(WR) Christianity as a Response to Jesus

Why should an intellectually rigorous historical reconstruction of Jesus matter to the theology of Christianity or the lives of Christians?

Since the foundings of Christianity as clusters of Jewish sects and Greek neighborhoods in the first century, every Christian, and every Christian community, has been faced with the fundamental question of the life, work, and death of Jesus of Nazareth, and how to respond to it. Theologically, as well as in everyday life, the histories of Christianity's many strands wholly consist in the working-out of this relationship.

Christian responses to Jesus have been persistently various and often contrary. Was Jesus an apocalyptic messiah? A social critic? A magician? The son of God? A rabble-rouser? Was he resurrected after his death, and if so does this mean his body came back to life, or does it mean something else? Was he an avatar of God, projected like a hologram into first century Palestine, or a flesh-and-blood person with desires, doubts, and fears? All these and many more have been claimed for him.

If to be a Christian in any time is, at a minimum, to take seriously the need to respond to Jesus, then of course one must  choose for oneself among many competing options for how to respond. To take uncricitally the word of any specific theological or traditional view of Jesus, however, would be to abdicate this most fundamental query:  Who and what was Jesus and what (if anything) does this mean for our own lives? Thus, perhaps ironically, we must go outside particular theological interpretations, and behind traditional narratives, to find what we can reasonably know about Jesus' life, work, and death before we are in a position to decide how, or whether, to respond.

In this sense, the rigorous and ongoing systematic reconstruction of Jesus and his time is not an antiquarian curiosity or a threat to the spirit of the religion (though it may at times threaten specific political power blocs and dogmatic ideologies within the churches). It is, rather, an indispensable basis for Christianity as a living practice.