NT Wright, History, and the Historical Jesus

NT Wright, History, and the Historical Jesus November 19, 2015

What does it mean to do history when it comes to Jesus? What is the historian doing? We might say there is a spectrum with at one end a radical reconstruction of what Jesus was really like and at the other end a kind of history that amounts to showing that the Gospels and the church after all got him and it right? One end is revisionism and the other end is apologetics.

Where does NT Wright fit into this spectrum?

Here are his words, given at the beginning of chp 10 of his new book Paul and His Recent Interpreters.

First, NT Wright sketches the big picture of the historical critical method when it comes to doing historical Jesus (HJ) work:

That, indeed, was what was implied in the long years when something called ‘the historical-critical method’ was invoked as the central task. We will do the history (it was thought), with proper Teutonic rigour, and this will demonstrate that some, perhaps much, of what ordinary western Christianity had taken for granted was in fact based on mistakes, not least on the fictions with which the early church sustained their faith. That was the agenda which ran, with twists and turns, from Hermann Samuel Reimarus in the eighteenth century through Ferdinand Christian Baur in the nineteenth, and on to Rudolf Bultmann and his successors in the twentieth. History was subversive, particularly when it came to ecclesial tradition. Many today, not least in North America, see themselves as engaged in the same kind of activity, and pour bitter vitriol on any whom they see as claiming to do ‘history’ while still retaining, and advocating, something like orthodox Christian faith (221-222).

This is accurate: HJ scholarship has defined itself as getting behind the church and its creeds to what Jesus was really like. Wright’s word “subversive” is exactly right.

Second, Wright disagrees for three reasons, and I reformat to make his points easier to grasp online:

First, the word ‘history’ can refer, notoriously, to three things:

to ‘what happened’,

to ‘what people wrote about what happened’, and

to ‘what the historian does today’, the task of trying to construct a meaningful narrative from the evidence available.

History can be event, writing or task. It is a matter of ‘history [event]’ that Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in AD 70. It is a matter of ‘history [writing]’ that Josephus wrote about that event within his three larger narratives (the Antiquities, the War, and the Life). It is a matter of ‘history [task]’ that we today, reading those works of ‘history [writing]’ and many others, attempt to tell our own story of what happened (‘history [event]’). The writing and the contemporary task blend into one another; in a sense, Josephus is not only a source, but also a precursor, of today’s historian. But the task of research, the finished written product, and the original event are clearly not the same thing. Within this multiple ambiguity there lie many long-standing puzzles, not least the awkward difference between ‘the historical Jesus’ (meaning the real Jesus who lived, breathed and died) and ‘the historical Jesus’ (meaning the ‘Jesus’ whom historians, working within particular worldviews, try to reconstruct). Some, suspicious of the latter, have appeared to deny the importance of the former. Perhaps fortunately, our present concern is not with Jesus, but with Paul… (222).

Where do you put NT Wright? Other historical Jesus scholars?

My contention is that (1) all HJ scholarship is about reconstructing what the real Jesus [I find it too confusing to use HJ for both the real Jesus and the historian’s Jesus] was like (2) over against the canonical Jesus of the NT Gospels and the Apostles and (3) over against the church’s creedal Jesus. Straight exegesis reads and expounds the Gospels as the Apostles’ Jesus (canonical Jesus) while the historical construction into a different framework — some only slightly different, others radically different — is HJ scholarship.


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