Book Review

Book Review Dale C. Allison Jr., 2009, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans. ISBN-13: 978-0-8028-6262-4. Paperback; 126 pages; indices Reviewed by Don McLellan1 Dale Allison is an outstanding biblical scholar whose collaboration with W. D. Davies in the three-volume International Critical Commentary on Matthew’s Gospel2 set a new benchmark in synoptic studies. Then, following the death of Davies in 2001, Allison set about to abridge the work for a wider audience, in my view very successfully.3 While so many commentaries from the more liberal schools effectively eviscerate the gospels by their focus on critical theory, Allison’s Matthew unashamedly seeks to find the significance of this gospel for today’s Christian. As an evangelical I found it wonderfully accessible, and as a result I came to read The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus with considerable interest. The title alludes to a famous book written by Martin Kähler in 1892, translated in 1964 as The so-called historical Jesus and the historic biblical Christ, which remains a seminal work. In The Historical Christ, Allison opens his heart to reveal the struggle of a moderately liberal but committed Christian to come to terms with the massive divide between what historians assert about Jesus, and his personal need for Jesus to be the focus of his Christianity. This unresolved struggle is mentioned so often that it becomes almost depressing, though one must honour him for his honesty. A major reason for this lack of resolution is the stubborn fact that there is still no consistency among Jesus historians. Allison respectfully cites a virtual Who’s Who of Jesus historians of every possible stripe and from every generation. After all this, the only thing he can say for certain is that there are no certainties about the Jesus of history. Allison is troubled that the pictures of Jesus obtained by historical research are so numerous and so diverse that they can only lead to confusion. Undoubtedly he is right. A century ago Albert Schweitzer caused a hiatus in the quest that lasted nearly fifty years,4 but then it took off again.5 Allison’s observations about what has happened since, only emphasise that all the quests that have followed have left us largely in the dark, and probably more confused than ever. Indeed, a fair conclusion from Allison’s discussion is that the quest or quests are now dead, and this time there is no Käsemann to resurrect them. Every option, every possibility no matter how implausible and outrageous, has been proposed, examined exhaustively, and written up. The result is dozens of versions of Jesus and, contra the contrived efforts of the Jesus Seminar, no consensus. Early in the piece (p. 14) Allison asserts that theologians must choose one of three ways to deal with the historical Jesus. The first is to rely on what they may have learnt in seminary years ago, ignoring recent developments. This obviously is unsatisfactory. However, if they then seek to explore recent scholarship, they are left in a quandary as to which version of the historical Jesus they are to embrace. So most take the third option: they simply ignore the questions of history surrounding Jesus and present a Christianity 1

based on a Jesus who, according to Allison, may bear little or no resemblance to the one who actually lived. Thus the old division between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith continues to dog liberal theology. Allison finds himself unable to accept this, which leaves him perched uncomfortably on the horns of a whole herd of dilemmas. Evangelicals assert that there is a fourth way to deal with the historical Jesus. It is the way in which we have dealt with him all along: seeing him through the eyes of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; seeing a Jesus who accepts the accolade that he is the Christ, the son of the living God, who calls God “Father,” and who declares that the kingdom of God is at hand. Though some historians would despise this on the grounds that the Jesus of the gospels is contradictory and inconsistent, we may well respond that their versions of Jesus are much more so. When we read the gospels, we encounter the Jesus whom we have come to know personally, because he is risen from the dead. We have chosen to believe the Bible, and in believing we have encountered the living Christ. Curiously enough, Allison comes some distance towards these conclusions. He admits that “we can… often profitably argue about what Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John wanted us to think” (p. 103), but asserts that this may not be what Jesus himself would have wanted us to think. He is convinced that all efforts to rid Jesus of his apocalyptic baggage have failed; that Jesus really did believe he was coming again as judge of the earth, because that to Allison is the overwhelming evidence of the gospel material. As for eschatology in particular, my contention is that either a decent number of the entries in my catalogue [of eschatological material from the gospels] fairly characterize what Jesus was about, or the tradition is so full of mnemonic holes and fictional accretions that the quest is a vain aspiration and we should find some other pastime with which to amuse ourselves (p. 95).

So what is Allison to do? He can only do what liberalism always forces its adherents to do by the inevitability of its own logic, and that is to come up with yet another version of Christianity. In his case it is mysticism with overlays of what he considers to be the ideals of Jesus, including the ideal of a better and brighter future. As evangelicals we encounter the living Christ whose resurrection demonstrates that he is all-powerful, all-conquering. Allison’s mysticism means that he encounters periodically that flood of pleasant sensations, that feeling of oneness with the universe, of which so many mystics speak. And somehow, though he knows not how, he thinks that in so doing he is encountering Jesus, or at least something like him. In the end, the Christianity Allison espouses is scarcely any improvement on the old liberalism of a century ago, with its assertions of the Fatherhood of God, the Brotherhood of Man, and the Ultimate Triumph of Good over Evil. Little wonder he is frustrated. Little wonder he is sad. And when we consider how close he comes to embracing the Jesus of the gospels even if dimly lit, little wonder the evangelical reader is left feeling sad for him.

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Don McLellan is Campus Director of Harvest Bible College’s Brisbane campus Australia. He holds the MA (Studies in Theology) and PhD (Studies in Religion) from the University of Queensland, Australia. 2 W. D. Davies and Dale C. Allison, Jr., A critical and exegetical commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1988. 3 Dale C. Allison, Jr., Matthew: A Shorter Commentary. London: T & T Clark, 2004. 4 The search for the Jesus of history, a popular pastime in 19th century Europe, stalled after 1910 and the publication of Schweitzer’s The Quest of the Historical Jesus, which showed that the results to that point were minimal and inconclusive, not to mention contradictory. By the middle of the 20 th century, differentiation between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith had become normative in liberal schools, and theology was usually built only on the latter. 5 In 1953 Ernst Käsemann kick started a new round of quests with his essay “The Problem of the Historical Jesus,” in which he insisted that Christianity must rest on assured historical foundations. The New Quest was the earlier of these but its findings were scarcely any different or conclusive to those of the original quest. The Third Quest then arose, when a group of scholars decided to reject any data that tends to portray Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet. Allison believes that this flies in the face of the evidence.