the Jefferson Bible is still given to all graduates from the University of Virginia, which he founded. Now, he really wasn't a scholar because he worked with the English. But the idea was that we cannot know anything about -- we cannot -- we do not know anything about the supernatural. There is no way in which we can scientifically address the supernatural. So we will just look in the gospels. And the quest for the historical Jesus was really what the word says, a quest, a looking for the historical Jesus. And references to his deity, to his miracles, to his resurrection were considered things which were added on at a later time. And there have been three quests for the historical Jesus. These are kind of arbitrary divisions. But three quests. The first quest said, "We will only believe in those things about Jesus which have parallels to other people and other things that happened in his time." We can explain the miracles of Jesus as -- the healing miracles of Jesus that maybe he had some medical knowledge. The feeding of the 5,000 can be explained by maybe the people brought their lunches with them. And they were afraid to take out their lunches and eat it because they might have to share. And Jesus had the bold courage in faith to take out his lunch and eat it in front of all the others. And so they figured that if he had it, they could also -- they would also -- could also eat their lunch and wouldn't have to share. Some of these things are really quite amusing. I used to spend quite a bit of time looking at these things. It's very strange that this particular item in Christology has no part in our dogmatic tradition at all. Yet, this type of thinking is what prevails at most secular public and private universities and also religious schools. It pervades all of education. You may be acquainted with the name of Albert Schweitzer. He lived in ***Ausaslaraine. And he was a very famous humanitarian. But he also was a biblical scholar. He was also one of the finest Bach scholars and Bach organists who have ever lived. And he was also a medical doctor. What he did was he gathered excerpts from the 19th -- the 18th and the 19th Century scholars excerpts and published an anthology. And what he did by publishing this anthology of what the historical scholars thought about Jesus, he demonstrated that they all use different methods and they all contradicted one another. So his conclusion was we know nothing about the historical Jesus at all. That was his conclusion. Now, that brought the first quest to a conclusion. He himself had an idea of who Jesus was. The only thing he could say about Jesus was that at the end of his life, he died a hopeless individual hoping that the Son of Man was going to deliver him. Because Jesus made statements that he hoped the Son of Man was going to deliver him. And these references were not to Jesus himself but to some heavenly figure who would come to his rescue and take him off the cross. The second quest for the historical Jesus occurred in the middle of the 20th Century. And at the forefront of that particular quest was Rudolph Boltman who gave us the term demythologizing. He claimed that Jesus was basically a simple teacher. And that after he died, they attributed to him certain divine things. And these divine things came about when Christianity went from a Jewish community into a Greek community and a Greek culture. Because in a Greek culture, there were gods. All sorts of gods who did fantastic things. And so that Jesus would have the same honor as some of these mythological figures. They attributed Jesus a virgin birth, a resurrection and miracles. And Boltman's phrase, demythologizing, was very famous at the time. That he saw it as his job and the job of scholars to take the myth out of the New Testament so that we could confront the law and the Gospel in its raw form so we could become authentic human beings. That particular quest has come to a conclusion. And now scholars are on what they think is the third quest. Now, what is problematic in the quest for the historical Jesus, even though it calls itself historical. And even though it calls -- it's understood as scholarly, the methods which these scholars use are not always the same. History likes to pride itself in being objective. I would like to suggest that perhaps the historians are underneath the -- underneath the sheep's clothing are historical wolves because they establish the principles of what can be and what cannot be. The new historical quest for Jesus in a certain sense has been a little bit more optimistic. There is a kind of a general feeling that maybe Jesus had some kind of sense that he was different from other people. This does not necessarily mean that he was God. A very significant leader now is Bart Ehrman who works this way: If there's anything about Jesus in the New Testament -- in Paul's epistles -- in the epistles, then this -- this is something that the church thought about Jesus. And it's not historically very identifiable. I think that this should be a component part of all theological education. You cannot know what every scholar is doing. However, you have to be aware that this is going on and that many of our people will come into contact with this. And it can be very destructive of the Christian faith. Because the certainty about whether Jesus lived -- I mean, this is not even a point of whether he rose from the dead. But if we have absolutely no certainty about what he said and what he did, that this is all later additions, he can hardly be the object of faith. *** This text is being provided in a rough draft format. Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART) is provided in order to facilitate communication accessibility and may not be a totally verbatim record of the proceedings. ***