Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

FAITH AND THE HISTORICAL JESUS §4.1
came something intolerable to the Enlightenment scholar. 1 The philosophical basis
was provided by Rene Descartes (1596-1650), who formulated the model of
analytical (scientific, mathematical) reasoning, in which all accepted ideas and
opinions are subjected to systematic doubt unless and until one is convinced by
self-evident facts. 2 In essence, the Enlightenment signals the emergence of modern
science and modern scientific method, where information about the world is
to be discovered, not from the Bible or ecclesiastical or classical authority, but
from the world itself, by means of careful observation and repeatable experiment.
Biblical scholars and theologians influenced by the Enlightenment followed
the same logic. The new science increasingly became the paradigm of
knowledge, replacing the old Bible. A concept of 'scientific criticism' began to
be propounded whose task was to evaluate the records of the past in the light of
modern scientific knowledge, free from what many regarded as the often ignorant
and primitive superstitions which had previously clouded the present's perception
of the past. 3 A third model for scholarly study of the pastness of Jesus
was thus developed, the model of scientific inquiry, of investigation of the past
following the paradigm provided by the emerging natural sciences.
b. Scientific History
As a concept, 'modernity' overlaps with 'Enlightenment'; it indicates the increasingly
scientific perspective and secular frame of reference which has dominated
intellectual activity in western Europe since the Enlightenment. But as a
phase in Western intellectual history 'modernity' has long outlasted the Enlightenment
and indeed stretched well into the 1960s. 4
For the 'quest of the historical Jesus' the longest lasting effect of 'modernity'
has been the application of the scientific paradigm to history. History itself
came to be redefined as a science, which should proceed scientifically by devel-
1. On Galileo's significance see, e.g., I. G. Barbour, Issues in Science and Religion
(London: SCM, 1966) 23-34.
2. L. J. Beck, 'Descartes, Rene', EncBr 5.597-602: since the one self-evident fact for he
who doubts is that he doubts, and, as doubting, is thinking, the cornerstone of self-evident certainty
is given by the famous formula 'Cogito, ergo sum' ('I think, therefore I am').
3. P. L. Gardiner, 'History, Philosophy of, EncBr 8.962.
4. My colleague David Brown points out that both terms are used in narrow and broader
senses. Narrowly the Enlightenment denotes only an eighteenth-century movement and modernism
a twentieth. 'But both terms are commonly used in a wider sense, and one might as well
say in that sense that their influence very much continues into the present, competing with postmodernism'
(private communication, dated September 13, 2001).
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