Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§2 Introduction
(2) By 'history' I mean all that is involved in taking seriously the fact that,
whatever else he was, Jesus was a figure in history, and, to that extent at least, is
amenable to the methods and tools of historical study. What these methods and
tools are, what are or should be the working assumptions behind their employment,
and whether historical inquiry can or should try to escape completely from
the pre-conditioning of some ideology ('faith' or other), these too are questions
which form part of the daily diet for protagonists on our theme and must feature
prominently in what follows. Here it should simply be noted that the fact of faith,
belief regarding Jesus, however expressed, is itself a historical datum, one which
has itself to be taken into consideration in any historical account of Christianity's
beginnings, even when a particular historical method may attempt to bracket out
a faith perspective from the assumptions lying behind that method.
(3) By 'hermeneutics' I mean the theory of interpretation, and by extension
the science, or perhaps better, art of interpreting the data available to us regarding
the historical figure of Jesus. The data in question have consisted primarily of
the testimony of the NT writings, particularly the Gospels, including, of course,
their own faith claims. The wish that there could be other sources has often been
expressed, and a significant body of contemporary opinion would claim that that
wish has been fulfilled through the discovery of more documents from the earliest
centuries CE during the last fifty or so years. This claim too will be a matter
for further discussion. But whatever the extent of the data base, the task of interpreting
it remains. The hermeneutical task itself has been seen to have many facets
in recent years. But the principal concern for the present historical study will
be what might be called the hermeneutical dialogue between faith and history. 5
Hermeneutics, I suggest, provides a kind of bridge between faith and history.
Whether that is in fact the case, whether it can be sustained as such a bridge, and
whether, if so, the bridge will be sustainable only in a lopsided way, firmly
rooted on one side but with only a shallow hold on the other, are once again questions
which lie behind and motivate all that follows.
The task in front of us has usually been described as 'the quest of the historical
Jesus', to use the title popularised by the English translation of Albert
Schweitzer's magisterial study at the beginning of the twentieth century. 6 This
period of Life of Jesus research was described by Schweitzer as 'the greatest
5. The faith-history tension is closely related to the tension between the NT as Scripture
and as a set of historical documents, but the latter would be more restrictive than the dialogue
here envisaged.
6. A. Schweitzer, Von Reimarus zu Wrede (1906, but since 1913, Geschichte der Leben-
Jesu-Forschung); ET The Quest of the Historical Jesus (London: Black, 1910). The Quest has
been republished as the 'first complete edition', with revised translation, Schweitzer's Preface
to the sixth German edition (1950), and a Foreword by D. Nineham (London: SCM, 2000). I
will distinguish the two English editions as Quest 1 and Quest 2 .
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