Even though the period between 1906 and 1953 was classified as “no quest,” according to James K. Beilby and Paul R. Eddy, such a description is inaccurate, for studies about the historical Jesus kept going on for half a century. Nevertheless, there are indications of less activity due to the influence of Schweitzer’s book. The editors identified two of them.
First, the criticism that the Jesus of history that came out from the first quest was nothing but a product of subjective scholarship. Many seemed to accept the reliability of this criticism that led to skepticism and the giving up of the goal to arrive at the objective Jesus of history.
The second influence was related to the conclusion of Schweitzer himself that the Jesus of history was a misguided prophet of doom.
In addition to the foregoing impacts of Schweitzer’s study, two more influences questioned the viability of the quest for the historical Jesus. One of them was the emergence of form criticism, where Rudolf Bultmann’s book was widely accepted as an authority in this kind of Gospel analysis. Bultmann’s work pushed deeper the “skeptical attitudes toward the Gospels as historical sources” (p. 22). Form criticism provided an impenetrable wall of myth that made the Jesus of history inaccessible to modern scholars. The logical response to this level of skepticism was to give up any hope for the possibility that the Jesus of history could ever be reconstructed or recovered.
The identified influences so far are historical. The fourth or the last one was theological. For Martin Kahler, the quest for the historical Jesus “was theologically unnecessary—even illegitimate” (pp. 22-23). The quest was going nowhere, for the end result of the studies of modern scholars deprived us of the living Christ. The crucial issue is about the nature of the Christian faith. Christian faith could not have the ever-changing stances of scholars about the historical Jesus as its basis. In fact, the two are inimical to each other. They cannot be combined “like oil and water” (p. 23).
Kahler’s conclusion was picked up by neo-orthodox theologians like Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, and Bultmann. From the perspective of neo-orthodoxy, “any attempt to render the Christian faith dependent on an objective, historical foundation was a violation of the defining Reformation principle of ‘justification by faith alone'" (ibid.). If the observation of the editors about neo-orthodox theologians is accurate, it appears that the latter’s idea of faith is void of objective and historical content. I wonder if the view of classic Protestantism about faith is the same as what neo-orthodoxy claims.
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