Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

CHAPTER 3
The (Re-)Awakening of
Historical Awareness
The beginning of the 'quest of the historical Jesus' is usually traced quite properly
to the European Enlightenment (c. 1650-1780) and the emergence of 'modernity'
. It is important, however, to recognize that interest in historical inquiry
and in the human Jesus began much earlier. The more appropriate place to start is
with the Renaissance (the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries) and the Reformation
(the sixteenth century).
3.1. The Renaissance
The Renaissance is generally regarded as having begun in fourteenth-century Italy
with the revival of the study of antiquity called for initially by Petrarch in particular.
1 Of course historical interest and inquiry did not begin with the Renaissance;
one should beware both of idealizing the Renaissance and of exaggerating
the transition which it marked. Interest in the past, or perhaps more precisely,
concern to record the present or recent past as a way of informing and legitimating
the present, goes back at least to the Greek historians Herodotus and
Thucydides. 2 Historical and biblical scholarship did not begin with the Renaissance.
3 However, it is also true that the Renaissance did bring about a new phase
1. D. Weinstein, 'Renaissance', EncBr 15.660.
2. E. B. Fryde, 'Historiography and Historical Methodology', EncBr 8.947.
3. See, e.g., B. Smalley, 'The Bible in the Medieval Schools', in G. W. H. Lampe, ed.,
The Cambridge History of the Bible. Vol. 2: The West from the Fathers to the Reformation
(Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1969) 197-220 (here 216-19).
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