It seems to me that there is something appropriately symbolic about the state of affairs I’m going to describe. There is an important article by John A. T. Robinson, “The Last Tabu? The Self-Consciousness of Jesus” which I was trying to locate a copy of. It is available in the Google Books preview of a volume on the historical Jesus in which it was reprinted. But there is a page that is not there.
Isn’t that just like our attempt to investigate the historical figure of Jesus, including his self-consciousness? As Mark Goodacre in particular has pointed out, we don’t know (unlike in a Google Books preview) how many “pages” we are missing, and (like in a Google Books preview) neither do we know what was written on them. The one difference is that in the case of a book, we can turn to interlibrary loan. But, to state the obvious, we cannot interlibrary loan the thoughts of Jesus.
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