David Bivin

There are many scholarly approaches to the life and teaching of Jesus of Nazareth. The TIME cover story, "Who Was Jesus" (August 15, 1988), illustrated this well. Each approach stemmed from a number of basic assumptions or presuppositions.

For instance, many scholars today feel that it is impossible to know what the historical Jesus really said. At the root of this pessimism lies the basic presupposition that an organized record of Jesus’ teaching never existed. The Gospels therefore are seen as distant reports of Jesus’ sayings, which were filtered through a long process of oral transmission within Greek-speaking congregations. The result of this presupposition is that, as theologian Rudolf Bultmann wrote in 1926, "We can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus."

However, scholars of the Jerusalem School of Synoptic Research have evidence, which suggests that Jesus’ sayings were recorded shortly after his death — and in Hebrew, the language in which they were probably spoken. Consequently the Jerusalem School begins its study with different assumptions, and is able to take a much more optimistic view of our ability to recover accurate information about the Jesus of history.

In forthcoming articles we will examine a number of the central presuppositions of mainstream New Testament scholarship, and compare them with those of the Jerusalem School.