Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§6.5 History, Hermeneutics and Faith
through the picture his disciples made of him', 100 it is also that the only Jesus we
reach through that picture is the Jesus who inspired that picture.
Of course we do have some echoes of an outsider's perspective in Roman
and rabbinic sources. 101 But we simply do not have portrayals of Jesus as seen
through the eyes of the high priests or the Roman authorities or the people of the
land. We do not have a 'neutral' (!) portrayal of Jesus. 102 All we have in the NT
Gospels is Jesus seen with the eye of faith. We do not have a 'historical Jesus',
only the 'historic Christ'. As Kahler noted, the proof of the pudding is in the diverse
Jesuses constructed by questers generally, not least the Liberal and now
neo-Liberal Jesuses. In each case, the distinctiveness of the 'objective Jesus' is
largely the creation of the historical critic. The irony indeed is that the typical
'historical Jesus' is as much a theological Jesus as is any Gospel portrayal, since
the constructed Jesus has been almost always an amalgam of the historian's own
ideals (the fifth Gospel according to Kahler) and the critically (selectively)
worked data. 103 Whether the new sources trumpeted by the neo-Liberal questers
make a significant difference to Kähler's point is again an issue to which we will
have to return.
c. Form Criticism's Missed Opportunity
Form criticism opened up a new possibility of penetrating behind the earliest
written sources. It also recognized that faith had shaped these earlier forms. But
its practitioners were distracted from the implications of this recognition for
'Life of Jesus' research by focusing on the way faith had shaped the forms toward
their final form in the Gospels. They neglected to inquire very far about the
faith stimulus which started the traditioning process. Or else they took Easter
faith as the starting point for the tradition, assuming that the portrayal of Jesus is
entirely post-Easter in creation and the product of developed faith. In a sense we
100. H.-I. Marrou, De la connaissance historique (Paris: Editions du Seuill, 1954) 108,
cited by Reiser, 'Eschatology' 221.
101. See below, §7.1.
102. Beyond, arguably, Josephus' brief references to Jesus (see again §7.1 below).
103. To clarify the point: I do not mean that the tendencies of individual Evangelists
cannot be identified and allowed for. My point is rather that the basic tendency of faith saturates
the tradition and that any steps to isolate an unsaturated residuum are inevitably 'contaminated'
by the procedures used and 'distorted' by the spectacles through which the Gospel tradition is
read. Nor do I abandon the practice of 'critical realism' (§6.3e). My point is rather that the only
Jesus we can realistically expect to emerge from the critical dialogue with our sources is the Jesus
who made the impact on the disciples which we encapsulate in the word 'faith'. The point is
developed in the following pages.
127