In one of those occasionally serendipitous coincidences of blogging, three different posts today interlock.
- First up was Michael Bird on Fact and Meaning in Biblical Studies
- Then came Matthew Montonini with a quote from Mark Strauss on the real Jesus and scientific historical enquiry.
- Finally there was Ben Witherington fisking of a book by
a raving nut-jobproponent of the view that Jesus was a myth not a real person. (I wish BW would stop SHOUTING and use lower case).
The existence of idiots (certainly in the etymological sense of that term) overturning the whole discipline of history in the service of their atheist polemic (I assume God knows where Mr Doherty got the history degree Wikipedia attributes to him, but Doherty’s website isn’t saying) — the existence of such idiots is at least one reason why historical Jesus research should be considered of value. The question is whether it can serve more than either an apologetic (on the one hand) or corrosive (on the other) purpose.
Is Strauss right to claim however, that
The historical Jesus – defined as knowledge about Jesus which can be attained through historical research – is a subset of truth about the real Jesus.
I’m not so sure. The problem lies in the definition. Strauss defines it in a way in which few other people seem to work in practice. Historical knowledge about Jesus is not that hard to come by, and has informed many different views of Jesus. However, most people usually mean somewhat more than historically informed interpretations. Fitting that knowledge into anything like a coherent reconstruction is more than possible, but the diversity, to say nothing of the incompatibility, of the various reconstructions suggest that “the historical Jesus” understood as a person in history, is less a “subset of truth” and more a mishmash of evidence and prejudice.
Some of the problem is in the discipline of history, which is always less scientific than it likes to present itself as. Hence, I think, the importance of Michael’s musings about “facts”. Historical facts are not really detachable from historical narratives, and hence come embedded in meaning. That meaning may or may not be the best interpretation of the events being described. The narration of facts always involves interpretation, simply because of what is included or omitted in the narrative sequence, however impartial the historian / narrator seems (or intends) to be. Facts without narration (implicit or explicit) are fairly useless.
The historian’s job is partly the evaluation of data, partly the mining of data, and partly the combination and configuration of data into information. The best historians both account for the most data, and present a persuasive narrative that converts it to information. History matters, and, for those who believe in the incarnation, should matter, but it is less as a “subset of truth” about Jesus, and more as rounding and fleshing out of the story with the best available data. The story (and for the believer that includes the church’s story and one’s personal story) needs to account for the data and be shaped by it, but the story also shows what the data means, and why it matters. Only when narrative and data are in an ongoing relationship, can we learn any information at all.
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