Whose Historical Jesus?

19. The Christ of Faith: Context

19. The Christ of Faith: Context StephenWesterholm One could almost wish that the quest for the historical Jesus were not an essential part of our job description. Sufficiently fascinating to provide scholars of Christian origins with an instant audience, it has, alas, also proved sufficiently baffling to puncture repeatedly any pretension that we might know much of what we speak. What pride can we take in belonging to an academic discipline that finds it agrees on virtually nothing? Can we even talk of a "discipline"? Yet how could we ignore the historical Jesus and feign competence in Christian beginnings? In the paper that follows, Barry Henaut reminds us of a plague that continues to bedevil the quest. Let me put his point in a still wider context. While historians of any period must work with the data at their disposal, the mere collecting of data, or the arranging of source material into a more or less coherent story, does not yield history. History is the product of the minds of the historians who, on the basis of their own interests, frame their own questions, then—much as detectives find clues on which they base a reconstruction of what happened—bring their own intelligence to bear upon their sources until they arrive at answers to their own questions. Those answers, although prompted by the data, are inevitably the "constructs" of the minds of the historians. Alas, as Albert Schweitzer demonstrated in his lengthy and devastating review of historical-Jesus research up to his own day,1 and as Henaut shows for more recent scholarship, supposed portraits of the historical Jesus, while inevitably the constructs of the historians' minds, have also all too frequently mirrored their creators' own ideals and convictions. The pitfalls are real, and Henaut does well to remind us of them. His thesis can be supplemented with a few (largely methodological) observations. First, Henaut has made it abundantly clear that historians' own predilections have often been imposed unnaturally upon the subjects of their histories. It is, however, worth adding that the biases of historians can also enable them to rediscover dimensions of the past to which the uninvolved are oblivious. The personal engagement of the historian in itself guarantees neither the accurate recovery nor the distortion of the past. Second, while historians may well be tempted to find their own ideals and convictions in their subjects, it is only fair to add that not all historians all the time have succumbed to the temptation. The agenda for historical-Jesus research 1 Albert Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben Jesu Forschung (Tubingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1906)—English translation: The Quest of the Historical}esus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, trans. W. Montgomery(New York: Macmillan, 1968). The Christ of Faith: Context 239 for the better part of the 20th century can be said to have been set by the insistence of Johannes Weiss, quite contrary to his own liberal Protestant preferences, that Jesus viewed his own career and times in apocalyptic terms. Henaut rightly points out that although theology has often exercised undue influence upon the work of historians, the latter has at times compelled the redirection of theology. Historical insights do occur—to those historians who refuse to ignore data that resist reduction to existing interpretations. Third, whereas good methodology does not necessarily result in good history, bad methodology necessarily does not. An example is the naive belief that a proper "objectivity" is brought to the quest for the historical Jesus when we confine our endeavours to isolating and paraphrasing the earliest possible sources. Historians are no mere regurgitators of data—even of the data they establish to be the most reliable. The delimiting and accurate control of data represents a precondition for historical work, not its culmination. Fourth, the work of historians requires that they formulate their questions, put them to the available data and then use their insights to arrive at hypothetical answers. The insights that any historian is capable of reaching are undoubtedly limited by that historian's knowledge and experience. To that extent the answers proposed by historians are necessarily the subjective product of their (very individual) minds. Appropriate "objectivity" is achieved not by trying to eliminate the inevitably subjective involvement of the mind of the historian but by submitting its insights and hypotheses to rigorous and public counter-examination: Is this the only possible hypothesis that explains the data? Is it the simplest of the...