Re: Why the historical Jesus matters

What do I mean by the ‘historical Jesus’? Well, I don’t primarily mean the Jesus whose existence and life can be described and validated by historical-critical method, for example. What I am getting at is a way of thinking about the Jesus of the Gospels that finds his significance both for biblical interpretation and perhaps also for faith in the framework of a complex backward-looking and forward-looking narrative that describes the concrete historical experience of a community. In a sense this is more a literary consideration than a historical one: What sort of story is being told? But I think it has implications for the question of historical plausibility.

This ‘historical Jesus’ is differentiated from the Jesus of much evangelical piety, for example, whose meaning may be contained in a quasi-Gnostic narrative of personal salvation or chopped into discrete statements of faith. I’m not saying that these other types of narrative are necessarily untrue or unhelpful, only that they are a very misleading representation of how the Bible tells the story of Jesus.

The phrase ‘biblical witness’ in the above context has to do with the manner in which scripture as a whole conceptualizes and gives expression to the reality of God. My point was that for the most part scripture speaks of what is ‘deep and universal’ in narrative terms, perhaps to the extent that many of the ‘beliefs’ that we have traditionally taken to be universal are actually narratively and historically contextualized, contingent. Peter sees this as highly damaging to contemporary faith. I’m not so sure, but I do think that we see scripture more clearly if we resist the pressure of our modern belief system to find universal truths, precepts, doctrines, perspectives under every rock and stone.

I agree with you that we are bound to reconstruct the narrative from a particular vantage point and that for all practical purposes it is the reader’s context that is determinative. That is why it seems in some ways more helpful to regard this as a literary exercise than a historical one - it keeps us from that presumption of scientific objectivity.

What I hear you saying at this point, however, is that the argument as it is stated above fails to take account of the fact that it is illusory to think that we can go back to some pristine, unadulterated, perspective-free version of the story and start again. Correct me if I’ve got this wrong. In principle I agree with you, but I would argue that our retellings always reflect some shift in our thinking, in our values, in our presuppositions, in our intellectual context - and some of these shifts are more significant, more fundamental, than others. So I think my response would be that there are elements in our present interpretive context, which I regard as one of quite drastic and disorienting transition, that are pushing us in the direction of taking the narrative-historical-eschatological shape of the biblical material much more seriously. In other words, the present context of interpretation does not neutralize hermeneutic preferences; on the contrary, it is the basis on which we make crucial decisions about how we are going to interpret.

To my way of thinking, it is this contextualization of the hermeneutical choice that keeps us from succumbing to the embrace of he modern paradigm. Just as biblical ‘truth’ is narratively contextualized, so are our own attempts to restate that truth, retell that story.