Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§4.1 The Flight from Dogma
oping hypotheses and discovering laws which would have explanatory power
analogous to that of hypotheses and laws in the physical sciences — hence 'scientific
history'. 5 Such 'scientific history' did not really emerge till the nineteenth
century. In the earlier phase of modernity, as Ernst Troeltsch puts it, 'Historical
facts were only useful "for illustration, not demonstration" and so could be surrendered
to scientific criticism'. 6 But in the early nineteenth century historical
method emerged as a powerful tool to reconstruct the past. In the 1830s Leopold
von Ranke became the model for the master historian, and his famous formula, to
describe 'how things really were', became the motto for a scientific and objective
history. 7
Strictly speaking, then, the quest of the 'historical Jesus' as such did not
begin till the nineteenth century, when historical method became a tool to penetrate
back behind the Christ of the present, the Christ of dogma and elaborated
tradition, to the Jesus of the past, the original, the real Jesus. The 'historical Jesus'
was, by definition, part of the historical, observable world; so what could be
more natural than that the Gospel accounts of him should be analysed as one
would analyse any account of the observable world? Thus the third model for
scholarly study of the Christian records of Jesus, scientific inquiry, modulated
into what became the tool which was to dominate the 'quest of the historical Jesus'
for 150 years, the historical-critical method.
It is probably as well to take note at once of the hermeneutical assumptions
behind the historical-critical method since they proved increasingly to be its
Achilles' heel in the second half of the twentieth century.
(1) The first is that there is an objectivity in history (the past) which allows
history (the discipline) to be treated on the analogy of the natural sciences; that
is, historical facts are objects in history which could be uncovered or recovered
by scientific method like so many archaeological artefacts (Positivism).
(2) A second assumption has been the correlative one, that the historian
could be entirely impartial, strictly objective in his (sic) treatment of the historical
facts, and could therefore avoid prejudicial value judgments (Historicism).
Wholly unrecognized (and therefore unquestioned) were the fundamental assumptions
that history was the 'grand narrative' of scientific progress, of a unified
historical development culminating in the modernization of the Western
5. J. Appleby, L. Hunt, and M. Jacob, Telling the Truth about History (New York:
Norton, 1994) chs. 1-2. See, e.g., E. Troeltsch, 'Historiography', ERE 6.716b-23a, particularly
717b-19a.
6. 'The Significance of the Historical Existence of Jesus for Faith', in R. Morgan and
M. Pye, eds., Ernst Troeltsch: Writings on Religion and Theology (Louisville: Westminster/
John Knox, 1990) 182-207 (here 186).
7. Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth 67-68, 73-74. Troeltsch could speak of
'purely historical knowledge' ('Historiography' 718b).
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