Hur forskbar är Jesus?

Abstract

This inaugural lecture explores what aspects of the historical phenomenon Jesus can be investigated. The characteristics of Jesus’ (Aramaic) oral style have been carefully delineated, but the question remains whether this approach leads us to the ipsissima vox or verba Iesu. They could have been imitated and used for producing new sayings in keeping with early Christian beliefs. This is theoretically possible, but arguments support Allison’s statement that we have to choose one of two alternatives: either the Jesus tradition globally evidences what he said, or it is totally unusable as historical information; there is no intermediate alternative.

Misunderstanding oral tradition as infinitely malleable is one methodological dead end, and the criterion of dissimilarity is another (prejudice camouflaged as very-scientific-method, although never used in any other branch of historical research). When Theissen-Winter make «double similarity» the decisive criterion of plausibility, this is a sober reversion to ordinary historical method. The same could be said about Sanders’ 1985 demonstration of how to work with incontrovertible facts about Jesus. New Testament historians now break with the scholarly orthodoxy of historiographic presuppositions inherited from the Enlightenment, and recent scholarship has gone on to attempt using the self-understanding of Jesus as a key to grasping the «gestalt» of his aims and outcome in interplay with other actors, the core task of historical understanding.