John P. Meier, «The Present State of the ‘Third Quest’ for the Historical Jesus: Loss and Gain», Vol. 80 (1999) 459-487

Despite the questionable method and positions of the Jesus Seminar, the third quest for the historical Jesus has resulted in seven notable gains as compared with the old quests. (1) The third quest has an ecumenical and international character. (2) It clarifies the question of reliable sources. (3) It presents a more accurate picture of first-century Judaism. (4) It employs new insights from archaeology, philology, and sociology. (5) It clarifies the application of criteria of historicity. (6) It gives proper attention to the miracle tradition. (7) It takes the Jewishness of Jesus with utter seriousness.

come to appreciate both the danger of overlooking what is said or implied about women in the gospels and the enrichment of the portrait of the historical Jesus that results from taking the presence and actions of his female followers seriously.

V. Clarification of the Criteria of Historicity

        A fifth gain of the third quest is the improvement in the articulation and use of criteria of historicity. When one looks back to the work of Bultmann, one is suprised at how intuitive many of his judgments about historicity were. For instance, one is almost embarrassed to read in his Geschichte his argument in favor of the authenticity of Luke 11,20 par., a logion that asserts that Jesus’ exorcisms make present the kingdom of God. Bultmann says that this saying can claim "the highest degree of authenticity that we are in a position to accept for a saying of Jesus" because "it is filled with the feeling of eschatological power that the appearance of Jesus must have conveyed"³⁶. The master skeptic of form criticism can be oddly subjective, not to say romantic, when evaluating the historicity of individual sayings. It is relatively rare that Bultmann argues the pros and cons of historicity at great length; usually a short pronouncement suffices. In the very act of studying Jesus’ authoritative pronouncements, he creates his own.

        The post-Bultmannians were usually more careful. In Ernst Käsemann, Günther Bornkamm, and their colleagues, we begin to see the more explicit articulation of individual criteria of historicity. A somewhat different approach, emphasizing more the arguments that could be fashioned from the supposed Aramaic substratum and poetic rhythm of Jesus’ sayings, was championed by Joachim Jeremias and his followers. Yet it is only in the last few decades that the definition and proper application of criteria have been debated at length and refined³⁷. Some criteria that were once widely appealed to have fallen out of favor, while others have been more carefully formulated. For example, an appeal to the presence of Aramaic vocabulary, grammar, and syntax in reconstructed forms