The "Real" Jesus

One of the key themes of Biblical theology at the turn of the century was the search for the "historical" Jesus, an attempt to discover his "personality" and his own sense of his mission. This quest seemed to be all but demolished in the years between World Wars I and II by such "form" critics* as German Theologian Rudolf Bultmann, who maintains that all that is known about Jesus was set down by the early church after the resurrection, when the first Christians saw him as the Messiah and composed the Gospels to prove it. Therefore, says Bultmann, one cannot know anything of the "Jesus of history'' as he was before the first Easter, walking and talking among men.

But the search for Jesus the man is still alive, even among the form critics themselves. A leading example of the search is the work of French Theologian Oscar Cullmann, discussed in a roundup of current European theology in the Protestant quarterly Religion in Life. Cullmann maintains that just because the Gospels are the product of the post-Easter church is no reason why it is impossible to reach back beyond the crucifixion to the historical Jesus and "distinguish between the places where the Gospel writers obviously express their own view and the places where they report the words of Jesus himself."

Son & Servant. Cullmann approaches the Gospels like a paleontologist reconstructing a human head from the fossil of a jawbone. As U.S. Scholar Maria

Sulzbach notes in her analysis of his position, he focuses on the fact that Jesus refers to himself as the "Son of Man" in combination with Isaiah's concept of the "Suffering Servant of God" (Mark 10:45 and Mark 8:31). The title, Son of man, was not current in popular Judaism. It was only in esoteric circles of late Judaism that the nationalistic idea of the Messiah as the redeemer of Israel was replaced by the apocalyptic conception of the Son of man "as the hidden Messiah who, at the end of time, will come to judge men and rule over the world."

In this. Cullmann sees a glimpse of Jesus' conception of himself. Cullmann's reasoning: the writers of the Gospels use the title Son of man "only when they represent Jesus himself as speaking. They themselves never call him by this name and they never report another's doing so in conversation with Jesus." This would not make sense, Cullmann argues, if the Gospel writers were really the first to attribute the title to Jesus. "Actually, they have preserved the memory that only Jesus himself used it this way."

Glory & Humiliation. Jesus' exclusive combination of the Son of Man and the Suffering Servant. Cullmann thinks, shows his own attitude toward his mission--not a later conception of the early church. He saw himself as appearing "(1) in glory at the end of time--a thought familiar to the expectation of the Son of man in certain Jewish circles; (2) in the humiliation of the incarnation among sinful men --a thought foreign to all earlier conceptions of the Son of man."

In other words, says Cullmann, the historical Jesus, as well as the theological Jesus, was conscious of being both the Servant and the Son, "in the complete and unique oneness with God which he experienced continually and in a manner beyond all human possibilities."

* Form criticism is a method of textual analysis that aims, and claims, to penetrate the written record of the Gospels to the oral tradition behind them.

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