Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

CHAPTER 19
Jesus Remembered
19.1. A New Perspective on the Jesus Tradition
In the opening chapters I reviewed the 'quest of the historical Jesus' as an ongoing
dialogue between 'faith' and 'history'. I pointed out that the roots of this
quest, and in effect the opening exchanges of the contemporary dialogue, can be
traced back to the emergence of 'a sense of history' in the Renaissance. The developments
and fruits of historical philology and textual criticism from that time
began the provision of a resource and base which is still fundamental to all scholarly
work on the New Testament and life of Jesus research. The emergence of the
model of scientific inquiry brought a rigorous methodology to historical study
and raised many hopes regarding the objectivity of historical 'facts' which have
in hindsight proved elusive, not to say illusory. But there is an equal danger of a
postmodern over-reaction to the older historicist over-confidence. A model for
historical study along the lines of 'critical realism', which recognizes the
dialogic nature of inquiry into that which may be known concerning persons and
events of the past, seems to provide the most promising way forward.
The study of the past as a hermeneutical problem also highlighted a number
of significant findings: the importance of recognizing a historical text as historical
text; the importance of retaining an active concept of 'plain meaning', at
least to the extent of endeavouring to listen to the text speak in its own language
and idiom; the importance of respecting the intention of the text (entextualized),
even when the questions being asked seek to draw other information from it or
through it; and the importance, not least, of acknowledging and allowing for the
nature of the hermeneutical process of dialogue between text and hearer/reader.
In addition, I argued that the source-critical findings of study of the Gospels
in the second half of the nineteenth century (John as a much less direct historical
source than the Synoptics, the two-source hypothesis for the Synoptics)
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