Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §5.6
the climax for which Jesus looked was YHWH'S return to Zion (enacted in his
own return to Jerusalem and in the expected destruction of Jerusalem). 135 The issues
thus raised by Sanders and Wright are fundamental for any quest for Jesus
the Jew. They will be important dialogue partners in subsequent chapters.
Yet even as another group of historical critics set out on another quest of
the historical Jesus, the fundamental question is being posed more sharply than
ever: Is the historical method after all capable of penetrating back to a 'historical
Jesus'? Almost without many second and third questers noticing, the spring tide
of postmodernism has built up against the dykes of the historical method, threatening
to obliterate most of the familiar landmarks on which historical critics have
depended for finding their way. Following the interlude of the new quest, the
flight from history has resumed with a vengeance. And though the third questers
have set out to remedy what has been the most blatant disregard of history in the
quest (the Jewishness of Jesus), they too are in danger of being overtaken by the
postmodern wave of a-historicism.
5.6. Postmodernism
'Postmodernism' is the term coined to indicate a paradigm shift in Western thinking,
like the paradigm shifts of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, a transformation
in intellectual conceptualisation and ways of thinking which, again
like the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, is amorphous and diffuse in character
but all too real in its influence. In a major epistemological revolution earlier in
the twentieth century the older subject-object antithesis and discontinuity had already
come under radical question. The Cartesian philosophical assumption, that
T as a self-conscious subject can describe and define what I observe with complete
objectivity, had underpinned the nineteenth-century scientific method. The
existentialism of the inter-war period had also reflected a significant shift in emphasis
in observation of reality from the externality of the observed to the involvement
of the observer in the act of observing. 136 But as the Newtonian
to invest them with [what we think of as] their "theological" or "spiritual" significance'. 'No
Jews whose opinions are known to us thought that their god was about to bring the space-time
world, including land and Temple, to a sudden end'. 'Their expectations remained national, territorial
and Temple-centred').
135. Wright, Jesus, ch. 13 ('The Return of the King', 612-53), although he also argues
that 'Israel's god was already becoming king, in the events of Jesus' ministry' (454).
136. My colleague David Brown notes that the philosophical climates were different in
England and in mainland Europe. 'Existentialism never really took off in England, and belief in
the objectivity of knowledge even today remains much stronger among English philosophers
than it would be on the continent'.
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