Finding the Shards #18
When the time came to again take up the quest for the historical Jesus, however, more than questions about the influence of hellenistic religions and mythological language had to be confronted. A book had been written that created even more havoc than had the hermeneutical issue. This was Karl Ludwig Schmidt's Der Rahmen der Geschichte Jesu ("The Framework of the Story of Jesus"), a careful study of the way in which the earliest gospel had been composed. In his hands the Gospel of Mark fell apart and broke up into little pieces, for he was able to show that all of the connecting links between the smaller stories in Mark were of Mark's own doing. This study, published in 1919, effectively brought to an end the old quest for the historical Jesus with its desire for a biography and its unexamined assumption that the basic plot of the narrative gospels was essentially historical record. With the finding that Mark was responsible for the gospel plot, all that was left from the time before Mark were fragments of memory traditions, bits and pieces of oral lore, and perhaps a few collections of parables and stories that someone, for reasons as yet unknown, had hung together by theme. So the old dream was in trouble and new strategies had to be devised if scholars were not going to give up completely the quest for Christian origins. Three new strategies were developed that continue to be used by scholars today.