Professor Scott McKnight ponders the end of the the so-called "quest for the historical Jesus":

Sitting on my desk is volume four of J. P. Meier's Rethinking the Historical Jesus. What began as a two-volume venture has doubled, and one or two more volumes are forthcoming. Volume one generated all kinds of conversation; volume four entered the market with barely a notice. Sitting next to Meier on my desk is Martin Hengel's Jesus und das Judentum, over 700 pages and perhaps the last volume from the titan of scholarship. Someone will translate Hengel, doctoral students will read it, professors will use it, reviewers will say that it's brilliant, an occasional pastor will find it useful, but in a decade it will all be forgotten. Why? Historical Jesus scholarship has come to the end of the road.

Two recent scholars have read the obituary for historical Jesus studies. James D. G. Dunn, in both the hefty Jesus Remembered and the slender A New Perspective on Jesus, argues that the furthest we can get behind the Gospels is to the underlying strata of Jesus as his earliest followers remembered him. That is as far as we can go. That is the Jesus who gave rise to the Christian faith, and that is the only Jesus worth pursuing. In Dunn's view, the "remembered" Jesus contains the faith perspective of the earliest followers of Jesus, and behind that faith perspective we cannot go.

Dale Allison, whom I consider the most knowledgeable New Testament scholar in the United States, is less sanguine and more cynical than Dunn in his newest book, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, which in my judgment plays Taps for the quest for the historical Jesus. After three decades of work in and around the historical Jesus, Allison sketches the variety of views about the historical Jesus and the supposed modern theory that if we put our heads together we will arrive at firm conclusions. Allison offers this depressing conclusion: "Progress has not touched all subjects equally, and whatever consensus may exist, it remains mostly boring."

We must be willing to ask, Whose Jesus will we trust? Will it be that of the evangelists and the apostles? Will it be the church's orthodox Jesus? Or will it be the latest proposal from a brilliant historian? Allison admits this about one of his own books on Jesus: "I opened my eyes to the obvious: I had created a Jesus in my own image, after my own likeness." He's not done: "Professional historians are not bloodless templates passively registering the facts: we actively and imaginatively project. Our rationality cannot be extricated from our sentiments and feelings, our hopes and fears, our hunches and ambitions." So, he ponders, "Maybe we have unthinkingly reduced biography [of Jesus] to autobiography."

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