Anthony Le Donne has written a few posts on the paradigms shifts that can be observed in historical Jesus studies. In his first post he asks whether the distinction between the ipsissima verba and the ipsissima vox of Jesus is helpful or even accurate. In his second post he discusses the nature of the so-called “Third Quest” and whether we have entered a “post-Third Quest era.” The third posts proposes that a better designation that various “quests” would be pre- and post-Holocaust. This is applicable not only to the study of the historical Jesus, but Pauline studies as well, as exemplified by the emergence of various New Perspectives on Paul.
A Sea of Change in Jesus Studies: Fare Thee Well, Ipissima Verba!
Post-Third Quest Quirks; or, Have We All Stopped Medicating?
the archives near Emmaus 
Reblogged this on Cosmos the in Lost.
The last century of historical Jesus “scholarship” has been obsessed with recovering authentic bits of tradition that go back to the lips of Jesus himself. In terms of giving academics something to do, it was a marvelous success, but in terms of getting at the truth about Jesus, it was a big mistake. To me, the fact that this field has such little regard for the Gospel of John simply because it doesn’t contain bits of tradition that go back to the lips of Jesus renders the heretofore academic study of the historical Jesus worthy of instant dismissal.
Today there are many scholars who are looking for the historical Jesus. Not a new endeavor, but certainly with a great new impetus provided by these new sources. There are those who say, with John Dominic Crossan, that Jesus was a peasant Jewish sage of some kind, and there are others who say, with another group of scholars, that Jesus was, on the contrary, an apocalyptic teacher of the coming end of time. Both groups claimthat they can get to the real Jesus. And that if you read the sources right, you make the right selection of the sayings and the materials, you will find the real Jesus. I have doubts about that. It seems to me that history doesn’t get you there. It would be fascinating if it did. If we had videotapes, if we had transcripts. We don’t have those. We have… a series of refractions of some extraordinary person, seen from a variety of quite different viewpoints. We have fragments, we have sayings, we have impressions, we have vignettes. That’s what we have. And actually, as I read them, they’re quite different, and they’re quite contradictory. They may not be irreconcilable, but to me, it’s not satisfactory to go back to one type of evidence and say, “this is the real Jesus,” or,” that’s the real Jesus.” What I see is that as far back as history will take us, we see an enormous range of different people. Now there’s nothing really so dismaying about that. I mean, what if we saw the origins of the Christian movement as, in fact, a movement with strong disagreements, with powerfully different perspectives, people in conversation with one another struggling to understand what is the most important truth of their lives. Is that so different from the way we look for truth today?