Jesus without Christ

Jesus without Christ
Stephen Curkpatrick

The quest for “Jesus without Christ” is an obsession of the modern era. The attempt to secure the prophetic life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth without superimposed confessions of Christian faith is a consistent expression of this quest. It is a quest for Jesus without Christ; that is, Jesus without Christian faith. This quest has sought to distinguish the faith of Jesus from faith in Jesus.* To identify the faith of Jesus, it is assumed, is to find a universal faith behind Christian faith in Jesus Christ. It is a post-Christian quest for the pre-Christian faith of Jesus.

The quest for the faith of Jesus seeks to establish Jesus as an exemplar of faith in God that is not compromised by Christian faith. The faith of Jesus, it is assumed, opens a way of universal peace and goodwill without the offence of Christology within Christian assertions of the unique meditating status and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the incarnate disclosure of God.

The difficulty for those committed to a quest for the faith of Jesus is locating an independent testimony to such faith, for everything we know about Jesus, comes from New Testament testimony to faith in Jesus Christ. We know of no original Jesus divorced from Christian testimony to God embracing humanity in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, who, as risen One gives the Holy Spirit in every age to a community bearing his name.

The only reason we know anything about Jesus of Nazareth is because it was passed on by Christians in their testimony to Jesus who is also Christ. The quest for a perspective of Jesus apart from Christian testimony focuses on constructing hypothetical layers of gospel tradition in order to isolate an independent story of Jesus from Christian faith.**

The four gospels are consistent in their testimony that this human One is from God and returns to God as the focus and meaning of human existence—whether in the baptismal scene of Mark or the resurrection appearances of Matthew and Luke. Early Paul and late John are equally insistent on their portrayals of Jesus Christ as the way, truth and life—an offence if one is looking for an exemplary universal figure without Christology.

Implicitly and explicitly, the gospels are permeated with continuity between Jesus and Christ that is also expressed in the epistles and Acts. The gospels do not fit into a neat scenario of early authentic but later corrupted tradition. They do not give independent testimony to another portrayal of Jesus before Christ.

The construction of a hypothetical figure from selected fragments borrowed from Christian testimony, while also rejecting this testimony, entails rejecting most of the New Testament. Any claim to the historical faith of Jesus distinct from Christian faith can only be sustained from very selective reading of New Testament writings, including the gospels, with their images and references to the paradox of Jesus as the human face of God.

Any quest for the historical faith of Jesus apart from Christ is essentially a rejection of Christian faith as a viable point of departure for this inquiry. Some quests for the historical Jesus explicitly reject Christian faith for the faith of Jesus. Others smoulder with implicit rejection. It can only be regarded as a contradiction to adhere to Christian faith while advocating the thesis that an original Jesus tradition represents a different picture than the one given in Christian testimony.

In quest of the historical Jesus apart from Christian faith, sophisticated literary analysis has been undertaken for the purpose of retrieving the most archaic levels of Jesus tradition in its original formation. The attractive certainties of historicism—hypotheses of cause and effect, and therefore development, can become a tacit yet sophisticated form of fundamentalism that is expressed in claims to know the specific influences that shape a particular writing.

Emphasis on securing the original context of New Testament writings has the potential for inordinate focus on contextual methods with an assumption that the meaning of a particular writing is understood by securing the context as the key to interpreting this writing. Yet we cannot know all the influences that impinge upon an ancient context and their relative weightings as influences. The quest for context has generated an unexpected perspective—the impossibility of arriving at an original stratum that does not reflect the testimony of other New Testament writings.

Hypotheses posed as facts derived from desiccated writings that are viewed with scepticism as to their most explicit claims, are most unlikely to address humans in their perennial exposure to menace and mortality. Beyond the parameters of context, biblical testimony presents the possibility of vocative encounter with God who in love, comes to human life in its variegated joys and sorrows, to invite humanity into unique communion. This testimony to grace in the midst of creation has its ultimate focus in Jesus Christ. This reality exceeds any hypothesis of context for interpreting texts.

The story of Jesus Christ is eventful in history while exceeding the scope of historical and literary methods to ascertain the inner character and veracity of its claims. This story is only known in response to the disclosure of God in grace and living presence in Christ.

It is a fallacy to assume that the real Jesus can be discovered by divorcing Jesus from Christian faith. This assumption is likely only to portray Jesus as an alibi for political or religious ideologies. As one among other exemplars, Jesus can even become superfluous to these ideals and irrelevant to their tangible expression within human life.

When focus on Christ as the disclosure of Christian testimony to grace is excised to give a profile of Jesus merely as an exemplary human figure, the participatory possibility for humans is made opaque. For such a figure we could as easily turn to Gandhi or Mandela. They evoke inspiration, even awe, but such figures cannot deliver the eternal as grace and communion into human hearts.

If there is no intrinsic connection between “Jesus without Christ” and Christian faith, Christianity can only be regarded as antithetical to the faith Jesus once articulated (Overbeck). In the quest for Jesus without Christ, Christian faith could only be considered the ruination of all that is represented by the faith of Jesus as a human possibility. Either Christian faith gives integral testimony to Jesus crucified and risen as the Christ of God or it is a confusion of the authentic original.

Ironically, for Christians to assert that there is a faith of Jesus to be pursued apart from faith in Jesus Christ—as coming from God, crucified, risen and representing the possibility of communion in grace within the futurity of God—is to will the end of Christian faith. Allegiance to an original faith of “Jesus without Christ” in the name of Christian faith is a contradiction, for there is no Christian faith without faith in a risen Christ. Christian faith concerns Jesus who is also Christ.

*A distinction between the faith of Jesus in contrast to faith in Jesus is sometimes based on a few references in Paul’s epistles (Rom. 3:22, 26; Gal 2:16, 20; 3:22; Phil. 3:9) in which the genitive is interpreted subjectively (of Christ) not objectively (in Christ) (Byrne). Paul consistently articulates the believer’s life “in Christ,” which makes the subjective interpretation inconsistent with Paul’s theology. Translations consistently opt for faith in Christ.

**The hypothetical document “Q” or “Source” is often structured in arbitrary temporal stages to locate apocalyptic sayings as later development of earlier wisdom material, so as to demonstrate that an earlier Jesus tradition has been overlaid by apocalyptic motifs. This scenario is based on too many hypothetical suppositions.

Selected sources: Byrne Romans; Overbeck Über dei Christlichkeit unserer heutigen Theologie 1873, 1903; trans. How Christian is our Present day Theology? (2005).