Good points from John which I think conclusively answer beliefs some (not myself) Christians may have that moral ideas and equality were absent pre 30-33AD.I've appreciate both standpoints in this Blog! I think the source of Jesus' & Paul's beliefs has to be founded in OT theology due to their context which was most certainly Jewish?

(James Thompson, on "Atheism and the Good Life")

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The Quest for the Historical Jesus  - Part II
From the Enlightenment to Today
John Dickson

The historian, theologian, musician and physician – Albert Schweitzer, single-handedly overturned the strident scepticism of Enlightenment scholars such as Reimarus and Wrede. Schweitzer’s 1906 volume The Quest of the Historical Jesus demonstrated that the portraits of Jesus offered by the supposedly objective historians of the previous two hundred years were basically ‘projections’ of what they themselves believed to be the ethical ideal. The characterization of Jesus as a simple, noble teacher, for instance, does not arise from the evidence, he argued, but is a construct born of the humanism of the Enlightenment. Such a Jesus is a figment of the scholarly imagination or, as Schweitzer himself put it, ‘a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical gab.’  Once Schweitzer had made the point, it was impossible to read Enlightenment scholarship without seeing projection on every page.

The Second Quest: the 20th-century recovery
After Albert Schweitzer there was almost fifty years of conspicuous silence on the subject of the historical Jesus. Between 1906 and 1953 the topic received very little attention in academic circles. The Enlightenment confidence on the matter had been crushed, and no one quite knew what to do with an ‘apocalyptic Jewish prophet’.

Karl Barth (1886-1968) and Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976)

 Theologians during this period of hiatus tended to approach the Gospels in an a-historical way, almost as if the events of 5 BC—AD 30 were peripheral to Christian faith and life. Jesus had died, of course.

No one doubted that. Indeed, for theological giants like Karl Barth and Rudolf Bultmann the death of Jesus is just about all that mattered for theology. Things like Jesus’ birth and healings—and even his teaching—were thought to be inconsequential for modern faith.

For Bultmann, especially, the really important thing about the Jesus story is that behind the ‘mythical garb’ lies a divine call to an existential decision—to say ‘yes’ to God. 

If that sounds a little esoteric, remember, the 1920s-40s were the highpoint of the philosophy of Existentialism.  Looking back on this retreat from history the German scholar Günther Bornkam opened his 1956 volume with this rather wry observation:

In recent years scholarly treatments of Jesus of Nazareth, his message and history, have become, at least in Germany, increasingly rare. In their place there have appeared the numerous efforts of theologians turned poets and poets turned theologians.
  Things like Jesus’ birth and healings—and even his teaching—were thought to be inconsequential for modern faith.
 
 

The ‘New Quest’ of Ernst Käsemann (1906-1998)

It was only a matter of time, however, before the pendulum began to swing back (slowly) to a renewed appreciation of historical questions about Jesus. And it was one of Bultmann’s most famous students who got the ball rolling again.

In 1953 Ernst Käsemann , a professor in Gottingen (moving later to Tübingen), gave a lecture titled ‘The Problem of the Historical Jesus’ in which he raised a question which over the last 50 years has received an increasingly positive answer.
Does the church’s image of the crucified and risen Christ find any grounding in the life and teaching of the earthly Jesus? Put another way, how much of the Gospels’ pre-Easter story supports Christianity’s post-Easter faith? It was a modest question but it signalled the rise of a more measured and productive approach to the question of Jesus.

The movement inspired by Käsemann is often called the ‘New Quest’ or ‘Second Quest’ for Jesus. It includes such significant names as Günther Bornkam, Norman Perrin and Ernst Fuchs. 

Following Käsemann these scholars devised rigorous tests for working out what is ‘historical’ in the Gospels and what is not. One such test is called the ‘criterion of dissimilarity’ and it highlights something of the character and limitations of this new quest (which in some ways continues today).
  … how much of the Gospels’ pre-Easter story supports Christianity’s post-Easter faith?
 
 

The criterion of dissimilarity

The criterion of dissimilarity states that only things in the Gospels that are different from both Judaism, on the one hand, and the early Christian church, on the other, can be confidently said to have come from Jesus. The logic went like this: teachings of Jesus with strong parallels in Judaism could easily, so it was thought, be the result of the Gospel writers trying to make Jesus fit with the Jewish culture of their day; and teachings of Jesus with strong parallels in early church practice could be attempts to justify certain ecclesiastical traditions by having Jesus say it first. Hence, only things that are doubly dissimilar (from Judaism and Christianity) reliably come from Jesus.

Let me offer two examples of how this test is thought to sift out the ‘historical’ from the ‘unhistorical’ in the life of Jesus.

Jesus famously insisted that we must not swear oaths; instead, our ‘yes’ should mean yes and our ‘no’ no.  This teaching is radically different from Judaism in the first century and the later practice of the early church—both continued to affirm the use of oaths. Since it is unlikely that the Gospel writers would invent something so dissimilar from Jewish and Christian culture, this teaching is regarded as authentic.

Now for a negative example: The famous Last Supper of Jesus obviously has strong affinities with the church’s later Lord’s Supper ritual. It may therefore be an invention designed to ground a later ceremony in the life of Christianity’s founder. It also has a lot in common with the Jewish Passover festival, the highpoint of the Jewish calendar. Perhaps, then, the Gospels are simply trying to make Jesus sound more Jewish at this point. The Last Supper is thereby called into question by the criterion of dissimilarity.

Contemporary scholars have severely criticized this particular test for historicity. For one thing, suggesting that something is authentic only if it was not picked up by the early church, assumes that Jesus had no lasting impact on his followers. This is plainly ridiculous. Author after author in the New Testament affirms Jesus as the foundation of the Christian life. 

Just as strangely, the suggestion that ‘Jewish sounding’ teachings are unhistorical ignores one of the most obvious details of Jesus’ life. He was a Jew living in Jewish Palestine.

How could the historical Jesus not have sounded Jewish! The harshest criticism comes from the pen of the great Jewish scholar Professor Geza Vermes of Oxford University:
  … suggesting that something is authentic only if it was not picked up by the early church, assumes that Jesus had no lasting impact on his followers.
 
 

  How, then, can anyone imagine that a saying of Jesus, in order to be authentic, had to distance itself from every known expression of ‘Jewish morality and piety’? Such an angle of approach is quite close to the old-fashioned anti-Semitic attitude according to which the aim of Jesus was to condemn and reject the whole Jewish religion.
 
 

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