Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §3.1
in historical awareness in western Europe, 4 together with a growing fascination
with and admiration for the classical past. 5
It is at this period that we can see emerging a clear sense of the pastness of
the past and the otherness of the past: the recognition that the past was not only
distant from the present, but was also different from the present. 6 The rediscovery
of the Greek classics in their original language (Greek began to be studied
again in the West in the late fourteenth century) brought home to Renaissance
man that the world unveiled in these texts was very different from that of the late
mediaeval period. The manners and customs, the mode of government and law,
the way of thinking about the cosmos and society were not as they are now in the
present. This awareness naturally included a growing sense that during the intervening
decades and centuries change had occurred. If these texts and the world
of which they spoke were to be properly understood, therefore, such differences
and changes had to be recognized and taken into account.
The classical texts had of course been familiar through mediaeval textbooks,
digests, and compendia. But the urge to read the classics in their original
tongue reinforced the sense of difference and change and gave birth to the new
science of historical philology. Donald Weinstein describes the situation well. 7
It was Petrarch who first understood fully that antiquity was a civilisation
apart and, understanding it, outlined a program of classically oriented studies
that would lay bare its spirit. The focus of Petrarch's insight was language: if
classical antiquity was to be understood in its own terms it would be through
the speech with which the ancients had communicated their thoughts. This
meant that the languages of antiquity had to be studied as the ancients had
used them and not as vehicles for carrying modern thoughts.
What also emerged as essential to the task newly perceived was the further new
science of textual criticism, the comparison of variant manuscripts, the correction
of faulty or dubious passages, and the production of commentaries on the
style, meaning and context of an author's thought. This naturally involved not
4. See particularly P. Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (London: Edward Arnold,
1969).
5. See further Burke, Renaissance ch. 2; C. L. Stinger, The Renaissance in Rome
(Bloomington: Indiana University, 1985) 59-76.
6. Burke defines the 'sense of history' as including three factors: the sense of anachronism,
the awareness of evidence, and the interest in causation. On the first, elaborated as a
'sense of historical perspective, or sense of change, or sense of the past', he comments: 'Medieval
men lacked a sense of the past being different in quality from the present'. 'Medieval society,
ruled by custom, could not afford the awareness of the difference between past and present
and the consequent irrelevance of precedent' {Renaissance 1, 19).
7. Weinstein, 'Renaissance' 664.
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