Jesus and Peter Pan
Stephen Curkpatrick

Having lost his shadow but shown by Tinker Bell where to find it, Peter Pan attempts to reattach it but cannot. Wendy offers to sew it on. We know that a shadow cannot be detached from the person who casts it. Such things only happen in the world of fantasy.

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Various quests for the historical Jesus that are stripped of Christian reference, try to prevent Jesus jumping over his own historical shadow. Such things can only belong to the imaginative world of Peter Pan! Resurrection and seeing Jesus Christ in the light of faith is the premise for all New Testament writings in which Jesus of Nazareth does leap his own historical and cultural shadow.

Jesus cannot be comprehended merely by evaluating within sociological criteria, the unique shadow he cast in Galilee two millennia ago. Any such quest for the “real” Jesus is to grasp at the projections of scholars and journalists. His historic uniqueness is only conveyed as crucified and risen Lord of a new community—as a focus of faith and life in the Spirit. This is more than history or sociology can recognise and convey.

Without the faith of early Christians, there would be no relay of testimony concerning Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus would probably have remained unknown among the thousands of people disposed anonymously by the Romans.

Any quest for Jesus without Christ is yet to encounter the reality of resurrection and its engagement by faith in which Jesus leaps his own historical shadow to be present in every time and place of subsequent history. To relegate this possibility to the world of Peter Pan is to miss this crucial point of New Testament witness and chase mere shadows instead.

Separated from Christ, Jesus is also separated from Christian faith and its testimony to him. Who then, attempts to construct the historical person of Jesus while denying the unique testimony to his historical reality in Christian witness? Who attempts to divide one from the other, historical person from the only community—the Christian community—that remembered him?

The quest for Jesus without Christ is not a new phenomenon. It gained significant momentum during the nineteenth century. This quest was often driven by a desire to articulate Christian theology that would be acceptable to contemporary life, in which historical facts were not to be confused with a mythic overlay characteristic of the ancient world. While this method was applied to ancient history in general, it was also applied to biblical writings.

The most significant and assumedly mythic aspects of gospel testimony were that God was in Christ reconciling the world and in Christ there is a new creation. Without these, Jesus was whittled down to a focus of historical data and ideals that would correlate with modern perspective in its inability to accept the crucial miracles of incarnation and resurrection. Everything was laundered within the suppression of these two claims of Christian testimony.

Jesus without Christ is Jesus without claims that would identify him as messiah of promise, anticipation and fulfilment in biblical testimony. Proposals of Jesus without Christ could only yield a figure akin to Socrates. Other possibilities, such as a political revolutionary, a romantic genius with ethical flair or a religious mystic were conjectured. In the divorce of Jesus from Christ, New Testament testimony was discarded for a “fifth gospel”—virtually a “fifth column” within Christian faith—constructed according to each author’s inclination and perspective.

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The nineteenth century quest for the real Jesus without Christ ended early in the twentieth century, significantly through the influence of Albert Schweitzer who showed that in the proliferation of Jesus profiles, each was constructed according to the author’s own milieu and perspective. For Schweitzer, Jesus was too enigmatic for any such profile to circumscribe him for our assimilation. Jesus came from a time and culture that expected the end of the age; Jesus who preached the imminent reign of God within this horizon, proved to be an intractable stranger to our own time.

Schweitzer effectively dampened desire to reconstruct the real Jesus according to “modern” assumptions. Scholars took an interest in the formation of gospel preaching about him instead, yet this led to some extreme expressions of disinterest in Jesus altogether. Jesus without Christ and Christ without Jesus are both cul-de-sacs.

The quest to secure Jesus without Christ persists as a popular ideal. Why is there a desire to establish a distinction between Jesus of Nazareth and Christ as risen Lord, between Jesus as a moral sage and Jesus Christ of Christian faith? This is ultimately a faith issue.

Any attempt to divorce Jesus from Christ is either explicitly or implicitly hostile to Christian gospel. Explicit hostility is easy to recognise. Implicit hostility is masked by many disguises.

Explicit divorce of Jesus from Christ reflects an attempt to retrieve Jesus for humanity without Christian interpretation. Jesus is an exemplary human whose views and actions should be made known, engaged and integrated into a range of human resources toward personal and social wholeness. This might appear to be reasonable. It replicates the old quests that sought Jesus only as he could be approved and integrated into our horizon and values.

Implicit divorce of Jesus from Christ occurs where faith in Jesus Christ is no longer relevant. This can occur in ministry or theological contexts where personal engagement has shifted to some other form of belief, such as a commitment to religious equivalence in which unique Christian claims are superfluous or merely symbolic. Belief in human change by political means, rather than by transforming faith in Jesus Christ, will also render specific Christian claims superfluous. These are two prominent reasons for an implicit divorce of Jesus from Christ.

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Gospel testimony resists configurations of Jesus according to our own projections and preferences, whether as a celebrity icon, a partisan zealot or a benign religious symbol. In the gospels, we encounter Jesus Christ as the living word of God—confronting our assumedly plausible perspectives on life and offering life-giving reality instead. With authority, he calls humans to follow as one who could also command all creation. Whether assuming the very prerogative of God to forgive or to create, everywhere in gospel testimony he generates a question: “Who then is this?”

Water is without shape. It must be contained within some form otherwise it dissipates in complete relinquishment to gravity. For this reason, in Scripture, water is often symbolic of negation and dissipation into nothingness. Combined with the wind, which is without tangible source and destiny, a stormy sea is both formless and chaotic. Together, frenzied wind and water impose a dramatic portrayal of potential destruction.

The gospels’ Stilling of a Storm alludes to the LORD commanding the sea and overcoming chaos to save life from sinking into oblivion—that is, turning to water—an image of fear. The story is about power over death and nothingness, for like water, decaying flesh ultimately seeps into the earth.

“Who then is this, who commands even wind and water, and they obey him?” Told three times, the story’s central focus is elsewhere confessed in the New Testament—Christ the Lord of life in whom all things cohere. This story invokes the creative and saving reality of God in the presence of Jesus who summoned faith from disciples. In risen presence to every generation, he continues to call disciples to faith in him. Merely to have opinions about Jesus of Galilee without faith in Jesus as Christ is to risk living in a chaos of contradictions that threatens to engulf human existence.

Reference: Albert Schweitzer Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906); The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1910)