Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §6.4
'meaning' itself, or, to be more precise, against the idea of stability of meaning or
of specific meaning being effectively communicated from (or through) text to
reader. But the very concept of effective communication, on the basis of which the
overwhelming majority of lectures and speeches are delivered, books and letters
written, depends on the assumption that words and sentences constructed with a
view to communicate an intention can usually hope for a large measure of success
in so communicating. Despite theorists denying the referentiality of texts outside of
themselves, nowhere have practising historians given up the belief that language
refers to reality; texts are still viewed as vehicles for communication of consciously
held ideas. 61 The general principle is not affected by the fact that some communicators
are bad at communicating, or by the recognition of a communicator's ambiguity
or (deliberate) deceptiveness, rhetoric or individual style, humour or irony.
The principle of 'plain meaning' can embrace such features, since it seeks to take as
full account of historical context, genre, and particular circumstances as necessary.
Nor is the principle undermined by recognition that on innumerable finer points or
nuances there will be considerable scope for disagreement among auditors and
readers. Without the conviction that at least the main point and thrust of what we
wish to communicate is in fact communicated, no communication could hope to
rise above the first stumbling phrases of someone trying to speak in a new foreign
language. The irony (or should we say self-condemnation) of arguments intended
to 'prove' the incapacity of texts to communicate intended meaning seems somehow
to escape some practitioners. 62 On this logic we should abandon all laws of
copyright and 'intellectual property' and strike the term (and the academic 'sin' of)
'plagiarism' from our vocabulary and university rule books.
If, then, it is possible to construe meaning from a verbal communication
today, and to gain a broad consensus assent as to what the main thrust of that
meaning is, then it is in principle possible to construe the equivalent meaning in
an ancient communication and to gain some breadth of consensus regarding that
meaning as the communication was first spoken and heard or first written and
read. Such consensus will not extend to every detail by any means, just as it will
not depend on a translation as 'fixed' as the original text; nor could it foreclose
61. Iggers, Historiography 118-33, 139-40, 144-45. Iggers can even conclude with the
outspoken assertion: The alternative to an albeit chastened Enlightenment is barbarism' (147).
62. Meyer appeals effectively to the phenomenon of 'self-reversal' (Lonergan), referring
inter alia to 'Richard Rorty's four-hundred-page philosophic argument purporting to show the
non-cognitive character of philosophy and hence the futility of philosophic argument' {Reality
and Allusion 40-47 [here 43], 131-36); cf. Moore, Literary Criticism 145-48. R. Ingarden
warns of the failure to recognize the social nature of language. 'It is simply not true that each of
us forms the meanings of words for himself alone, in complete isolation, "privately"' (from The
Cognition of the Literary Work of Art [1973], abstracted in Mueller-Vollmer, Hermeneutics
Reader 198-200).
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