Caretakers, Critics, and Comparativists: A Meta-Analysis of Historical Jesus Research

Historical Jesus research is in a crisis that mostly goes unnoticed. It can be seen in the proliferation of scholarly Jesus portrayals that does not seem to near its end. Without realising it, historical Jesus research is trapped in a historiographical framework that it seems incapable of escaping from. In this article it will be argued that historical Jesus research is deceptively diverse in its conclusions but remarkably unifi ed in its historiographical approach and selfunderstanding. Both the diversity and uniformity are the result of the way in which historical Jesus research is conducted. The analytical distinction between caretaker and critical modes of inquiry in the study of religion is replaced in this article by a spectrum that includes caretakers, critics, and comparativists in order to comprehensively analyse historical Jesus research. Caretakers and critics limit the scope of investigation to the parameters provided by religions, whereas comparativists take their clues from crosscultural and interdisciplinary analytical tools. In a meta-analytical refl ection of historical Jesus research these categories are used to analyse the features of a scholarly debate extending over more than two hundred years. The proposal of this article is for a truly interdisciplinary mode of historiography in order to overcome the crisis