Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.2
should be noted, were not expressions of unfaith: on the contrary, they were attempts
to retain faith in a world where science was becoming the established paradigm
for all knowledge and therefore provided the governing hermeneutical
principle. The fact that rationalisations of the reported miracles of Jesus are still
common in the literature and sermons of today reveals both the unease which
many Christians continue to feel over at least some of the miracles attributed to
Jesus and the continuing influence of the scientific paradigm.
Strauss accepted the same rationalist presupposition that miracles do not
happen: to postulate such occasional (arbitrary?) divine intervention would undermine
the fundamental principle of scientific inquiry, depending as it does on being
able to assume the regularity and consistency of the laws of nature. 30 But he made
the acute observation that attempts to retain the miraculous by setting aside details
of the account meant abandoning the text without making it any more credible;
and attempts to retain the historicity of the account by removing the miracle in
toto actually destroyed the whole point and significance of the account. Where the
text clearly intended to relate a miracle, what was gained by denying what the text
affirmed? The attempt to save the history behind the text was actually destroying
the text itself. Rather than attempt to explain (away) the history behind the text,
the primary endeavour should be to explain how the text came about. Where others
began by asking how the event related could have taken place, Strauss began
by asking whence arose the narrative of the miraculous event. 31
His own solution is summed up in the word 'myth', the first time the term
enters the quest as a major factor. For Strauss, 'myth' was an expression or embodiment
of an idea; in the Gospels, myth is the expression of the first Christians'
idea of Christ. It is the idea which gives rise to the account; the narrative is created
out of the idea. 32 Such narrative embodiments (myths) of ideas regarding
30. Defence of miracles from the side of faith have typically taken too little account of
what divine intervention would involve, given that the interlocking character of natural processes
and phenomena may mean that a butterfly's passage in South America can be a contributory factor
in a windstorm over Galilee. A subsequent solution has been to abandon the definition of miracle
as 'divine intervention', but this still leaves the theological problem of the seeming arbitrariness
of God, who can somehow 'manipulate' causes and effects to 'save' some but not others.
31. Strauss states his basic case at once (Life 40); good examples on 500-501, 546.
32. Strauss's clearest definition is given in his later A New Life of Jesus (1864; ET London:
Williams and Norgate, 2 1879): 'The Myth, in its original form, is not the conscious and intentional
invention of an individual but a production of the common consciousness of a people
or a religious circle, which an individual does indeed first enunciate, but which meets with belief
for the very reason that such an individual is but the organ of this universal conviction. It is
not a covering in which a clever man clothes an idea which arises in him for the use and benefit
of the ignorant multitudes, but it is only simultaneously with the narrative, nay, in the very form
of the narrative which he tells that he becomes conscious of the idea which he is not yet able to
apprehend purely as such' (1.206).
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