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Assuming that there existed a historical Jesus, or at least a figure upon whom the biblical stories are based, who was he and what was he like? Questions about a historical Jesus and what the "original" Christianity was like have preoccupied philosophers, historians and theologians for centuries. In the past few decades, however, that interest has only increased, with much more work being done by scholars and appearing in the mass media purporting to discover who the "true" Jesus really was.
Yet all these accounts tend to be rather different. They can't all be Jesus - so we are left with an embarrassment of riches. There are, quite simply, too many Jesus figures running around. If you look at the books written by liberal Christian theologians about Jesus, for example, you'll find a bewildering array of Jesuses with all sorts of agendas, ideas, and personalities.
Who was this Jesus supposed to be? A political revolutionary? A religious dissident? Maybe a quiet mystic whose life got blown out of proportion? Perhaps he was a cynic philosopher, or just a nobody who got confused with someone else?
All of these theologians are ostensibly trying to get at some sort of 'root' - a truth about Jesus unvarnished by mythology and time. But what's amazing is that they keep coming up with a Jesus that looks like them.
None of these writers seems to come up with the sort of Jesus that Albert Schweitzer did: one which is embarrassing. Why is that? As Robert Price has described it, each of these attempts is the author's own Christology - not unlike the original gospels themselves. They are an effort to get to the heart, not of who Jesus was or might have been, but instead to the heart of what the figure of Jesus means to the writer.
But no one really sees this. Instead, they imagine that there was indeed some real figure behind it all. This person was so dynamic that he gave rise to a variety of very different movements and religious traditions which were, in turn, brought back together to form the gospels and inspire other New Testament writings.
Two recent books explore this situation from two different and interesting perspectives. The first is Charlotte Allen's The Human Christ: The Search for the Historical Jesus. Allen goes through several hundred years of attempts to search for the 'historical' Jesus, and explains how each attempt has revealed more about the writer and the intellectual fads of the era than has been revealed about Jesus. This is not to say that such quests are wrong - but that they should be embarked upon or relied upon with caution.
The second is Philip Jenkins' Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way. Jenkins explores the increasing reliance upon "hidden" or "lost" gospels as a basis for understanding the earliest Christian communities and Jesus' message. According to Jenkins, these gospels were not included in the canon for good reasons and they reveal very little - except about the expectations and ideology of those attempting to use them.
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