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Originally Posted by James The Least Well, Brunner was a literary critic

The method of historical criticism ensured that the teachings and life of Jesus would be situated within its historical context, which meant within Palestinian Judaism. The more research was done on first-century Judaism, the clearer it became that Jesus could be seen as an essentially Jewish figure whose teachings were in line with those of other Jewish sages of the time. This realization clashed with the central dogmatic claims about the uniqueness of Jesus and of Christianity. This clash created an identity crisis for nineteenth-century German theologians. Historical criticism had discovered an “ordinary” Jesus while dogmatics and German political identity insisted upon the primordiality and superiority of Christianity. How could a religion of unparalleled spiritual depths be founded by a man who was an ordinary practitioner of an inferior religion?— Racializing Jesus: race, ideology, and the formation of modern biblical scholarship / Shawn Kelley, p. 71

Was Jesus the founder of Christianity or a teacher of Judaism? When he argued the latter based on the New Testament, Abraham Geiger ignited an intense debate that began in nineteenth-century Germany but continues to this day.— Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus / Susannah Heschel.

Aside from the entirely frivolous contentions of a few, such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain or Walter Grundmann, that Jesus was Aryan, a much harder issue would be to come to any judgement about the impact of the widely prevailing image of Jesus as virtually a non-Jew held in almost all western centers of learning at the beginning of the century and for some time into the century. Certainly anti-Semitism was no special possession of Germany, though its roots seemed to run deeper there, and the countervailing forces provided by a C.G. Montefiore or an Israel Abrahams did not prevail in Germany. But the question of demonstrating a link between historical Jesus portrayals and the subsequent Holocaust would require a monumental investigation of its own and is so amorphous that the probability of success would be minimal. My own suspicion, merely to venture an intuition, is that the treatment of Jesus in scholarship, and thereby in churches as well, had an indirect influence in preparing people to think of Jesus as disconnected from Judaism and therefore to separate the two in making moral evaluations. The same could, of course, be affirmed of places other than Germany. The instinct of Jewish scholarship to attempt to reclaim Jesus was then not merely an exercise in recovering its own history, but a movement of self-survival as well.—The historical Jesus in the twentieth century, 1900-1950 / Walter P. Weaver, p. 256.

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Originally Posted by Toto I fully expect a mythicist branch of Christianity to pop up, if it hasn't already.

In any case, even if he were made into the abstraction of some contemporary Jewish current of thought, it would still be to the credit of Jewry, making it impossible to find fault with it; after all that, a little reflection always keeps bringing us back to Christ as a unique human individual ... And so it has been going on for nearly two thousand years: the Christ hanged on a tree, the Gnostic Christ, the Christ of religion, the scholastic-Aristotelian Christ; and it will not be long before the present non-existent Christ has just as much power, fame and originality in the world as all the earlier Christs. The Christ who was never born will never die, and will remain for ever as the great constellation in the heavens, outshining all our stars, causing all their fame to fade away! A disgusting originality! Is there nothing we can do against it? Are we so powerless, with our hatred and envy, with all our science? Thus, in its sickness, criticism passionately searches out similarities from every hole and corner of the world, to devalue this originality and strip it of its uniqueness.

You only need to peep into the Gospels to see that Christ's destiny is quite different from the Messianic expectations which are linked to him in these same Gospels, and by his own disciples! The entire Gospel of Matthew has the one and only purpose of showing how Christ's life conforms to the prophecies of Scripture; how different, therefore, how magnificent and wondrous is the life of Christ as presented to us by Matthew's Gospel! The evangelists believe in Christ the Messiah; no more than the critics do they notice that their Messiah Christ speaks about his Messiaship and his divine Sonship in a way totally unlike their Jewish national Messiah—which he never became. But what do the evangelists and the critics notice! The whole Jewish people observed that Jesus was not their Messiah, as do all Jews right up to the present day; the only ones who still fail to observe it are the critics.