After the period of no quest ended in 1953 the second, and present, search for the historical Jesus began.  On October 23, 1953 Ernst Käsemann delivered a lecture titled “The Problem of the Historical Jesus.”  Käsemann was critical of the discontinuity of history and faith and that Jesus must be rooted in history to some degree to avoid docetism, which would allow Christ to be formed however the scholar wills.

In 1956 Günther Bornkamm wrote a book titled Jesus of Nazareth and, along the same lines, James M. Robinson wrote A New Quest for the Historical Jesus in 1959.  They argued that faith does not depend on history; rather, a certain amount of “pre-easter” history about the historical Jesus could be known and this was vital to understanding Christian kerygma.