The quest for a historical Jesus has failed spectacularly.  Several times.  Historians now even count the number of times.  With the latest quest (numbered “the third”) and its introduction of criteria, the concept of Jesus we’re supposed to believe existed is actually getting more confused and uncertain the more scholars study it, rather than the other way around.  Progress is supposed to increase knowledge and consensus and sharpen the picture of what happened (or what we don’t know), not the reverse.  Instead, Jesus scholars continue multiplying contradictory pictures of Jesus, rather than narrowing them down and increasing their clarity — or at least reaching a consensus on the scale and scope of our uncertainty or ignorance.  More importantly, the many contradictory versions of Jesus now confidently touted by different Jesus scholars are all so very plausible — yet not all can be true.  In fact, as only one can be (and that at most), almost all must be false.  So the establishment of this kind of “strong plausibility” has been decisively proved not to be a reliable indicator of the truth.  Yet Jesus scholars keep treating it as if it were.  This has left a confused mass of disparate opinions, vast libraries of theories and interpretations essentially impossible to keep up with, and no real efforts at improving or criticizing the worst and gathering the best into any sort of coherent, consensus view of what actually happened at the dawn of Christianity, or even during its first two hundred years.

I won’t recount the whole history of historical Jesus research here, as that has been done to death already.  Indeed, accounts of the many “quests” for the historical Jesus and their failure are legion, each with their own extensive bibliography.  Just to pick one out of a hat, Mark Strauss summarizes, in despair, the many Jesuses different scholars have “discovered” in the evidence recently.  Jesus the Jewish Cynic Sage.  Jesus the Rabbinical Holy Man (or Devoted Pharisee, or Heretical Essene, or any of a dozen other contradictory things).  Jesus the Political Revolutionary or Zealot Activist.  Jesus the Apocalyptic Prophet.  And Jesus the Messianic Pretender (or even, as some still argue, Actual Messiah).  And that’s not even a complete list.  We also have Jesus the Folk Wizard (championed most famously by Morton Smith in Jesus the Magician, and most recently by Robert Conner in Magic in the New Testament).  Jesus the Mystic and “Child of Sophia” (championed by Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and John Shelby Spong).  Jesus the Nonviolent Social Reformer (championed by Bruce Malina and others).  Or even Jesus the Actual Davidic Heir and Founder of a Royal Dynasty (most effectively argued in The Jesus Dynasty by James Tabor, who also sees Jesus as a kind of ancient David Koresh, someone who delusionally, and suicidally, believed he was sent by God and charismatically gathered followers; not surprising, as Tabor is also a Koresh expert, having been an FBI consultant during the siege of Waco, and subsequently authoring Why Waco?).  There are even recent versions of Jesus that place him in a different historical place and time, arguing the Gospels were mistaken on when and where Jesus actually lived and taught.  Or that conclude astonishing things like that he arranged his own execution to effect a ritual sacrifice to magically cleanse the land.  We even get confused attempts to make Jesus everything at once (or half of everything at once, since most theories are too contradictory to reconcile), for instance insisting we should understand him to have been “a prophet in the tradition of Israel’s prophetic figures…a teacher and rabbi, or subversive pedagogue of the oppressed…a traditional healer and exorcist, a shamanistic figure…[and] a reputational leader who brokers the justice of Yahweh’s covenant and coming reign,” whatever that means.

This still isn’t even a complete list.  As Helmut Koester concluded after his own survey, “The vast variety of interpretations of the historical Jesus that the current quest has proposed is bewildering.”  James Charlesworth concurs, concluding that “what had been perceived to be a developing consensus in the 1980s has collapsed into a chaos of opinions.”  The fact that almost no one agrees with anyone else should compel all Jesus scholars to deeply question whether their certainty in their own theory is really even warranted, since everyone else is just as certain, and yet they should all be fully competent to arrive at a sound conclusion from the evidence.  Obviously something is fundamentally wrong with the methods of the entire community.  Which means you cannot claim to be a part of that community and not accept that there must be something fundamentally wrong with your own methods.  Indeed, some critics argue the methods now employed in the field succeed no better than divination by Tarot Card reading — because scholars see whatever they want to see and become totally convinced their interpretation is right, when instead they should see this very fact as a powerful reason to doubt the validity of their methods in the first place.

Richard Carrier (2012. Proving History:  Baye’s Theorem and The Quest for the Historical Jesus, p. 12-14)