Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

CHAPTER 5
The Flight from History
The quest for the historical figure known as Jesus of Nazareth has been marked
throughout by tension between faith and history. Initially the faith in question
was conceived as dogma, the developed and formalized faith of the Christian
churches, perceived as forming a kind of suffocating layer which separated present
from past, or even a kind of prison from which the historical Jesus needed to
be liberated. At first history was seen as the great liberator. Careful historical research,
it was assumed, would enable the present to reconstruct the past clearly
enough to expose to modern gaze the real (historical) Jesus. And even when faith
returned to a more experiential and less cerebral form, it was still assumed that
historical inquiry would enable a fresh encounter between the faith of the 'historical
Jesus' and the faith of the present-day believer. The surprising confidence of
the neo-Liberal quest bespeaks the same liberal optimism, that the tools of historical
inquiry are wholly adequate for the job of finding a wise teacher behind
the theologized Gospel portrayal, behind the dogmatic Christ of classic Christian
faith. It is matched only by the same confidence in their ability to decompose
documents, not least later Gnostic Gospels, into definite compositional layers
and more 'original' tradition.
But there is the other side of the tension still to be considered, a second plot
line running through the story of the quest. History has by no means always been
seen as a positive force. And what it is that history, that is, historical inquiry, can
actually do, what historical research can actually be expected to produce, are
questions too little asked by too many of those involved in the quest. It is this second
feature of the quest, including the hermeneutical questions it has posed, to
which we now turn.
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