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Almost a century ago, the scholar-turned-medical-missionary Albert Schweitzer published a little bombshell of a book with the bland title of The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906; reissued this year in paperback by the Johns Hopkins University Press). Schweitzer reviewed the history of critical studies of the life of Jesus, starting with the early eighteenth-century skeptic Hermann von Reimarus and concluding with the late nineteenth-century liberal theologian William Wrede. The central argument of Schweitzer's book at the opening of the twentieth century is startlingly appropriate also at its end.

Scholar after scholar, Schweitzer contended, had looked for Jesus down the deep well of history and had seen instead the scholar's own reflection. Some writers on Jesus marshaled impressive intellectual tools, from archaeological research to literary analysis, from comparative studies of Near Eastern religions to examination of talmudic materials. Others relied on personal intuition, perhaps a journey or two to the Holy Land, and vivid imagination to construct their own "lives of Jesus." But in almost every case, Schweitzer concluded, two centuries of supposedly rigorous investigation had produced a wide range of portraits of Jesus, each of which bore a suspicious resemblance to the artist and none of which was conclusive.

Charlotte Allen has come to the same conclusion after almost another century of biblical scholarship. In her new book, The Human Christ: The Misguided Search for the Historical Jesus (Free Press), she begins by surveying early Christian understandings of Jesus, and then takes up her story proper with eighteenth-century Enlightenment inquiries into the "human" Jesus—that is, the "real" Jesus stripped of the superstitions and myths that had attached to him somehow over the centuries. Drawing her narrative up virtually to the present—yes, the Jesus Seminar appears, as do other contemporary scholars—Allen's rather lightly argued verdict is Schweitzer's redux: so-called critical examinations of the Gospels in search of Jesus over more than three centuries have been typically uncritical of the author's own governing biases and have resulted, time after time, in the projection of one's own ideals onto the figure of Jesus of Nazareth.

Skeptics dismiss Jesus as a lunatic, a charlatan, a troubled poet, or an impotent revolutionary—or embrace him as an ironical, detached, innocuous fellow such as they see themselves to be. Rationalists who do not discard him discover him to be logical, sensible, and practical. Liberals admire him as idealistic, brave, kind, and wise. Romantics extol him as passionate, vital, and free. Reformers revere him as bold, visionary, impatient, and forceful. Some modern Jewish scholars find Jesus to be, in fact, a pretty good Pharisee (while Paul, the ex-Pharisee, turns out to be the troublemaker who actually started the Christian religion).

The worst kind of scholarly self-indulgence is revealed in Allen's painstaking account of two centuries of "lives of Jesus" that share one damning trait: whenever the historical evidence fails to fit the preconceived theory, the evidence has to give way. Books of the New Testament are assigned earlier or later dates of composition and to this or that author in order to conform to somebody's scheme of how early Christianity developed. At the end of the nineteenth-century, the eminent scholar Martin KŠhler—no friend of orthodoxy—condemned the entire life-of-Jesus movement as having contributed virtually nothing to the store of historically reliable knowledge about Jesus. And many observers of the Jesus Seminar today see a similar dynamic at work in their deliberations: since "we" already "know" what Jesus typically said or did on the basis of our "study" of hypothetical documents such as "Q" or "proto-Luke," or our reading back of Jewish or Gnostic texts from centuries later, then we can confidently assess the veracity of this or that report of a saying or action of Jesus. Yeah, sure.

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December 7 1998, Vol. 42, No. 14