Bible Books: The Apocalyptic Visionary

The attempts by the Jesus Seminar in the 1990s to uncover the historical Jesus inspired some of the most heated, frustrating and irresistible debates of that decade. Now Dale C. Allison has entered the fray with a book, remarkable for its logical presentation and clarity of expression, that ranks among the best of the modern Jesus books.

Allison, associate professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Pittsburgh Theological Seminary, takes up the radical thesis at the heart of Albert Schweitzer’s groundbreaking study, The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906; reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1998). Schweitzer showed in an objective but nevertheless devastating sequence of analyses that those who have looked for Jesus have generally failed to find much more than reflections of themselves. And yet Schweitzer could not resist proposing his own interpretation of Jesus as an apocalyptic prophet.

There has recently been a renewal of interest in Schweitzer’s apocalyptic Jesus, partly in response to efforts by the Jesus Seminar and others to strip away the Jewish apocalyptic elements that are so prominent in the Jesus of the Synoptic Gospels. Scholars as varied as E.P. Sanders, John P. Meier, N.T. Wright and Bart D. Ehrman have taken up the Schweitzer approach, which insists on Jewish apocalypticism as the proper background and on the coming kingdom of God as the central theme of the activity and teaching of Jesus.