Just give me (one more) Jesus…
Okay, just to make everybody even more confused, here comes the Jesus of Pope Benedict XVI (Ratzinger), adding to the pile of "Jesus-es" of Sanders', Borg's, Crossan's, Dunn's, Wright's, Theissen's….. and the list goes on…..
And it seems the words of caution from Bauckham continues to linger in the air:
There is a very serious problem here that is obscured by the naive historical positivism that popular media presentations of these matters promote, not always innocently. All history — meaning all that historians write, all historiography — is an inextricable combination of fact and interpretation, the empirically observable and the intuited or constructed meaning. In the Gospels we have, of course, unambiguously such a combination, and it is this above all that motivates the quest for the Jesus one might find if one could leave aside all the meaning that inheres in each Gospel's story of Jesus. One might, of course, acquire from a skeptical study of the Gospels a meager collection of extremely probable but mere facts that would be of very little interest. That Jesus was crucified may be indubitable but in itself it is of no more significance than the fact undoubtedly so were thousands of others in his time. The historical Jesus of any of the scholars of the quest is no mere collection of facts, but a figure of significance. Why? If the enterprise is really about going back behind the Evangelists' and the early church's interpretation of Jesus, where does a different interpretation come from? It comes not merely from deconstructing the Gospels but also from reconstructing a Jesus who, as a portrayal of who Jesus really was, can rival the Jesus of the Gospels. We should be under no illusions that however minimal a Jesus results from the quest, such a historical Jesus is no less a construction than the Jesus of each of the Gospels. Historical work, by its very nature, is always putting two and two together and making five — or twelve or seventeen.
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, p.4