Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.3
It is this historical distance and difference which prevents the present from domesticating
the NT and either muffling or dictating its message. As Schweitzer
observed a century ago, if Jesus does not come to us, in some degree at least, as a
stranger and an enigma, then we can be sure that we have modernized Jesus, and
to that extent at least have failed to grasp what Jesus of Nazareth was about. As
the Reformation, by setting the apostolic age in its historical context, provided a
corrective to the abuses of mediaeval Catholicism, so Schweitzer, by setting Jesus
more realistically in his historical context, provided a corrective to a portrayal
of Jesus too much shaped in accordance with nineteenth-century western
European sensibilities. The point is that the otherness of Jesus is, in part at least,
a historical otherness, the otherness in particular of Jesus the Jew — again something
we 'moderns' have forgotten to our cost. Without that sense of Jesus 'born
under the law' (Gal. 4.4), of Christ 'become servant of the circumcision' (Rom.
15.8), with historical awareness of what that meant in terms of the particularities
of history, then the humanity of Christ is likely to be lost again to view within
Christianity and swallowed up in an essentially docetic affirmation of his deity.
Although the failures of earlier lives of Jesus at this point (see particularly §5.5
above) are now widely acknowledged, the instinctive compulsion to extricate Jesus
from his historical context and to assume his timeless relevance still has to be
resolutely resisted.
b. Probability Not Certainty
The fundamental methodological observations made by Lessing and Troeltsch
must also be given full weight. The key and most enduring point can be restated
simply in terms of the distinction, familiar to historians, between event, data, and
fact. 3 The historical 'event' belongs to the irretrievable past. All the historian has
available are the 'data' which have come down through history — personal diaries,
reminiscences of eyewitnesses, reports constructed from people who were
present, perhaps some archaeological artefacts, as well as circumstantial data
about climate, commercial practice, and laws of the time, and so forth. 4 From
these the historian attempts to reconstruct the 'facts'. The facts are not to be identified
as data; they are always an interpretation of the data. 5 Nor should the fact
3. As I learned it from R. G. Collingwood, The Idea of History (Oxford: Oxford University,
1946; Oxford Paperback 1961), e.g., 133, 176-77, 251-52.
4. Droysen's observation is pertinent here: 'The data for historical investigation are not
past things, for these have disappeared, but things which are still present here and now, whether
recollections of what was done, or remnants of things that have existed and of events that have
occurred' (extract from his Historik [1857] in Mueller-Vollmer, Hermeneutics Reader 120).
5. Contrast Fredriksen, who exemplifies a common popular perception regarding 'facts'
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