Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.3 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
complex than is usually appreciated. Where it involves language (description of
an artefact, a written document) we need to be aware that language has differing
degrees of referentiality. 35 More to the present point, it involves interpretation,
involves the interpreter, so that even if the observation of data can be likened in
some measure to the old ideal of scientific research, the act and process of interpretation
cannot. 36 Alternatively expressed, historicism (historical positivism)
could think in terms of 'brute facts' in abstraction from interpretation. But the
facts 37 that matter in history, the facts that carry history forward, are never 'bare
facts', empty of significance. Facts, other than the merely ephemeral, are always
experienced as significant, facts-in-their-significance, 38 a 'fact' ignored by
questers who, desirous of academic respectability for their work, continue to appeal
to the Enlightenment paradigm of scientific objectivity. 39 The same point is
inescapable when we recognize the role of analogy in historical method (§6.3c
above). Here too, to acknowledge that historical method depends on analogy is
not at all to deny the objectivity of that which is known but simply to underline
the inevitable subjectivity in the knowing of that which is known, whether past or
present.
35. G. B. Caird, The Language and Imagery of the Bible (London: Duckworth, 1980) ch.
12 ('Language and History').
36. Curiously, in one of the most illuminating treatments of 'the challenge of poetics to
(normal) historical practice', R. Berkhofer (in Jenkins, ed., Postmodern History 139-55) regards
the movement from 'evidence' to 'facts' to 'synthesis' as firm lines (empirically based)
still linking the frames of representation and referentiality (148). G. Himmelfarb, 'Telling It as
You Like It: Postmodernist History and the Flight from Fact' (Jenkins, ed., Postmodern History
158-74) protests with some justification that modernist history is not so uncritically positivist
as postmodernists often imply: 'the frailty, fallibility and relativity of the historical enterprise
... are not the great discoveries of postmodernism' (159, see also 160, 165-66).
37. 'Fact' is here being used in its popular sense. My own preferred formulation would
speak in terms of events and data (§6.3b above); 'facts' as I use the term are interpreted data.
38. Cf. Collingwood, Idea of History 131-33; Thiselton, Two Horizons 80-81, referring
to Pannenberg.
39. Crossan, despite the otherwise revolutionary character of his approach, bases his
analysis of the Jesus tradition on a surprisingly 'objective' stratification of that tradition;
H. Childs, The Myth of the Historical Jesus and the Evolution of Consciousness (SBLDS; Atlanta:
SBL, 2000) criticises Crossan for 'a subtle and unwitting positivism' (ch. 2, here 55).
And Wright's concern to avoid 'having loose ends . . . flapping around all over the place' (Jesus
367) is surprisingly modernist in character. Even Meier, who recognizes that 'the quest for objectivity'
is unrealistic (Marginal Jew 1.4-6), retains the ideal of an exegete using 'purely
historical-critical methods' (1.197; also 'Present State of the "Third Quest'" 463-64). See further
the shrewd critique of A. G. Padgett, 'Advice for Religious Historians: On the Myth of a
Purely Historical Jesus', in S. T. Davis, et al., eds., The Resurrection: An Interdisciplinary Symposium
on the Resurrection of Jesus (Oxford: Oxford University, 1997) 287-307.
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