Abstract
The Next Quest for the historical Jesus must account for the broader study of religion, culture, society, cognition, and historical consciousness.
In this chapter, I identify and discuss a few important current approaches in religious studies that I believe to be underutilized in the critical study of the historical Jesus, and which accordingly offer potential avenues for future questing. To make the discussion more concrete, I will sketch how these approaches might be applied to one key source for the historical Jesus: the story of Jesus’s empty tomb (in Mark 16:1-8 and parallels)—perhaps at first blush an unusual choice for anything related to the Jesus of history, yet one that follows Fredric Jameson’s injunction to “always historicise!" In so doing, I find that visionary elements are far more extensive in Mark 16:1-8 than usually perceived, and indeed that visionary sources pervade Mark’s Gospel, furnishing it with many of its most significant episodes. The presence of extensive visionary experiences in the early Jesus movement introduces a radical indeterminacy to any Quest for the historical Jesus and invites consideration of the pluriform character of historical consciousness.