The Quest of the Historical Jesus / A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede

by Albert Schweitzer

To take a more general point: what interest had primitive [pg 342] theology in dating back the Messiahship of Jesus to the time of His earthly ministry? None whatever. Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly life of Jesus was regarded by primitive Christianity. The discourses in Acts show an equal indifference, since in them also Jesus first becomes the Messiah by virtue of His exaltation. To date the Messiahship earlier was not an undertaking which offered any advantage to primitive theology, in fact it would only have raised difficulties for it, since it involved the hypothesis of a dual Messiahship, one of earthly humiliation and one of future glory. The fact is, if one reads through the early literature one becomes aware that so long as theology had an eschatological orientation and was dominated by the expectation of the Parousia the question of how Jesus of Nazareth “had been” the Messiah not only did not exist, but was impossible. Primitive theology is simply a theology of the future, with no interest in history! It was only with the decline of eschatological interest and the change in the orientation of Christianity which was connected therewith that an interest in the life of Jesus and the “historical Messiahship” arose.

That is to say, the Gnostics, who were the first to assert the Messiahship of the historical Jesus, and who were obliged to assert it precisely because they denied the eschatological conceptions, forced this view upon the theology of the Early Church, and compelled it to create in the Logos Christology an un-Gnostic mould in which to cast the speculative conception of the historical Messiahship of Jesus; and that is what we find in the Fourth Gospel. Prior to the anti-Gnostic controversies we find in the early Christian literature no conscious dating back of the Messiahship of Jesus to His earthly life, and no theological interest at work upon the dogmatic recasting of His history.[263] It is therefore difficult to suppose that the Messianic secret in Mark, that is to say, in the very earliest tradition, was derived from primitive theology. The assertion of the Messiahship of Jesus was wholly independent of the latter. The instinct which led Bruno Bauer to explain the Messianic secret as the literary invention of Mark himself was therefore quite correct. Once suppose that tradition and primitive theology have anything to do with the matter, and the theory of the interpolation of the Messiahship into the history becomes almost impossible to carry through. But Wrede's greatness consists precisely in the fact that he was compelled by his acute perception of the significance of the critical data to set aside the purely literary version of the hypothesis and make Mark, so to speak, the instrument of the [pg 343] literary realisation of the ideas of a definite intellectual circle within the sphere of primitive theology.

The positive difficulty which confronts the sceptical theory is to explain how the Messianic beliefs of the first generation arose, if Jesus, throughout His life, was for all, even for the disciples, merely a “teacher,” and gave even His intimates no hint of the dignity which He claimed for Himself. It is difficult to eliminate the Messiahship from the “Life of Jesus,” especially from the narrative of the passion; it is more difficult still, as Keim saw long ago, to bring it back again after its elimination from the “Life” into the theology of the primitive Church. In Wrede's acute and logical thinking this difficulty seems to leap to light.

Since the Messianic secret in Mark is always connected with the resurrection, the date at which the Messianic belief of the disciples arose must be the resurrection of Jesus. “But the idea of dating the Messiahship from the resurrection is certainly not a thought of Jesus, but of the primitive Church. It presupposes the Church's experience of the appearance of the risen Jesus.”

The psychologist will say that the “resurrection experiences,” however they may be conceived, are only intelligible as based upon the expectation of the resurrection, and this again as based on references of Jesus to the resurrection. But leaving psychology aside, let us accept the resurrection experiences of the disciples as a pure psychological miracle. Even so, how can the appearances of the risen Jesus have suggested to the disciples the idea that Jesus, the crucified teacher, was the Messiah? Apart from any expectations, how can this conclusion have resulted for them from the mere “fact of the resurrection”? The fact of the appearance did not by any means imply it. In certain circles, indeed, according to Mark vi. 14-16, in the very highest quarters, the resurrection of the Baptist was believed in; but that did not make John the Baptist the Messiah. The inexplicable thing is that, according to Wrede, the disciples began at once to assert confidently and unanimously that He was the Messiah and would before long appear in glory.

But how did the appearance of the risen Jesus suddenly become for them a proof of His Messiahship and the basis of their eschatology? That Wrede fails to explain, and so makes this “event” an “historical” miracle which in reality is harder to believe than the supernatural event.

Any one who holds “historical” miracles to be just as impossible as any other kind, even when they occur in a critical and sceptical work, will be forced to the conclusion that the Messianic eschatological significance attached to the “resurrection experience” by the disciples implies some kind of Messianic eschatological references on the part of the historical Jesus which gave to the [pg 344] “resurrection” its Messianic eschatological significance. Here Wrede himself, though without admitting it, postulates some Messianic hints on the part of Jesus, since he conceives the judgment of the disciples upon the resurrection to have been not analytical, but synthetic, inasmuch as they add something to it, and that, indeed, the main thing, which was not implied in the conception of the event as such.

Here again the merit of Wrede's contribution to criticism consists in the fact that he takes the position as it is and does not try to improve it artificially. Bruno Bauer and others supposed that the belief in the Messiahship of Jesus had slowly solidified out of a kind of gaseous state, or had been forced into primitive theology by the literary invention of Mark. Wrede, however, feels himself obliged to base it upon an historical fact, and, moreover, the same historical fact which is pointed to by the sayings in the Synoptics and the Pauline theology. But in so doing he creates an almost insurmountable difficulty for his hypothesis.

We can only briefly refer to the question what form the accounts of the resurrection must have taken if the historic fact which underlay them was the first surprised apprehension and recognition of the Messiahship of Jesus on the part of the disciples. The Messianic teaching would necessarily in that case have been somehow or other put into the mouth of the risen Jesus. It is, however, completely absent, because it was already contained in the teaching of Jesus during His earthly life. The theory of Messianic secrecy must therefore have re-moulded not merely the story of the passion, but also that of the resurrection, removing the revelation of the Messiahship to the disciples from the latter in order to insert it into the public ministry!

Wrede, moreover, will only take account of the Marcan text as it stands, not of the historical possibility that the “futuristic Messiahship” which meets us in the mysterious utterances of Jesus goes back in some form to a sound tradition. Further he does not take the eschatological character of the teaching of Jesus into his calculations, but works on the false assumption that he can analyse the Marcan text in and by itself and so discover the principle on which it is composed. He carries out experiments on the law of crystallisation of the narrative material in this Gospel, but instead of doing so in the natural and historical atmosphere he does it in an atmosphere artificially neutralised, which contains no trace of contemporary conceptions.[264] Consequently the conclusion [pg 345] based on the sum of his observations has in it something arbitrary. Everything which conflicts with the rational construction of the course of the history is referred directly to the theory of the concealment of the Messianic secret. But in the carrying out of that theory a number of self-contradictions, without which it could not subsist, must be recognised and noted.