1. Historical Jesus

1. The Historical Jesus and Christian Theology* (Originally published in Sewanee Theological Review 39, 1996. Reproduced by permission of the author.) N. T. WRIGHT The quest for the historical Jesus began as a protest against traditional Christian dogma, but when the supposedly ‘‘neutral” historians peered into the well, all they saw was a featureless Jesus. Even when scholars decided that other biblical figures—John the Baptist, the evangelists, Paul, the “Q” people, and so on—were at home in a richly-storied and symbolic world. Jesus himself was not allowed to act symbolically, to criticize his contemporaries, to think theologically, to reflect on his own vocation, or to evoke any of the various meta-narratives with which his Jewish world was replete. At this point objectivist historiography begins to eat its own tail; it has now decided that it dislikes the taste, which is hardly surprising.