andrewcriddle

FWIW Bultmann appears to have held that something like the death by Crucifixion of a controversial Jewish religious figure called Jesus, is all that Christianity requires as its basis in critical objective history.

Most Christians would require more, practically none would regard the death by Crucifixion as dispensable with.

Andrew Criddle

Chili

Maybe to Bultmann but it is the repeat performance of crucifixion and resurrection that keeps it together, ie. "follow me." Christianity doesn't know this and will drift away into splinter groups where they, while gazing upwards, will wonder what this was all about.

krosero

I'm not sure if Fr. John Meier can be classified as a liberal Christian; his work, a very large one at that, finds a Jesus who is very compelling -- leaving aside the question of whether his reconstruction is correct; it certainly is formidable. In any case his assumptions were not the liberal ones you mean. The liberal school of Jesus studies, if I can call it that, assumed that underneath Christian theology you would find a Jesus very much like them, a Jesus who was a teacher of loving ethics and not an eschatological prophet, still less a prophet who made great claims about himself -- a Jesus who made a good fit with the dreams of liberal modernity. Meier does not come out of that tradition and revives the old critique of the liberals' Jesus: such a man would not offend or inspire anyone (outside of academia), still less be regarded as a threat and crucified.

Meier's Jesus is non-supernatural; Meier will not attribute miracles to Jesus, and will only say whether or not Jesus was regarded, at such and such a point in the development of the tradition, to have performed a given miracle. He finds the so-called "nature" miracles to be post-Easter attestations, leaving us with a Jesus who performed, at most, psychosomatic healings (though he does not insist on that interpretation). This Jesus is non-supernatural, he's not the liberals' Jesus (instead he's very much a first-century Jew, in this case an eschatalogical prophet who makes great self-claims) -- but he's very compelling. Subjective opinion? Sure, up to a point. But he's not someone who underwent a mere accident. He was somebody with a mission that had difficulties and consequences.

If a model existed in which Jesus lived but he was neither an original teacher nor a prophet seized with a mission, you would indeed peel away the onion and find little to care about. Perhaps that answers your question. I'm not sure I know of any such model that is plausible. I find rather the non-supernatural models of Sanders, Meier, and Dunn to be more-than-plausible interpretations of the data.