Gordon Clark: Jesus Christ - Fact or Fantasy? Part I (The Reformed Presbyterian Advocate)

1964. Jesus Christ - Fact or Fantasy? Part I. The Reformed Presbyterian Advocate. November. pgs. 5-6.

[In October Rev. Gordon H. Clark, Ph.D delivered three lectures at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota. This is the first of the three thought-provoking messages.]

The subject of these three lectures this week is Historiography, i.e. the exposition and evaluation of the methods historians use in their work.

I am interested in this subject, and perhaps you are too, mainly because Christianity is an historical religion. By this I do not mean that Christianity has had a history of some two thousand years. Buddhism has had a history too. By calling Christianity an historical religion I mean it is a religion that has historical events embedded in it. Buddhism does not. Even so short a summary of Christianity as the Apostles' Creed contains a mid-section that is altogether historical fact. Longer accounts might mention Abraham, the Exodus, and King David. These events are integral parts of the Christian message. The New Testament itself insists that if the Resurrection never occurred, Christianity is a false faith and vain delusion. There are also reasons of a more technical theological cast why attention must be given to the significance of history and to the methods of historians. These will appear as we continue.

Now, at first, this religious motivation in historiography causes confusion. The issues concerning of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ are so important from the religious perspective the one tends to be diverted from the strictly historical problem. Or, to put the warning another way: as this lecture proceeds it will be necessary to pass by many matters you may think more interesting and more important than historiography; but these strictly theological matters must be dropped in order to make any progress at all on the present subject, which is the relation of Christian faith to the determination of historical fact.

The origin of the contemporary interest in historiography is best located in the so-called Life of Jesus movement, or to use the title of a later book, The Quest of the Historical Jesus. This quest began in 1835 with the publication of D. F. Strauss's Leben Jesu.

Strauss's motivation is clear. He assumed that science had shown the impossibility of miracles. Since the Gospels contain accounts of miracles and are therefore unhistorical and legendary, historians are obliged to go behind the Gospels in order to uncover the non-miraculous historical Jesus.

Parenthetically may I note that this is not the only connection between science, historiography, and religion. The various subjects in a college curriculum are related in many ways and they all have their bearings on the Christian message. Therefore, the educated Christian needs to formulate a theory of knowledge in which the apparent conflicts can be resolved. A view of the nature of science as well as a view of historiography is necessary to a well balanced presentation of Christianity.

Now, to repeat, D. F. Strauss entertained a view of science that implied the impossibility of miracles. As a New Testament scholar therefore he envisioned the necessity of discovering the historical Jesus hidden behind the Gospels. The Gospels, he held, were a compilation of myths and legends which the enthusiasm of the early Christians had attached to the name of Jesus. Remove the legendary accretions by the proper historiographical criteria, and we find the historical Jesus.

If anyone should suppose that a non-miraculous Jesus would be insufficient for Christianity, F. C. Baur of Tubingen explained that w rejection of the Gospels as we have them cannot damage the Christian faith. The essence of Christianity, he asserted, is found in the strictly ethical teaching of the Sermon on the Mount. These ethical principles are the eternal and absolute content of the Christian message. The historical situation in which these eternal principles may have been first enunciated is of no great importance. From this it follows that regardless of how much or how little we can know about the life of Jesus, Christianity remains unaffected.

Indeed, we may add, if Christianity consists in a set of eternal ethical principles, and does not depend on unique historical events, one may conclude that Christianity remains unaffected even if it be proved that Jesus never existed.

The several scholars who followed Strauss and Baur for nearly a century disagreed considerably as to which items in the Gospels were historical and genuine. Although they all denied miracles, one would select one saying as genuine and another would select another, until their mutual repudiations produced a ludicrous confusion.

One most important and interesting point has to do with Jesus' own opinion of himself. Did he believe himself to be the Messiah? The earlier critics, who inherited from their Christian ancestors a desire to maintain Jesus' goodness and sanity, decided that he could not have an Messianic claims are found in the Gospels, other critics took an agnostic position. Then, when it became more difficult to explain why one verse was genuine and another was spurious, later critics maintained that Jesus made the claim, but only as a formality consonant with the religious terminology of his day. After several other twists of opinion showed it to be impossible to disentangle a naturalistic Jesus from the pervasive Messianic theme, Albert Schweitzer finally admitted that Jesus claimed to be Messiah and that therefore he was insane.

The demonstrated impossibility of distinguishing between the genuine and the allegedly spurious verses, by any reasonable criterion, put an end to the quest for the historical Jesus, and for this Albert Schweitzer is usually given credit. But so far as historiography is concerned. rather than New Testament criticism only, it was Martin Kahler, as early as 1892, who made the Life of Jesus movement untenable. In his argument there occurs for the first time the distinction between Historie and Geschichte, in which terms the mains controversy continues today.

Now let us summarize Kahler's position. First of all, Kahler does not accept the Gospels as reliable sources for historical science. Historical investigation, he says, required several corroborating sources and there are no sources for Jesus' life outside the New Testament. Then too the evangelists were not eye witnesses; their accounts give a disproportionate space to the last week of Jesus' life; and the great difference between the Synoptics and John is a basis for suspicion. Therefore, concludes Kahler, the search for the historical Jesus is impossible.

To support this conclusion Kahler examines the attempts made by Strauss, Renan, et al, to write the life of Jesus. Here he discovers - and we must remark that it was a very easy discovery to make - that these lives of Jesus are mainly the result of the authors' untrammelled imaginations. They had invented whatever criteria pleased them, and on the basis of these criteria decided what was and was not historical. Yet they claimed to be objective and unprejudiced.

This claim was the common claim of the nineteenth century. Not only the religious authors, but the secular historians also, like von Ranke and Mommsen, held that the ideal of historiography was first of all the discovery of the empirical truth, the objective facts, the events as they actually occurred. The prerequisite for such an investigation was said to be an objective attitude on the part of the historian. He was to approach his work with a mind entirely free from any presupposition.

Since Strauss and Baur were not objective, Kahler concludes not only that they failed, but that they had to fail in the attempt to write the Life of Jesus.

These adverse criticisms of Strauss soon turn into a positive reconstruction. Kahler urges that the Gospels record, not the life of Jesus, but the preaching of the early church. This preaching took no interest in history as such. Of all writers, the apostles and evangelists were not objective, disinterested historians. What they preached and wrote contained their recollections of Jesus to be sure, but these recollections had been transformed by their experience of the risen Christ.

This consideration introduces us to be a theological reason why a biography of Jesus must be a failure. The ontological structure of what has come to be called "the Christ-event" defies historical categories. Scientific biography must presuppose that Jesus was a mere man because historical investigation can proceed only on the principle of analogy. That is to say, the events under investigation and the psychology of the actors must be construed as essentially similar to other events and to the mental processes of other actors. For example, Alexander the Great and Napoleon must have had the same basic motivation. Therefore the mind of Jesus must be similar to the mind of Socrates. This principle of historical analogy rules out everything supernatural. But if Jesus was a mere man, then the Christian church has been engaged in idolatrous worship since the beginning.

Kahler, however, was not willing to plead guilty to the charge of idolatry. Therefore, historical investigation must be discarded (at least insofar as history is supposed to be of use to theology) and one must rely on faith.

(Due to the length of this article, we shall have to break it here and conclude it next month.)