The Human Christ: the Search for the Historical Jesus

The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus, by Charlotte Allen (Free Press, 383 pp., $26)

Cultural images of Jesus of Nazareth rarely render the features of that early-first-century Jewish religious figure. The Ravenna mosaics of the late imperial Church present a Roman military officer, beardless and armored, holding a standard proclaiming: "I am the Truth, the Way, and the Life." Luther's Jesus (as Luther's Paul) detested Judaism and preached something awfully close to sixteenth-century Protestantism to the obviously uncomprehending ancient crowds. And the Jesus of the modern American academy often shares the anti-sexist, anti-hierarchical, anti-right-wing politics of his late-twentieth-century liberal portraitists.

What accounts for the variety of interpretations? Historical malfeasance? Perhaps in part. But surely a larger part of the explanation has to do with the unique importance of Jesus in Western Christian culture. Unlike virtually any other figure from the past--Socrates, say, or Francis of Assisi, or even Freud --Jesus bears the singular burden of having to make immediate sense to us. The sorts of differences in world view, instincts, and manners that add charm to exchanges between Lizzie and Mr. Darcy, or that madden us when we try to deal with our parents, can turn threatening when they reveal the yawning gap between us in our world, and Jesus in his. Anachronistic reconstructions of the figure of Jesus are thus, in a sense, a backhanded compliment, a disguised index of his continuing cultural and emotional importance to later interpreters.

If the down side of such interpretations is their intrinsic anachronism, their up side can be their moral clarity and didactic force. In such instances we see not the first-century figure, but the ethical and religious values of the writer--hence, for example, the humane ethics of Jefferson's deist Jesus. This use of the figure of Jesus serves to sanction the moral vision of his interpreter. And as with most historical problems, retrospect aids our vision: we see such improbable correspondences (as between the ethics of the deists and the ethics of Jesus) only when we have out grown the world view that once seemed so compelling, and thus so obviously universal.

Does this mean that it is in effect impossible to read--or write--a good historical study of Jesus (and, by extension, of any culturally important figure)? Does our submergence in our own historical moment make it impossible to judge our own interpretations critically? Of course not. We as readers--and my academic colleagues and I as writers--routinely choose between reconstructions, routinely judge between good history and bad. And one of our standards of judgment is to gauge how well Jesus or any similar figure has been situated in a plausible historical context. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls; the explosion of archaeological knowledge from the land of Israel since 1948, and especially since 1967 with the reunification of Jerusalem; the intensive work on late-Second Temple Judaism pouring out of departments of religion and of Jewish Studies--all these have provided the building blocks for reconstructing Jesus' native context. If the Jesus who emerges from some study is not an early-first-century Jew speaking to other first-century Jews, concerned about the problems that concerned them and dying for first-century-Jewish reasons, then he is not the Jesus of history but a man without a country, a figure of the author's imagining. No grand interpretive consensus rules the field--witness the superabundance of new studies being published every year--but the principled commitment to the sympathetic reconstruction of the world of Jesus and his contemporaries now unites all serious efforts.

Charlotte Allen's new book acquaints the reader neither with current research nor with what was valuable and interesting in earlier efforts. Instead she offers a long review of what, to her mind, were interpretive failures. After a quick tour through first-century Galilee and Judea, she surveys epochal moments in the Western interpretation of the figure of Jesus from the second to the twentieth century. The strategy of presentation and the intellectual take-home message are identical in each of her ten subsequent chapters. First she interweaves a narrative of a given period's constructions of Jesus with a description of that period's key intellectual or political allegiances. Then she points out how the given image of Jesus merely reflects the salient points of what was then the current intellectual and cultural context. Finally, she concludes with sweeping generalizations about the motives and methods of the people she has studied. Thus, the eighteenth-century rationalists were "merely on an ideological crusade"; Schleiermacher, Kant, Rousseau, et al. "sought to make Jesus presentable to the modern age by clothing him in philosophical garments"; mid-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century American interpreters used "the gospel of social meliorism and liberal democracy" to displace "the transcendent as the religion of Jesus"; and so on. And on. Somewhere after page 200, I numbed up: in terms of both style and argument, The Historical Christ leaves the reader in about as much suspense as Aquinas's Summa Theologica.