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Chapter 1 The Historical Jesus, the Death of Jesus, Historiography, and Theology In history, as elsewhere, fools rush in, and the angels may perhaps be forgiven if rather than tread in those treacherous paths they tread upon the fools instead.1 ~G.R. Elton When academics stand before an audience and explain a view of the historical Jesus—in this case how Jesus understood his own death—and when the historical Jesus case is made in the context of a theological discipline and education, the scholar may think he or she is walking on water, but the voices of truth are calling out to the scholar to watch each step. The waters tend to swallow. Shorn of metaphor, we might say these voices of truth ask three questions: What is history? What is a historical Jesus? What role is that historical Jesus to play in the theological curriculum? Each question needs to be answered, but particularly the third because very few historical Jesus scholars operate in a vacuum. Each makes meaning on the basis of the historical reconstruction. In the context of this monograph the questions are more focused: How did Jesus understand his own death? And, while not the specific focus of this monograph, What role is a reconstruction of how Jesus thought about his death to play in the theological curriculum and, in particular, in how one understands atonement? Various answers might be proposed now in a preliminary and imaginative way.2 One might say that Jesus did not think about his death in any profound sense and that, therefore, it was the early Christians who narrated a story that imputed meaning to that death. For some, such a chasm between Christian faith 3 I am grateful to Paul Copan for comments on an earlier draft of this chapter. 1 G.R. Elton, The Practice of History (New York: Crowell, 1967), 89. 2 See ch. 2, under “Some Highlights in the History of Scholarship.” and what Jesus actually thought would jar the foundations of faith; for others, the chasm might provide space for free thinking. One might, alternatively, argue that Jesus thought of his death in profoundly soteriological terms, even if undeveloped , and that the early Christians unfolded the theology Jesus gave to his impending death. And, however one answers these questions, many think that whatever answer one comes to ought to shape one’s theology, and some are bold enough to think that the church, or at least the enlightened within the church, ought to revise its understanding of faith accordingly. As I said, to come to terms with how Jesus understood his own death means we have to come to terms with three questions—about history, about the historical Jesus, and about the role of historical reconstruction in theological meaning -making. We begin with the first question: what is history? MODERN HISTORIOGRAPHY: A BRIEF TAXONOMY3 Historical Jesus scholars appropriate a historiography, though very few of them spell their historiography out.4 Those historiographies can be conveniently labeled postmodernist and modernist, with all sorts of shades within each label as well as a spectrum of how those historiographies have been used by historical Jesus scholars.5 The most complete historiographies by historical Jesus scholars 4 Jesus and His Death 3 For a good survey of the history of historiography, see E. Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, and Modern (2d ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). It is not possible here to provide full bibliographies on matters historiographical. The standard journal is History and Theory. The term historiography, which usually refers to the “history of historical studies” or (less often) to the “writing of history,” is frequently used in scholarship as shorthand for “philosophy of history .” When I speak of historical Jesus scholars operating with a historiography, I intend that to mean “a philosophically based, whether conscious or not, perception of what can be known about the past and how what can be known is discerned and represented.” Peter Novick’s well-known That Noble Dream (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 8, n. 6 states: “the once respectable word ‘historiology’ has dropped out of just about everybody’s vocabulary, and ‘historiography ’ has had to do double duty for both ‘historical science’ [in which I would include the “philosophy of history”] and descriptive accounts of historical writing [i.e., “the history of history”]. Strictly speaking, ‘the objectivity question’ is an historiological [concerns the science of history] issue, but all historians speak of it as ‘historiographical.’ Go fight city...

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