The Book’s Objective
The Book’s Objective
Although the book involves scholarly work in ancient sources, I have tried to avoid extensive technical jargon from my guild (at least without explaining it first). I have tried to keep the book short and understandable enough to be useful not only to scholars but to students and former students of the subject, as well as others sufficiently interested in the topic to engage ancient sources.8
Let me explain first what I am not doing. First, my focus will be on the historical sources more than reconstructing yet another new portrait of Jesus. In the second part of the book I will provide a sketch of some of what we can say about Jesus historically based on our sources. Before turning to that, however, I must first establish which sources are genuinely reliable, the extent to which they are reliable, and why they are reliable to that extent. Even in the second part of the book, one of my primary objectives is to show that our sources frequently fit Jesus’ context and the most plausible historical reconstructions of Jesus’ ministry and plan.
Second, in contrast to my attempts in some of my more detailed scholarly work to interact with the majority of scholars writing on the subject, I have drawn the net more narrowly here in hopes of keeping this work briefer and more readable. The interested reader can find many other useful works that survey Jesus scholarship,9 work I do not seek to duplicate here.
Third, although I have elsewhere defended the likelihood of substantial historical information in the Fourth Gospel,10 I draw on that argument very rarely here, for two reasons: (1) The book already has grown longer than my prospectus to the publisher promised, and readers have access to my arguments concerning John’s Gospel elsewhere; and (2) There is sufficient material in the more widely accepted Synoptic sources to make the book’s point. John’s Gospel is different from the others and poses special problems, and there are enough issues of controversy involved in the present discussion that it seemed superfluous to add another one.11
Fourth, I should make clear for other readers what scholars often take for granted. As scholars often point out,12 claims based on research concerning the “historical Jesus” are not intended to be identical to claiming a complete or even representative knowledge of the Jesus who lived in the first century. What can be known of Jesus through historical methods, like what can be known of almost anyone by means of such methods, is only a shadow of how the person would have been experienced by those who knew the person.13
The historical enterprise proceeds based on probabilities and works from a limited base of evidence; it is therefore limited in the claims it makes. (It is certainly not identical with what most believers mean by a “faith” perspective, although this difference of approach does not mean that historians must denigrate a faith perspective in its own sphere.)14 As Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz point out, historical research by virtue of its character does not “say, ‘That’s what it was’, but, ‘It could have been like that on the basis of the sources.”15 Or as James Charlesworth puts it, “Historical research is scientific by method but not by conclusion; the historian at best can provide us not with certainty but with probability.”16 John Meier, too, reckons that the historical method can give us only a partial picture of the Jesus who lived in history.17
Beyond this observation, reconstructions vary widely based on whether we use minimalist historical criteria (admitting only the most certain evidence), a more maximalist approach (admitting any evidence not clearly inadmissible), or some approach in between these two extremes. Minimalists and maximalists both keep us honest about the outer limits of our historical evidence. The former, for example, help us not to assume more certainty for the elements used for our reconstruction than is publicly defensible; the latter invite us to work creatively with as much evidence as possible to produce a cohesive portrait rather than arguing from silence beyond the boundaries of our knowledge. Scholars may hold various personal convictions (whether religious or not), but we use the constraints of historical method so that we can dialogue with others who may differ from our other assumptions while we nevertheless work together academically on the basis of shared methodological assumptions.
Like all scholars (though I think not more than most scholars), I write with my own presuppositions. For those who are interested in the question, I began my interest in questions about religion and, to a much lesser extent, biblical perspectives from a position of extreme (though not totally closed-minded) skepticism, as an atheist. As one who is now a Christian I approach the subject with a special interest I previously lacked, but an interest that I believe makes me more rather than less committed to investigating genuine historical information about Jesus. When I was an atheist I never imagined that my life would take this turn, but I harbor no regrets that it has. Even when I was an atheist I valued pursuing truth, regardless of where it might lead.