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M*W: From The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby:
"The history of New Testament scholarship may be summarized as follows. Though some sporadic efforts had been made (by Jewish scholars in the Middle Ages and by English and German Deists in the eighteenth century) to apply scientific principles to the study of the New Testament, this was begun in a massive way only in the nineteenth century. The religious dogma of scriptural infallibility was abandoned, and it was fully acknowledged that contradictions and inconsistancies in the narratives should not be 'harmonized' away, but should be treated as the outcome of human fallibility. It was recognized that the books of the New Testament were derived from various sources, stitched together as best the editors could manage, and that the editors had been much affected by considerations of bias and propaganda in their work, suppressing or altering what did not suit their religious standpoint in the controversies of the early Church."
"The tendency of all this work was to uncover the fact that Jesus himself and his earliest followers in the 'Jerusalem Church' were very Jewish figures, who knew nothing of the doctrines which later became characteristic of the Christian Church (the divinity of Jesus, the abolition of the Torah, and the Crucifixion as a means of salvation and atonement taking the place of the Torah). As Julius Wellhausen said, 'Jesus was not a Christian.' The analysis of the editorial work in the Gospels showed that it consisted of the foisting on the original material (still discernible under the editorial revisions) of the later standpoint of the Church. The intensely Jewish standpoint of the early 'Jerusalem Church' (who did not regard themselves as having separated from a catastrophic split. It was F.C. Baur (1792-1860) and his followers of the 'Tubingen school' who stressed the Jewishness of the Jerusalem Church, though they did not fully realize the implications of this as far as Jesus himself was concerned."
"In the twentieth century, however, an ingenious way was found to halt this unpalatable trend. This was to cast doubt on whether the New Testament contains any material of historical value at all. The school of 'form criticism', of which Rudolf Bultmann became the leading exponent, denied that there was any underlying historical layer in the New Testament at all, since the narrative framework was merely a device for linking together items which served various functions in the life of the Church of the late first century and second century. This intensified scepticism served a pious purpose, for, by removing Jesus from historical enquiry, it was possible to prevent him from assuming too Jewish an outline. Instead of defending the traditional Jesus by attempting to reassert the editorial standpoint of the Gospels (a trap into which nineteenth-century apologists had fallen) it was not possible to defend an orthodox standpoint through the ultra-scepticism of declaring the quest for the historical Jesus to be impossible. All the evidence of Jesus' Jewishness in the Gospels could simply be ascribed to a phase of 're-Judaization' in the history of the Church: this too served a Church function. Though the historical Jesus was beyond a historical approach, he could still be reverently guessed at through faith; and the guess generally made was that he must have had some affinity with the doctrines at which the Church eventually arrived. So, by a tour de force, the ultra-sceptics found themselves thankfully back at square one."
"Bultmann himself, in his earlier work, had taken a slightly different standpoint: namely, that the historical Jesus may indeed have been a figure of wholly Jewish import (a Messiah figure raising a banner of revolt against Rome). This could not be proved nor disproved, but, in any case, it did not matter, because Christianity was based not on the historical Jesus, who lived and died in Palestine, but on the mythical Jesus, who was resurrected like the gods of the mystery cults and brought salvation through his resurrection. This Hellenistic myth removed Jesus from his historical connections, whatever they may have been, and turned him into a totally mythical figure of far greater spiritual importance, since religion is built on myth, not on fact."
