Quest of the Historical Jesus: The nineteenth-century movement that sought to separate and distinguish the man Jesus of Nazareth from the Christ of faith as proclaimed by the church. The proponents of this quest concluded that the “historical” (non-supernatural) Jesus never made any messianic claim, never predicted his death or resurrection and never instituted the sacraments now followed by the church. Instead the biblical stories that assign these acts to Jesus are nonhistorical “myths” that, together with certain philosophical and theological claims set forth in the NT documents, were projected onto him by his disciples, the Gospel writers and the early church. The true historical Jesus, in contrast, preached a simple, largely ethical message as capsulized in the dictum of the “fatherhood of God” and the “brotherhood of humankind.”1