Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.3 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
be identified with the event itself, though it will always be in some degree of approximation
to the event. 6 Where the data are abundant and consistent, the responsible
historian may be confident of achieving a reasonably close approximation.
Where they are much more fragmentary and often inconsistent, confidence
of achieving a close approximation is bound to be much less. It is for this reason
that the critical scholar learns to make carefully graded judgments which reflect
the quality of the data — almost certain (never simply 'certain'), very probable,
probable, likely, possible, and so on. 7 In historical scholarship the judgment
'probable' is a very positive verdict. 8 And given that more data may always
emerge — in ancient history, a new inscription or, prize of prizes, a new cache of
scrolls or documents — any judgment will have to be provisional, always subject
to the revision necessitated by new evidence or by new ways of evaluating the
old evidence. 9 This insight was already the basis of the Deists' and Reimarus' rejection
of proof from miracle: could there be sufficient data to put the claim to
miracle beyond dispute? As David Hume had earlier pointed out, it is more prob-
and who defines 'facts' as I define 'data': 'We have facts. . . . Facts are always subject to interpretation
. . . but they also exist as fixed points in our investigation' {Jesus 7). The same distinction
between 'data' and 'facts' applies also to scientific method generally: 'the data of science
are never "bare facts'"; 'there are no uninterpreted facts' (Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion
139).
6. Such a distinction can hope to work, of course, only with 'simple' events (Did x shoot
y?); but then we should probably not speak of complex events such as a career, a battle, or the
destruction of Jerusalem as though it was a single 'event'.
7. Cf. P. A. Boeckh's distinction between the 'plausible', the 'presumable', and the
'credible' (in Mueller-Vollmer, Hermeneutics Reader 145-46).
8. In a famous libel trial in UK during the early months of 2000 the historical facticity of
the Holocaust was at issue: whether there was a systematic plan to destroy European Jews,
whether there were gas chambers at Auschwitz, and whether Hitler was directly responsible.
Most would regard the probability of these facts as overwhelming; but without certainty the
room for doubt can be exploited by Holocaust deniers. As Martin Gilbert (biographer of
Winston Churchill) observed, in the libel action brought by David Irving, history itself was on
trial (The Guardian, Saturday, February 5, 2000, p. 3). There was an interesting sequel some
months later when Jörg Haider of the Austrian Freedom Party lost a libel case over his reference
to Nazi concentration camps as 'punishment centres'. His claim that the reference was
'correct and respectable' and that the expression was commonly used was rejected by the judge
with the comment: 'The term punishment centre comes from a single document from the Third
Reich in 1941 in which it referred to mass extermination camps as punishment centres. That is
the only place the term has come from. The term is historically incorrect. A leading politician
in 1995 . . . should have had a better grasp of historical reality' (Daily Telegraph, September 27,
2000).
9. Since the task of a criminal law court is often likened to that of the critical historian,
we may appropriately compare the sequence of successful appeals against several notorious
sentences in British courts over the past fifteen years on the basis of revised scientific evaluation
of the evidence on which guilt had been determined.
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