The Historical Jesus vs. the Jesus You Want to Believe In

This post is part of our “Voices from the Academy” series—an initiative highlighting standout content from members of the Biblical Studies Academy. Each month, we feature a few of the most insightful, thought-provoking posts from our community on BartEhrman.com.  The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Dr. Bart D. Ehrman.

Dr. Méndez’s next lecture will be about reconstructing Jesus, engaging the Gospels with an eye to discovering the historical Jesus. What I often observe is that most people are more wont to envision a historical Jesus who embodies their own ideals and values. When we're reading the narratives of Jesus we don't really do so with the aim of ferreting out the real Jesus.

Of course, for centuries, the vast majority of Bible readers were believers in the theological Christ, and uncritically equated the historical Jesus with the Second Person of the Trinity, and the vicarious sacrifice for our sins that Orthodox soteriology portrays him as. The quest of the historical Jesus didn't really get going until European scholars like Reimarus, Strauss, and Renan undertook it. Today, thanks to their opening the modern mind to the question of who and what the historical Jesus really was; and to the secularization of our culture, to our no longer being locked into Christological dogmas, it has become common among both scholars and laypeople to speculate about the first-century rabbi from Galilee whose death and purported resurrection sparked the birth of Christianity.

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To return to my point, I find that most of that speculation among those of us who are not trained critical scholars is highly biased toward our own values. For instance, among my fellow theological liberals, the image of Jesus as a paragon of love is quite popular nowadays. To a great many liberal Christians and non-Christians, the historical Jesus can be summed up as a lovely fellow who taught that we should love one another. Then you have someone like advertising executive Bruce Barton, whose vision of Jesus in his 1925 book The Man Nobody Knows aligned with his organizational and business-oriented values. For him, Jesus was a consummate organizer and advertising man who "picked up twelve men from the bottom ranks of business and forged them into an organization that conquered the world." Barton's book and reimagining of Jesus actually became very popular! And he isn't the only author or evangelist who's anachronistically viewed the historical Jesus through a modern market lens as a model of business virtues and a capitalist work ethic. And then of course there was the “muscular Christianity” movement that viewed Jesus as the ultimate incarnation of hegemonic masculinity! And so on.

Regardless of how out of keeping it might be with his life, ministry, and teachings, one's reconstruction of Jesus tends to be shaped by one's value system and ideology. Few of us approach the historical Jesus like proper critical scholars and strenuously bracket our own values and biases when trying to get a bead on him. I'm curious to hear from my fellow BSA members if they honestly think they're exceptions, that they're really trying to objectively reconstruct, and come to terms with the real Jesus and not merely constructing a Jesus to their liking? Of course, there’s also a case to be made for idealizing Jesus, if you’re more of an idealizer than a reconstructor (and realize it) please feel free to share your perspective too. I’m not against the idealization of Jesus, I’m just keen on distinguishing reconstruction from idealization.