Jesus of History vs. Christ of Faith

Against any attempt by pious Christians of a mystical or docetic bent to swallow up the real humanity of Jesus into an “orthodox” emphasis on his divinity, the quest affirms that the risen Jesus is the same person who lived and died as a Jew in 1st-century Palestine, a person as truly and fully human – with all the galling limitations that involves – as any other human being. Against any attempt to “domesticate” Jesus for a comfortable, respectable bourgeois Christianity, the quest for the historical Jesus, almost from its inception, has tended to emphasize the embarrassing, nonconformist aspects of Jesus: e.g., his association with the religious and social “lowlife” of Palestine, his prophetic critique of external religious observances that ignore or strangle the inner spirit of religion, his opposition to certain religious authorities, especially the Jerusalem priesthood.

Meier, A Marginal Jew, 1:199