Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.3 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
portant. Christian belief in the incarnation, in the events of long ago in Palestine
of the late 20s and early 30s AD as the decisive fulcrum point in human history,
leaves them no choice but to be interested in the events and words of those days.
For the incarnation, by definition, means the commitment of God to selfmanifestation
in Jesus at a particular time and place within human history, and
thus places a tremendous weight of significance on certain events in Palestine in
the years 28-30 (or thereabouts) of the common era. Christians cannot but want
to know what Jesus was like, since he shows them what God is like. The fact that
our knowledge of these events and words is fragmentary and uncertain makes no
difference. As Kahler and Bultmann insisted, faith need not, indeed should not,
be dependent on the scholarly arguments about this verse or that passage. But the
new questers of the third quarter of the twentieth century showed that faith could
and does have a theologically legitimate interest in the history of Jesus. Honest
historical inquiry may be granted insights regarding Jesus which are crucially
(in)formative of honest (self-critical) faith. Scholarship in its search for truth,
however flawed its perception of that truth, can stimulate and feed, discipline,
and even correct faith (when faith makes statements of fact beyond its competence).
A faith which regards all critical scrutiny of its historical roots as inimical
to faith can never hold up its head or lift up its voice in any public forum. 2
6.3. What Can History Deliver?
The task of the historian is to explain not only what happened, but why it happened
and why it happened in the way it did. But the attempt to treat history as a
'science' has suffered from too uncritical assumptions and over-optimistic expectations.
So, it is fair to ask whether it can deliver at all and if so what. The
above overview has highlighted several important pointers.
a. Historical Distance and Difference
As became evident already in the Renaissance and Reformation, the test of a historical
scrutiny of the past is the realisation it brings of the otherness of the past.
2. 'The fact that Jesus can be made an object of historical-critical research is given with
the incarnation and cannot be denied by faith, if the latter is to remain true to itself (Dahl,
'Problem' 101). Koester notes pointedly: 'Be it simple curiosity, be it in the service of a serious
religious search, or be it in the interest of a vital ideological commitment, to have Jesus on
one's side is evidently important even in the postmodern late twentieth century' ('Jesus the Victim'
8). See further R. Morgan, 'The Historical Jesus and the Theology of the New Testament',
in Hurst and Wright, eds., Glory of Christ 187-206.
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