Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.5 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
ginnings, so with the hermeneutics of reading the NT, there is neither an absolutely
objective meaning 'in' the text, nor an absolutely subjective meaning imported
to the text by the reader. The text must be listened to as well as read. 'The
voice that speaks from the past. . . itself poses a question and places our meaning
in openness'. 94
6.5. When Did a Faith Perspective
First Influence the Jesus Tradition?
I have argued that the key issue in any attempt to talk historically about Jesus of
Nazareth has been and continues to be the tension between faith and history, or
more accurately now, the hermeneutical tension between faith and history. Most
of what has so far been discussed in this chapter bears on that issue, and the
above overview leaves us with a number of important insights, which we need
now to harvest.
a. What Is the Historical Jesus?
The Enlightenment ideal of historical objectivity also projected a false goal onto
the quest of the historical Jesus. For from its inception, questers have made the
assumption that behind the text of the Gospels, behind the traditions which they
incorporate, there is a 'historical Jesus', an objective historical datum who will
be different from the dogmatic Christ or from the Jesus of the Gospels and who
will enable us to criticize the dogmatic Christ and the Jesus of the Gospels. 95
An important factor in all this has been the confusion injected into the
quest by the key phrase itself — 'historical Jesus'. It is true that whenever a definition
is offered for the phrase, the person offering the definition is clear that the
'historical Jesus' is the Jesus constructed by historical research. 96 Despite that,
94. Gadamer, Truth 374.
95. The archaeological imagery used by Funk is revealing when he describes the first of
'two pillars of modern biblical criticism' as 'the distinction between the historical Jesus, to be
uncovered by historical excavation, and the Christ of faith encapsulated in the first creeds' (Five
Gospels 3). Similarly Mack's description of his own and earlier 'archaeological efforts' (Myth
xi-xiii, 5). The image is given paradigmatic status in Kloppenborg Verbin's most recent title
(Excavating Q) and in the finely executed partnership of J. D. Crossan and J. L. Reed, Excavating
Jesus: Beneath the Stones, behind the Texts (SanFrancisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2001)
particularly xvii-xviii, 8, 12-14. See also below chapter 8, n. 302.
96. E.g., Robinson, New Quest 26; Keck, Future 20, 35 ('the historical Jesus is the historian's
Jesus, not a Kantian Ding an sich'); Meier, Marginal Jew 1.21-26.
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