Concluding “Unscientific Postscript” to Appendix 8
Concluding “Unscientific Postscript” to Appendix 8
Ending with an “unscientific postscript” runs the risk of having readers paint one’s entire work and career as unscientific, especially for those who, scanning a conclusion, suppose they have reconstructed the primary theme of the entire book. (Distinguishing between the body of one’s arguments and a concluding personal opinion is, however, why we normally reserve such material for a postscript.) For some readers, being able to pinpoint a scholar as Christian, Jewish, atheistic, or as holding some other view absolves the reader of the need to engage her or his arguments. Yet no scholar lacks personal perspectives, whether they are stated explicitly or not. I do not wish to conceal mine, as I believe that I came by them honestly (even if not in ways that would satisfy detractors), and as I believe that they motivate me to seek truth rigorously because I so esteem the subject matter.
But I also confine this discussion especially to this book’s end-matter so as to keep the arguments in the main body of the book as rigorous and independent as possible. Some who will dismiss without consideration that research because they disapprove of my personal perspective have, if they would admit it, personal perspectives of their own.
I believe that there remains in some sectors of academia a prejudice against accepting claims about the reliability of many Gospel traditions, a prejudice that may sacrifice genuine objectivity for the sake of objectivity’s appearance. Were the Gospels biographies of Greek or Roman religious figures, the prejudice against them would likely be less, but some assume that anything one tries to say about Jesus historically reflects a modern religious bias. I believe that I have highlighted sufficient evidence to show that there is plenty of historical information available about Jesus for those whose interest in studying him is purely historical, without religious considerations.
The concern about religious bias becomes most acute in the discussion of the resurrection, however. While the charge of bias might be leveled either way, that charge is often invoked before the evidence is even allowed to be weighed. Many explain the resurrection in terms of the disciples’ visionary experiences; such experiences can be described without prejudice to their objective content.
But if evidence seems to support the historicity of a more objective event, some view the presentation of such evidence as tendentious support for the claim of one religion (especially when an “act of God” seems the most plausible and parsimonious among proposed explanations). Academicians sometimes thus are predisposed to reject such evidence in the name of religious neutrality (and sometimes, with less pretense of “neutrality,” a hostility toward supernatural religion inherited from the most extreme phase of the Enlightenment).
If, however, our concern is with history rather than the religious use to which some may put it, we must ask first of all where the evidence points. At this point I will try to more explicitly separate the historical and theological questions, while at the same time showing where they bear on each other.
I have talked with a number of skeptics about Christian faith who, after extended conversation, admitted that their objections to the basic Gospel portrait stemmed from their concern that acknowledging more about Jesus historically would entail greater moral demands on their lives. This prejudice is not, however, the starting point of all skeptics, and was not my starting point when I was a skeptic. I was an atheist for what I felt were intellectually satisfying reasons; whether they were genuinely defensible reasons or not, they were not merely morally pragmatic ones. Because of my epistemological orientation at the time, I would have derided the intelligence of someone who rejected historical data out of moral convenience just as I derided most Christians (who I felt accepted their faith because of their upbringing or existential convenience).
I believe that, on historical grounds, an atheist could affirm most of the historical points we have established in this book. They are historical arguments, and I believe that most “neutral” observers would find them more convincing than not. As an atheist no less than subsequently as a Christian, I did desire to follow evidence, even if it crashed my own convenient philosophic system (which it ultimately did, especially the Neoplatonic part of it); I believe that I would have found arguments such as those in this book convincing.
When I was an atheist, however, my concerns were not the sorts of historical issues we have been addressing in this book. Admittedly, I believe that affirming the plausibility of the gospel narratives would have moved me to consider following Jesus in a much more significant way than I was then following various other thinkers (Greek philosophers and other sources). Yet at that point in my explorations, Jesus was an uncomfortable question I had deferred until later, and I knew Greek mythology far better than I knew biblical stories (I had read less than one chapter of the Bible — namely part of the first one, which from my cosmological standpoint revolted me). Although my primary objection to theism was that I thought that contemporary scientific philosophy could explain the universe without that hypothesis, my primary objection to Christianity in particular was that Christians did not seem to take it seriously. But because I esteemed truth as the highest value, I wanted to remain open-minded.
While one can believe many of the Gospel reports about Jesus without being a Christian, it seems to me more difficult to be a Christian while rejecting nearly all of the Gospel reports about Jesus. (Admittedly, this observation depends on how one defines “Christian.” If one defines it broadly as “follower of Jesus,” however, it is hard to follow the teachings and example of someone whose teachings and example remain virtually unknown.)
Historical Jesus research is a historical question; all researchers have biases, but academic dialogue allows us to challenge and probe one another’s biases and seek some central, securely grounded information about Jesus. Because such conclusions usually include the minimum on which most parties can agree, they usually do not resolve (and often do not address) the questions involved in religious or spiritual quests for Jesus. The approaches and goals differ, and the limitations of historiographic methodology are not limitations that must be embraced by these latter quests. Nevertheless, if the latter quests mean anything that is distinctive with regard to the person of Jesus of Nazareth, they do invite some historical exploration.
Some scholars have argued that the “Jesus” we can reconstruct from history is irrelevant to faith;22 others demur.23 While the historical method does not give us a complete picture of Jesus, however, it does call to our attention some emphases in Jesus’ message and ministry that we might otherwise have overlooked. 24 Because churches and cultures have too often remade Jesus in our own image, going back to the sources helps to keep us honest. While academic “Jesus research” does this in a different way than pure study of the Gospels (which mostly lacks the former discipline’s intractable problem of lacunae in sources), both approaches can highlight important features of Jesus and challenge our biases.