The Question: “Who Do You Say that I Am?”

The conversation begun in Caesarea Philippi between the Nazarene and his followers continues to echo into the present: “Who do people say the Son of Man is?” (Matt 16:13–20 / Mark 8:27–30 / Luke 9:18–27). His initial interlocutors suggested John the Baptist loosed from death, Elijah, Jeremiah, or perhaps a prophet of old. Subsequent respondents have proposed a millennial apocalyptic prophet, a cynic-like sage of subversive wisdom, or a revolutionary of social change. None of these answers will do, however, with any sort of ontological finality. Jesus responds: “But you; who do you say I am?” (Matt 16:15 / Mark 8:29 / Luke 9:20). The question, cast in the plural, expects a singular response both then and now. This is what makes seeking after the identity of Jesus so difficult: the pilgrimage is one of recognition and personal confession. Or, to appropriate from John Steinbeck’s classification of the Mexican sierra in his introduction to The Log from the Sea of Cortez, “technical objectivity” and “subjective related reality.” “The problem for seekers of Jesus,” of course, “is to sort out what is genuine from what is spurious” (p. 1).

The Book: Seeking the Identity of Jesus

This is the perplexing axis Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage works along with admirable deftness and subtly. The volume had its origins in the research initiative of Princeton’s Center of Theological Inquiry: “The Identity of Jesus Project,” a follow-up to “The Scripture Project,” whose proceedings were published as The Art of Reading Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003). The Jesus Project met twice annually for three years (2003 to 2006), and included a scholarly ensemble of specialists of Old and New Testaments, early Christianity, theologians, and church historians. All members, though of various ecclesiological and theological backgrounds, are “confessing Christians” (p. 4).

The book divides into three main sections—Sources and Methods, The Testimony of the Biblical Witnesses, The Testimony of the Church—with a chapter both situating and introducing the volume as well as a brief epilogue by the editors. There is also a helpful recommended reading section for those wishing to continue their pilgrimage.

Reviewing a book like this is difficult for many reasons not least owing to the limitations of space. Therefore we will focus primarily on the editors’ introduction as well as the first five chapters, which set a sort of methodological basis for what follows—though, of course, each subsequent chapter sets its own method with varying degrees of specificity.

The editors’ introduction orientates the project around three main themes: Sources for Knowledge of Jesus; Converging Visions of Jesus; and, Unresolved Issues (pp. 6–24). Though the editors see some value in extracanonical writings, the biblical witness and especially the four Gospels are the primary sources for our knowledge of Jesus and preservers of the early church’s memories of him (p. 6). These Gospels take the form of narratives, portray Jesus as an historical figure, and make referential historical claims. These texts, however, cannot be reduced merely to historical reports: they are works of proclamation and theological portraits of Jesus and are complementary testimonies about the complex figure of Jesus the Christ (pp. 6–8). Though the work of several contributors, the editors see several converging visions of Jesus emerge throughout the book:

1. Jesus of Nazareth was a Jew (p. 19).
2. The identity of Jesus is reliably attested and known in the OT and NT (p. 19).
3. The entirety of the canonical witness is indispensable to a faithful rendering of the figure of Jesus (p. 19).
4. In order to understand the identity of Jesus rightly, the church must constantly engage in the practice of deep, sustained reading of these texts (p. 20).
5. To come to grips with the identity of Jesus, we must know him as he is presented to us through the medium of the narrative (p. 20).
6. The trajectory begun within the NT of interpreting Jesus’ identity in and for the church has continued throughout Christian history (p. 20).
7. Jesus is not dead; he lives (p. 21).
8. Because Jesus remains a living presence, he can be encountered in the community of his people, the body of Christ (p. 21).
9. Jesus is a disturbing, destabilizing figure (p. 21).
10. The identity of Jesus is something that must be learned through long-term discipline (p. 22).

The editors recognize three persistent or unresolved issues: the relationship between historical reconstruction of the Nazarene with the “canonical” interpretation and the ecclesial rule of faith (p. 23); the unity and diversity within Scripture itself (p. 23); and the proper emphasis to be assigned to the role of experience and living encounters with the risen Jesus (p. 24).

William C. Placher’s chapter, “How the Gospels Mean,” gives hermeneutical focus to seeking the identity of Jesus in the Gospels (pp. 27–42). His argument is that the Gospels are neither fiction, myth, nor history of the modern sort (pp. 28–36); rather, they are “history-like witnesses to truths both historical and transcendent” (pp. 37–39). There is a sense in which the identity of Jesus must be freed from the formidable textual enclosures imposed by readings that are au pied de la lettre or a mere storehouse of ipsissima verba. The texts do not constitute the personhood of Jesus, they illustrate it (p. 34).

Robert W. Jensen’s chapter, “Identity, Jesus, and Exegesis” (pp. 43–59), “briefly consider[s] the general notion of identity” and its role in the theological tradition (p. 43). Jensen sees identities as “diachronic: an entity’s identity is what allows it to be identified by the same proper name or identifying description on different occasions without equivocation” (p. 44). One wishes for an interaction with Paul Ricoeur and his notions of identity as sameness (idem) and identity as selfhood (ipse) here, but to no avail. He settles with a workable definition: “an identity … is what can be repeatedly specified by a proper name or an identifying description, particularly with respect to what … may be called a person” (pp. 44–45). In any case, Jensen helpfully adds to the complexity of seeking after the identity of Jesus by demonstrating how one must consider both his human and divine natures (p. 56). The identity of Jesus is the identity of both the Nazarene and the second person of the Trinity. Therefore, “when we ask about the identity of Jesus, historical and systematic questions cannot be separated” (p. 47).

Markus Bockmuehl’s essay, “God’s Life as a Jew: Remembering the Son of God as Son of David” (pp. 60–78), follows Ricoeur’s proposal of identity as “a function of permanence over time” (p. 61) and suggests, “the identity of Jesus remains incomprehensible apart from the evangelists’ apostolic memory and testimony to the migrant prophet and Messiah from Nazareth ‘on a mission from God’ ” (p. 75). Therefore no “theological conscionable construal of Jesus’ identity can finally bypass this vital and personified commitment to the salvation of Israel, centered on the city over which Jesus lamented, and where he died” (pp. 75–76). And that this identity “did not change on Easter Sunday”; rather, the resurrection “confirmed this identity” (p. 77).

Dale C. Allison Jr.’s “The Historians’ Jesus and the Church” (pp. 79–95) demonstrates the “seriously defective” nature of the traditional criteria of authenticity (p. 79) while offering a challenging reading of memory, fiction-but-not-pure-fiction, and history in historical Jesus reconstruction. Allison’s chapter might ruffle some evangelical feathers, but this essay is an informative, challenging, and needed read.

Francis Watson’s “Veritas Christi: How to Get from the Jesus of History to the Christ of Faith without Losing One’s Way” (pp. 96–114) looks at the disjunction between the historical Jesus and early Church’s memory of him. Watson argues that while “the scope … and significance of this distinction still need to be clarified, the distinction itself is not the product of incoherent thinking or willful unbelief” (p. 101). Indeed, it is possible for the “scholarly construct” of the historical Jesus to be “reintegrated into the canonical image of the historic, biblical Christ” (p. 101), but not without first understanding the proper nature of this disjunction. Watson then ventures his thesis on the “dynamics of reception,” viz., “The theologically significant Jesus (the Christ of faith) is the Jesus whose reception by his first followers is definitively articulated in the fourfold Gospel narrative” (p. 105).

The identity of Jesus is then traced through various parts of Scripture, tradition, and ecclesial testimony. All display varying levels of excellence, but some are simply breathtaking. Dale C. Allison Jr.’s “The Embodiment of God’s Will: Jesus in Matthew” (pp. 117–32) and Joel Marcus’s “Identity and Ambiguity in Markan Christology” (pp. 133–47) deserve special mention among the Gospels as does the lively essay by Richard B. Hays: “The Story of God’s Son: The Identity of Jesus in the Letters of Paul” (pp. 180–99). The two essays on the OT—Gary A. Anderson’s “Moses and Jonah in Gethsemane: Representation and Impassibility in Their Old Testament Inflections” (pp. 215–31) and R. W. L. Moberly’s “Isaiah and Jesus: How Might the Old Testament Inform Contemporary Christology?” (pp. 232–48)—open inspiring vistas through which to seek the identity of Jesus, and Sarah Coakley’s “The Identity of the Risen Jesus: Finding Jesus Christ in the Poor” (pp. 301–19) is as challenging as it is brilliant.

One of the weaknesses of the book is in its omissions. It is hard to think of a volume on the identity of Jesus without the portrait of the Seer—to say nothing of the Catholic Epistles or the Johannine epistles. A more sustained conversation on what constitutes identity—a term fraught with potential anachronism—would have been helpful. Moreover, the inclusion of more ethnically and culturally diverse voices would have added texture to the volume. Though diversity alone is no safeguard against hegemony, it has real potential in staving off “group think.” There seems to be something slightly incongruous about tenured professors from prestigious universities spending their sabbaticals writing on a “disturbing and destabilizing” Jesus.

The jab at evangelicalism on pp. 1–2 is scoring points at best and a cheap shot at worst. One grows tired of the tawdry caricature of an evangelical Jesus “generally aloof from real-world affairs in the present,” and the “inspiration and authorizer of the American empire” (2). If this is your form of evangelicalism you are not an evangelical. If this is your critique of evangelicalism you should broaden your sampling to those outside the Falwell / TBN genre.

The Summons: History and the Interrogative Mood

Nevertheless, it is hard to think of a more worthwhile (and challenging) book than Seeking the Identity of Jesus for students or pastors to read on the complexities of Jesus’ identity. There is a persistent ecclesiological captivity of Jesus that needs to be matched by an equally persistent iconoclasm. If our reconstruction of Jesus is made to be another “one of us” who toes our party line, we have “another Jesus” (2 Cor 11:4), a Jesus who is no Jesus, a Jesus incapable of redeeming the world and ourselves. Nor can we leave Jesus in the past, a mere artifact of antiquity. The risen Christ refuses the shackles of the historians’ Jesus. History remains summoned in the interrogative mood: “Who do you say that I am?” Because Jesus is the living Jesus, the risen Lord present in the community of faith, the question persists. In answering this question the contributors of Seeking the Identity of Jesus have provided us all a great place to start.

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