My Own Journey
My Own Journey
Many scholars today appreciate full disclosure of one’s personal presuppositions, recognizing that all scholars have some. Like most scholars, I try to do my historical scholarship as a good historian. Many scholars working in historical Jesus research have personal religious commitments (Christian, Jewish, or other); others do not. But we all try to make a case that can be heard and engaged by others who may disagree with us. Having said that, some of us, myself included, would have gone into other disciplines without the element of religious interest in this particular figure. Before acquiring such interest, I did have enormous interest in the rest of the Greco-Roman world. Nevertheless, I was reticent to study Jesus or even ancient Israel because historical study of these subjects connected to modern “religious” discussions in ways that reading about Germanicus or Nero Drusus (or even “the divine Augustus”) did not.
When I was an atheist (largely for what I thought were scientific reasons), one of my central (albeit nonscientific) objections to believing anything about Jesus was that eighty percent of people in my country claimed to be his followers, yet most of them apparently lived as if it made no difference for their lives. In an effort to be provocative, I might ask whether western Christians’ frequent way of believing the resurrection is as consistent as most non-Christians’ way of disbelieving it. Much of western Christendom does not proceed as if the Jesus of the Gospels is alive and continues to reign in his church. In practice, a gulf remains between their affirmation of Jesus’ resurrection and their living as if he is humanity’s rightful lord, so that a theological affirmation does not translate into their experience. Their “faith” constitutes mere assent to a proposition, rather than sharing Jesus’ resurrection life as depicted in Paul’s letters. Likewise, their devotional prayer to God often has little emotional connection to the Jesus of the Gospels; the experience of the early church that connected the Synoptics and Paul is not always their own experience. The experience of Christianity in some other parts of the world is more wholistic; indeed, in many locations Christians even show great interest in Jesus’ example and teachings. At the time, however, I had personally witnessed that commitment from only a few persons, whom I thus treated as anomalous.
I reasoned that if I believed that there was truly a being to whom I owed my existence and who alone determined my eternal destiny, I would serve that being unreservedly. But whatever other religion might contain some truth, I concluded that if Christians did not really believe in Jesus, there was surely no reason for myself to do so. When I later encountered the risen Christ in an unsolicited and unexpected personal experience, hence came to the conviction that he (not to mention the God with whom he was associated) was in fact alive, I understood that the reality of Jesus rises or falls not on how successfully his professed followers have followed his teaching, but on Jesus himself.
Such an encounter will naturally be dismissed as purely subjective by those disinclined to accept it, and admittedly, I did not have a physical “resurrection appearance.” I offer this information as an explanation by way of full disclosure, not as an argument, since it functions outside the epistemological criteria used in normal academic historical Jesus work. Many historical Jesus scholars who doubt that Jesus is alive have in fact traveled the opposite direction, moving away from traditional Christian conviction. Some have done so as a result of rigid categories (so that rejecting parts of their earlier faith required rejecting the whole); others through accommodating dominant philosophic trends that made faith impossible; others because faith is often genuinely difficult (though, I think, all the more needed) in a world full of suffering; others for historiographic or other reasons. I can only recount my experience openly, as they are welcome to recount theirs, in the hope that we can dialogue further. Our experiences on both sides inform our presuppositions, for those inclined to skepticism as well as for those inclined to faith.