Page "Quest for the historical Jesus" Paragraph 25

The Second Quest ( also called the New Quest ) was a brief movement in the 1950s to revive the quest for historical Jesus.

These scholars emphasized the " constraints of history ", so that despite uncertainties there were historical data that were usable.

Moreover they disputed claims of extreme lateness for the formation of the New Testament and generally accomplished a consensus of approximately year 70 AD, give-or-take a decade or two depending on a specific text.

Likewise they emphasized how the redaction of the New Testament resulted from a process over time, so that the New Testament included early textual layers, around which later and later layers crystallized.

The form of the Gospel of Thomas was often argued to corroborate the existence of the Q Gospel, whose hypothetical form would resemble it.

Hypothesizing about the existence of original source texts became useful for data relevant to the Historical Jesus.

These early texts continue to remain hypothetical unless future discoveries render proof of their existence.

See, for example, Gunther Bornkamm, Ernst Käsemann, and James M. Robinson.