MetaCatholic

In a comment on this earlier post, Peter Kirk said:

I am worried by your lack of interest in what actually happened, as a historical event. Sure, that is not all there is to the Christmas story. There is a place for “the challenging diversity that nurtures our encounter with Jesus”. But that encounter is nothing if Jesus is not a real person who was born in a particular way - one way, not four or two! And it is a legitimate exercise in history to explore what that particular way was. … Why do you reject so firmly studying these narratives as history, unless you actually believe that they are not history but fiction?

I want to begin with some very general comments. The first thing to note is that history writing is itself never the way things were. It is a reconstruction of the way things were. The best reconstructions, and therefore the best history, are those that construct the most plausible story, by which I mean give the best explanation for all the available evidence. E H Carr’s book, What is history?, which in many ways kicked off historiographical writing by practicing historians, opens with a discussion of what a “fact of history” is, and he interprets such to be a significant fact. The development of social history has (I think, rightly) rather moved away from that. Very insignificant things are also part of the raw data, and a plausible history will account for the general tenor of life and culture, and the behaviour of groups, as well as the acts of individuals. Good history turns more data into information than bad history. But even good history remains but a partial reconstruction, a story of the way things were, unless you’re a post modernist like Keith Jenkins, in which case it’s a story about the present, not the past.

At one level, Jenkins’ post-modernism might seem to offer some ways out of the traditional impasse between faith and history. After all, in all sorts of ways the modern discipline of history is not necessarily the best one for investigating the biblical material, because it is rooted in a world-view that operates in terms of social and individual relationships, cause and effect. It has methodologically no room for divine action. Philosophical and theological critiques of that world-view such as Jenkins’ might seem superficially attractive. They are not a million miles away from what a lot of Christians actually do in their Bible reading, nor from the kind of Bultmannian existentialism that does away with history as an irrelevant category for faith. However, to embrace them wholeheartedly is, I think, a form of Docetism. Nonetheless, Jenkins’ work is a salutary reminder that present perspectives and concerns, the world-view(s) that make sense now, shape the narrative reconstruction of the past. History is less objective than it sometimes claims. Post-colonial, black, queer and womanist histories illustrate the point. There may yet be room for a more satisfactory development of theological history than we have yet seen.

In the end, however, we all have to deal with sources. Our theories (or theology) may both determine which sources we turn to, and what we make of them. Some of the debates about Lost Christianities illustrate precisely that: for Ehrman and others, the catholic narrative has marginalised a number of sources which he wishes to value. We also have to determine how our sources might relate to one another: which are primary and which secondary, which generally reliable and which not, how do we date them, and how understand any potential bias? Our overall perspective will inevitably affect these decisions, as well as help determine the kind of questions we put to these sources in order to reconstruct our own historical narratives.

In the light of that preamble, I come to some of my responses to Peter’s questions.

• Our only first century sources for the story of Jesus’ birth are the gospels of Matthew and Luke. I am unconvinced that other claimed allusions like Mark 6:3, John 1:13, John 8:41 or Gal 4:4 provide any useful data. In assessing these sources, we also need to account for the absence of any other evidence.
• As I noted before, if we (on the Two Document Hypothesis) accept the independence of Matthew and Luke, we can argue for an earlier but nugatory tradition of a virginal conception, announced by an angel, leading to a birth at Bethlehem. Unfortunately for me, I have slowly ceased to hold that view, and believe Luke used Matthew. This is an example of how our overall theory of the sources affects our interpretation of the value of the evidence.
• My overall assessment of the sources is that both Matthew and Luke are generally reliable narratives about Jesus of Nazareth, within the genre of Graeco-Roman bioi. But the birth narratives provide the greatest example of discord between them, and Luke “after investigating everything carefully from the very first” (1:3) felt Matthew’s account needed almost completely re-writing. Yet this part of Luke’s narrative is his most highly stylised, and betrays little evidence of any sources. It is not clear whether either of them thought they were writing history at this point. Luke doesn’t seem to think Matthew was, and the contrast between his time references in these first two chapters, and the detailed reference at the beginning of chapter 3, may suggest that he didn’t think he was either.
• It might be possible to argue that Luke did know enough to hold that certain elements of Matthew’s story were based on earlier tradition, and incorporated those in his own narrative. Such an argument could best be described as slender, for it would also seem likely that this tradition (if it existed) was either not widely known, or not regarded as particularly significant (or both) within the early Christian movement.

In short, it is difficult both because of the nature of the sources, and because of their relationship to one another, to treat them as historical sources on this point. Nonetheless, the nature of historical investigation is limited and partial. I am content to make the credal affirmations about the virginal conception is a state of an historian’s agnosticism. I do so, mainly in the light of what I find implicit in the Lukan narrative, which is that God’s new creation begins not over again, but with God taking the stuff of his first creation in order to redeem it. The Spirit that once moved over the face of the waters of the void now moves over the waters of Mary’s womb. That is poetry, myth and theology all wrapped up together: I am unconvinced that getting worked up about the absence of sperm does justice to the purpose of the narrative.

I do not, in fact, think that it makes any significant difference in how I or anyone else encounters Jesus in prayer, word, life and sacrament. It is, in my view (though sharing some – and only some – of the same historiographical problems) of a completely different order from the resurrection, and I don’t think they should be coupled together simply because they are “miraculous”.The resurrection leaves historical footprints, which I think would be significantly different had it not happened. I can see no way in which Jesus’ life (as accessible to the historian) would have looked any different whether he was conceived in the unique way these gospel stories and creeds attest to, or in the normal way of all flesh. The question is simply not one historians can speak about.