The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus

Allen's wide-ranging survey analyzes the quest for the historical Jesus.The historical Jesus has occupied French theologian Ernest Renan, German theologians like D.F. Strauss, Rudolf Bultmann and Helmut Koester, British novelists like George Eliot and American New Testament scholars like Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar. In a breezy journalistic style, Lingua Franca contributing editor Allen blows through the last three centuries of historical Jesus scholarship to render the oft-quoted moral of the story: the Jesus-searchers of every era have found their own worldviews reflected comfortably in their portraits of Jesus. Allen opens her survey of these Jesus quests with an exploration of Jesus' Jewish world and the reception of Christianity in the Hellenic world. She then proceeds to explore the cultural contexts, from the 17th century to the 20th, in which the various Jesus quests arose. For example, in her examination of the work of the Jesus Seminar, she argues that ""the non-eschatological Jesus of the New Quest is a congenial figure for many American academics who associate eschatology with snake-handling and polyester blends, or who fear that putting apocalyptic sayings into Jesus' mouth supports the political goals of the Christian coalition."" In her zeal to vilify the New Quest, however, she makes insupportable generalizations such as the contention that the Jesus Seminar ""implicitly claims to represent a consensus of current New Testament scholarship,"" a claim never made explicitly or implicitly by Funk and company. In the end, Allen prefers her Jesus as a Jew who is the divinized Christ of Catholic Christian orthodoxy. While the book might be helpful to some readers as an introduction to the quest for the historical Jesus, its superficial scholarship makes this a less than worthwhile contribution to the historical Jesus conversation. (May)