Church and Society: The Laurence J. McGinley Lectures, 1988-2007

8. Historical Method and the Reality of Christ: April 2, 1992

8 Historical Method and the Reality of Christ April ,  The Problem of Faith and History A fter a period of relative quiescence the quest of the historical Jesus has again become a center of controversy. Two major contributions to the theme—John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew1 and John Dominic Crossan’s The Historical Jesus2 —appeared just before Christmas 1991 and were widely reviewed. They have provoked criticisms and counter criticisms, focusing primarily on issues of method. The quest of the historical Jesus is not an idle pastime. It began in the eighteenth century as a fierce attack on the Christ of faith. Throughout the nineteenth century its aim was to establish another Christ to replace the Christ of dogma. In the words of Albert Schweitzer, who wrote the classic history of the early quest, ‘‘The dogma had first to be shattered before men could once more go out in quest of the historical Jesus, before they could even grasp the thought of his existence.’’3 The assault on orthodox belief has not died out. Many historians of the present day share the same animus. Can believers be indifferent to the historical quest? Can they keep their faith intact while letting historians do what they will with the Jesus of flesh and blood? Can they let go of the historical grounds that have heretofore sustained Christians in their belief? These questions raise difficult and fundamental issues about what faith is, what history is, and how the two are related. 103 104 兩 Church and Society For purposes of this paper faith will be understood as a firm adherence to a total vision of reality in the light of God’s revealing word. For Christians that word comes to us preeminently in Christ, as he is known through the canonical Scriptures and the teaching of the Church. Faith involves a free, reasonable assent made possible by the grace of God, which enables us to discern and confidently embrace God’s revealing word. The Concept of History The concept of history is complex and controverted. In a very broad sense it includes everything we know, or think we know, about the human past, whether based on faith, on vague general impressions, or on methodical investigation. In a narrower sense history is knowledge derived by means of a recognized method devised to provide reliable access to the human past. The method involves a kind of detective work by which we critically use the available sources, including documents that testify to past events. Applied to Christian origins, historical method will seek to ferret out the earliest and most reliable reports about Jesus and from them reconstruct the sayings and deeds that may most plausibly be attributed to Jesus and his circle. There are no rules that automatically determine what accounts are to be accepted as accurate. Historians generally rely on rules of thumb.4 For instance, they prefer accounts that can be traced to early witnesses and those that are attested by several independent sources. They are also inclined to credit reports that present Jesus as saying and doing what the Jews of his day would have avoided and assertions that would be embarrassing to the early Church. This principle of discontinuity (as it is often called) does not presuppose that Jesus was never in agreement with the Jews of his day or that his character and doctrine were generally out of phase with the teaching of the early Church, but simply that it is more difficult to account for dissimilar statements as originating from sources other than Jesus himself. To give more precision to their method, some historians make assumptions of a philosophical character. According to a positivist view that was widely accepted fifty or a hundred years ago, history is a science Historical Method and the Reality of Christ 兩 105 analogous to physics or chemistry. It proceeds on the assumption that the world is a closed system in which causes and effects are connected by strict necessity. History, in that view, leaves no place for the unique, the exceptional, and especially not for events brought about by God’s direct activity. On positivist grounds many historians wrote off the Gospels as unreliable, insofar as they portrayed Jesus as a utterly unique figure, conscious of a special relationship to God, and working miracles by divine power. This positivist view, I shall maintain, is not convincing. The historian cannot...