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2. The Impossibility of ‘Mere History’

There is not, nor can there be, any such thing as a bare chronicle of events without a point of view.² The great Enlightenment dream of simply recording ‘what actually happened’ is just that: a dream. The dreamer is once more the positivist, who, looking at history, believes that it is possible to have instant and unadulterated access to ‘events’. At a naïve level, this results in the pre-critical view:

Observer		Evidence		Past Event
--------->			--------->

simply looking at the evidence … and having direct access to the ‘facts’

At a more sophisticated level, awareness that evidence can mislead gives rise to a chastened positivism: the observer sifts the evidence, and reckons that, though some of it is more or less worthless, other bits give the desired direct access.³ This is the analogy of the positivistic rejection of metaphysics in favour of supposedly ‘hard’ scientific knowledge:

Observer	Evidence		Past Event
---------->		---------
looking at the evidence, sifting it,
		<----------
		rejecting some bits
		---------->
		and accepting others

But (to repeat my opening assertion) this dream of finding bare and unvarnished facts does not correspond to waking reality. This fairly obvious point may be spelled out briefly as follows.

At a general level, it is clear from a moment’s thought that all history involves selection. History shares this with other knowing. At any given waking moment I am aware of a vast number of sense-impressions, out of which I make a very limited selection for my current focus of attention and interest. (One of the reasons why art, or for that matter falling in love, are what they are, may perhaps be that they involve the heady experience of a wider-than-usual set of simultaneous selections.) At the most trivial level, any attempt to record ‘what happened’ without selection would fail, for the sheer overwhelming volume of information—every breath taken by every human being, every falling leaf, every passing cloud in the sky. Some human breaths might be worth recording: that of a person thought to be dead, for instance. Some falling leaves and passing clouds might suddenly attain significance, depending on the context (consider the small cloud which Elijah’s servant saw from the top of Mount Carmel). But even a video camera set up at random would not result in a completely ‘neutral’ perspective on events. It must be sited in one spot only; it will only have one focal length; it will only look in one direction. If in one sense the camera never lies, we can see that in another sense it never does anything else. It excludes far more than it includes.

In order, then, to make any statements about the past, human beings have to engage in a massive programme of selection. We do this all the time, and become quite good at it, swiftly selecting tiny fragments of our lives and arranging them into narratives, anecdotes, family legends, and so on. And such a process inevitably involves a major element of interpretation. We are trying to make sense of the world in which we live. If we do not we are being bath-sponges, not humans. All knowing and understanding has to do with reflection on the part of human beings: all knowledge comes via somebody’s perceptions and reflections. As we saw in chapter 2, the legacy of positivism often seduces us into imagining that a ‘fact’ is a ‘purely objective’ thing, unalloyed by the process of knowing on anybody’s part.⁴ But in reality what we call ‘facts’ always belong in a context of response, perception, and interaction—a process which is both complex and continuing. Stories, as we have seen, are more fundamental than ‘facts’; the parts must be seen in the light of the whole.

This becomes more obviously true, and at a more serious level, when we try to talk about events in the past. Suppose, for example, we try to make a small but central claim about Jesus.⁵ If we say ‘Christ died for our sins’, it is not too difficult to see an obvious element of interpretation: ‘for our sins’ is a theological addendum to the otherwise ‘historical’ statement. But even if we say ‘Christ died’, we have not escaped interpretation: we have chosen to refer to Jesus as ‘Christ’, ascribing to him a Messiahship which neither his contemporaries nor ours would universally grant. Very well: ‘Jesus died’. But we still have not escaped ‘interpretation’, and indeed at this point it looms larger than ever: three people died outside Jerusalem that afternoon, and we have chosen to mention only one. For that matter, thousands of Jews were crucified by the Romans in the vicinity of Jerusalem during the same century, and we have chosen to mention only one. Our apparently bare historical remark is the product of a multi-faceted interpretative decision. Nor is this unusual. It is typical of all history. All history involves selection, and it is always human beings who do the selecting.

According to one popular ‘modern’ view, it is only in the last two hundred years that we have discovered what ‘history’ really is, while writers in the ancient world were ignorant about these matters, freely making things up, weaving fantasy and legend together and calling it history. There is a high irony about this view, since it is itself a modern myth, legitimating the cultural imperialism of the Enlightenment without having any basis in the real history of the ancient world. In fact, the contemporary historians of the ancient world knew what history is as well as we do, and often a lot better.⁶ They were under no illusions about merely observing facts and recording them. Herodotus arranged events in such a way as to set forth his theory about how history operates—namely, that it is all a matter of the outworking of human jealousy and greed. He criticized some of the tales he recorded from other people on the grounds that they betrayed too much of the observers’ (presumably eccentric) points of view. He does not say they should not have a point of view, only that he has reasons for thinking that theirs has resulted in distortion of actual events. Like all the major historians in the ancient world, Herodotus knew the difference between History proper and mere horography, the attempt to record ‘what happened’ from one day to the next.⁷ At the same time, he knew as well as we do that there are such things as actual events, and that it is the business of the historian to write about them, discounting ones which he thinks incredible.⁸

Similarly, Thucydides held a doctrine of anangke, necessity, in accordance with which cause and effect take place in the historical realm. Although he lived close enough to the events of the Peloponnesian War to be able to know pretty accurately ‘what happened’, he did not pretend, and we should not imagine, that his account is therefore ‘unbiased’. Indeed, as a sacked general watching the fortunes of the country that rejected him, that could hardly be expected. Yet, precisely from this point of view, he had the opportunity to write with both involvement and detachment: to select and arrange, of course, but also to give his readers actual knowledge of actual events. Similar things could be said, mutatis mutandis, about Livy and Josephus, about Caesar and Tacitus, and even, to some extent, about Suetonius. The fact that a human mind has to organize and arrange the material does not ‘falsify’ the history. This is simply what ‘history’ is. At the same time, Thucydides and the rest were every bit as aware as we are of the historian’s solemn duty to strive towards intellectual honesty and severe impartiality.⁹

It is not the ancients who were deceived about the nature of history, living in a pre-modern age and not knowing what critical thought consisted of. It is we who, in the Enlightenment’s rejection of reliance on auctores, ‘authorities’ in a multiple sense, have come to imagine ourselves to be the first to see the difference between subjects and objects, and so have both misjudged our forebears and deceived ourselves. Inventing ‘history’ by a backwards projection of ideology is as much if not more a modern phenomenon as it is an ancient one. It is something from which New Testament scholars themselves are not exempt.

Thus, on the one hand, ancient historians as well as modern ones were aware of the historian’s obligation to do his best not to stand in his own light: Tacitus’ famous sine ira et studio, honoured of course in the breach rather than the observance, is sufficient evidence of that.¹⁰ On the other hand, no modern historian has escaped the inevitable necessity of selection, and selection cannot be made without a point of view. No point of view, in turn, can be held without being selected, at least subconsciously. The myth of uninterpreted history functions precisely as a myth in much modern discourse—that is, it expresses an ideal state of affairs which we imagine erroneously to exist, and which influences the way we think and speak. But it is a ‘myth’, in the popular sense, for all that.

It is therefore chasing after the wind to imagine that anyone, ancient or modern, could or can ‘simply record the facts’. In my youth it was notorious that the newspaper which claimed to ‘give you the facts, straight’ was the official propagandist organ of the British Communist Party. One learns to suspect people who claim to be the only unbiased voice on their subject; normally this simply means that their agenda is so large that, like a mountain which blots out the sky, they forget that it is there at all. There is no such thing as a point of view which is no-one’s point of view. To imagine, therefore, as some post-Enlightenment thinkers have, that we in the modern world have discovered ‘pure history’, so that all we do is record ‘how it actually happened’, with no interpretative element or observer’s point of view entering into the matter—and that this somehow elevates us to a position of great superiority over those poor benighted former folk who could only approximate to such an undertaking because they kept getting in their own light—such a view is an arrogant absurdity. It would seem odd even to have to refute it, had it not had such a large influence in precisely the area of our chosen subject-matter.

All history, then, consists of a spiral of knowledge, a long-drawn-out process of interaction between interpreter and source material. This is true whether the would-be historian is a Christian, writing about Jesus and Paul with some sort of prior commitment to them, or a non-Christian, writing about them with the expectation that they were misguided. At this point Rudolf Bultmann and Bertrand Russell stand on the same ground.¹¹ This process of interaction is not a strange or unusual phenomenon, but a perfectly ordinary human one. Every time I pick up a telephone and hear a voice I form a judgment, a hypothesis, as to whose it might be. Sometimes I am right; sometimes—even when the person reveals his or her name—I am wrong. In the latter case one is compelled to go round the spiral several more times, leading eventually, one hopes, to identification. One can then concentrate on the next spiral of knowledge (which may already have begun), that of actually having a conversation in which one or both partners may not always understand what is being said straight off. It is not the case that one is simply a neutral listener, recording whatever is said on to a mental blank tape. Interaction takes place. In principle history is no different, except that source materials are usually more complicated than telephone callers.

When the historian’s source material consists of the literature of early Christianity, the situation is of course further complicated. As we have already discussed in chapter 1, many readers of the New Testament come with the assumption that it is in some way or other authoritative. It is as though one were to pick up a telephone expecting to hear a voice telling one what to do. The ordinary process of the spiral of knowledge would still go on, but this time it would be overlaid, and perhaps confused, by a different set of questions. In the case of the gospels, matters are yet worse. It is now as though the voice on the line, which is presumed to be authoritative, gives no instructions, barks no orders, but rather tells a story. It is not surprising that those who have claimed scripture as their authority have had difficulty working out what to do with the gospels. Historians have struggled to break free from the assumption that the story is authoritative; theologians, sometimes, from the recognition that this authority comes in story-form. The same double problem meets us in the epistles. How can these historical documents possibly function as authoritative? The prima facie impression of the epistles, that they are easier to use as authority because they are actually telling people what to believe and how to behave, may in fact be misleading. What if Paul is telling the Galatians to avoid being lured into Judaism and telling the Romans to avoid being lured into anti-Semitism? How can a note telling a friend that Paul is hoping shortly to come and stay with him be ‘authoritative’ for the church in a subsequent generation? Nor is it clear from the surface of the text how a discussion of meat offered to idols is to become relevant to the twentieth-century church. Even when the voice on the line actually seems to be giving instructions, how can we be sure that they are meant for us? And, conversely, if we are determined to use the epistles as in some sense authoritative, how can we do that without leaving history out of consideration, as has notoriously happened in much study of Paul?

There are, then, at least three separate sorts of exercise involved when we read the gospels and epistles, and they frequently appear to get in each other’s way—added, of course, to the fact that the caller is speaking in a foreign language and from a very different culture. There is listening, pure and simple; there is interaction; and there is readiness to respond appropriately (or, intent to avoid making such a response). These have to do with matters wider than simply history, and they thus guarantee that the task of the historian can never be simply observing and recording ‘what actually happened’. Even those who do not regard the texts as in any way authoritative must face the fact that their reading of them is inevitably conducted in dialogue with other readers, ancient and modern, who have regarded them in this way, and that some at least of the questions discussed by those at this end of the telephone line have been shaped down the years by that perspective.¹² And, further, even those who like to think of themselves as rugged individualists will have to face the fact that they share the telephone with others. The alternative is simply to be unaware of the other conversationalists and so unable to engage in dialogue with them. Studying history, it seems, is not such a simple task as is sometimes imagined. And reading the New Testament from a historical point of view is even less so.

There are two areas of special historical concern for the student of the New Testament. These will occupy us later in the present volume. Both provide classic examples of the way in which interpretative presuppositions have inevitably interacted with the handling of the data.

First, the study of ancient Judaism has long been bedevilled by a reading which ‘knew’, in advance, that Judaism was the wrong sort of religion, the dark backdrop to the glorious light of the gospel. We are now in a period of sharp, and largely justified, reaction against this. Such reaction, however, brings its own problems: there is now an atomistic, non-theological reading of Judaism, which splits it up into its different expressions and forswears any coherent synthesis except the most generalized.¹³

Second, and similarly, the study of early Christianity has for generations been dogged by the need that most writers have felt to organize the material in a theologically desirable way, squeezing the data into a quite spurious shape. The early Christians must have been a certain sort of people: we need them to have been, to sustain our view of what Christianity is. This has produced, as is now commonplace to remark, ‘the Myth of Christian Beginnings’.¹⁴ As with Judaism, reaction has set in, and atomism is currently on the increase.¹⁵

In both cases one can feel some sympathy for the modern movements. As we shall presently see, there are two tasks facing the historian: the data must be included, and an overall simplicity must emerge. But these tasks must be held in the proper balance. If simplicity (of a spurious kind) has ruled for too long, producing the Myth of a Gloomy Judaism or the Myth of a Fresh-Faced Early Christianity, it is time that unsorted data were given a fresh hearing. But there is a counter-myth present here too, the Myth of Objective Data or of Presuppositionless History, and the purpose of my present argument is to challenge it: there is in fact no such thing as ‘mere history’. There are data. Manuscripts exist, even very ancient ones. Coins and archaeological data are available. From these we can know quite a lot about the ancient world, with as good a knowledge as we have of anything else at all. But in order even to collect manuscripts and coins, let alone read, translate, or organize them into editions or collections, we must already engage in ‘interpretation’.¹⁶ There are of course disciplines which have developed around all such activities, which are designed precisely to prevent such tasks lapsing into arbitrariness. My present point is simply that all history is interpreted history.

(i) Critical Realism and the Threat of the Disappearing Object

The sheer complexity of the historian’s task, and its manifest difference from ‘mere observation’, might lead, and has led some, to the conclusion that there are therefore no such things as ‘facts’. If everything is coloured by someone’s perspective, then everything can be reduced to terms of that perspective. This is the historian’s analogue for a phenomenalist epistemology:

Observer	Evidence		Past Event
--------->		------>
looking at evidence	which seems to offer access to events
		<------
	but which may only be evidence about itself
<--------
or which in fact is only evidence about the observer’s point of view

So frequent is this assumption that we daily meet examples of reductionism based solely on the mistaken belief that only a ‘pure’ or ‘neutral’ point of view will be of any use to anyone. ‘You only say that because you’re a pessimist’ might or might not be a telling rejoinder to a claim that the present fine weather would not last. The ‘pessimist’ might have heard an accurate weather forecast. Similarly, ‘you only say that because you’re a mathematician’ has no force whatever in dismissing the idea that two plus two equals four. In this case, as in several others, the qualification adduced as the reason for the reduction should work the other way: the fact that the person addressed is a mathematician is a good reason, not a bad one, for believing their statement if it concerns mathematics.¹⁷ The equivalent in the reading of the gospels in the twentieth century has been the apparently ‘scientific’ statement that ‘Every text is first and foremost evidence for the circumstances in and for which it was composed.’¹⁸ The critic then responds to the evangelists: ‘you only say that (this story about Jesus, this word or saying) because you’re a Christian.’ True enough in some ways, but manifestly not enough in others. If being a mathematician might entitle somebody to a hearing on the subject of numbers, being a Christian might mean that someone should be given a hearing on the subject of Jesus. If we followed the reductionist line to the end—and some today are trying to do that—we would land up, as we saw in chapter 2, with the normal phenomenalist’s cul-de-sac: solipsism. One only knows about oneself, about one’s own sense-data. Mark only knew about his own theology, not about Jesus.

It may help to go back for a moment to the theory of knowledge. The fact that somebody, standing somewhere, with a particular point of view, is knowing something does not mean that the knowledge is less valuable: merely that it is precisely knowledge. There is no need, despite the assertions of many empiricists of a former age and some phenomenalists in more recent times, to reduce talk about objects external to ourselves to talk about our own sense-data, so that instead of saying ‘this is a desk’ I should really only say ‘I am aware of sensations of hardness, flatness and woodenness such as I usually have when I sit here’, or possibly, to get rid of the suggestion that I have illicitly imported a reference to an actual object, namely myself, ‘there is here a sensation of hardness, flatness and woodenness’—or perhaps, more simply, ‘hardness—flatness—woodenness!’. The fear that ‘actual events’ will disappear beneath a welter of particular people’s perceptions is a fear of this sort, and is to be rejected as groundless. As a particular example, it must be asserted most strongly that to discover that a particular writer has a ‘bias’ tells us nothing whatever about the value of the information he or she presents. It merely bids us be aware of the bias (and of our own, for that matter), and to assess the material according to as many sources as we can. ‘Intellectual honesty consists not in forcing an impossible neutrality, but in admitting that neutrality is not possible.’¹⁹ Similarly, the fear of ‘objectivization’ which so affected Rudolf Bultmann’s theology may be laid to rest. Bultmann, within his neo-Kantian philosophical heritage, was anxious about seeming to talk of objects or events other than by talking of them in relation to the observer. He therefore insisted (among other things) on doing theology by doing anthropology, following Feuerbach in collapsing god-talk into man-talk.²⁰ We simply do not have to accept such false dichotomies. It is not the case that some things are purely objective and others purely subjective, or that one must reduce either to the other. Life, fortunately, is more complicated than that.

The discovery, therefore, that someone has a ‘point of view’, or has selected or arranged material, or has a characteristic style or turn of phrase, does nothing whatever to tell us whether what the writer is talking about (if he or she purports to be describing events) actually happened or not. There are such things as events in the external world. Many of them can be described, more or less. But a writer can no more describe them without selecting them according to a point of view than he or she can watch them without using his or her eyes.

The point may be made this time with the help of a visual metaphor. If I am presented with a telescope, supposing myself never to have seen such a thing before, I may eventually find out that if I lift it to my eye I can see things at the other end which I did not expect. All sorts of thoughts might then come into my mind. If I have met kaleidoscopes in the past, I might suppose this to be a variation on the theme, and try twisting the far end to see if the interesting picture, which I assume is somehow inside the opposite end of the instrument, will change. It might actually do just that, due to my altering the focus; my (wrong) suspicions will have been (wrongly) confirmed, and I will have to make several twists of the spiral of knowledge, as well as of the telescope, before I eventually discover the truth. Or I might imagine that there was an angled mirror at the other end, giving me information about something external to the telescope but adjacent to myself. So we could go on. But the fact remains that, even though I am looking through a particular lens, there are objects out there in the real world (as all but the most dyed-in-the-wool solipsist is bound to admit), and I am really looking at them, albeit of course (a) from my own point of view and (b) through a particular set of lenses.

So it is with history. The telescope of one particular piece of evidence—a book, let us say, of Thucydides’ history—contains particular lenses, arranged in a certain fashion. No doubt there are things outside its range. No doubt there are things which, because they are far apart from each other, cannot be seen through it at the same time. But Thucydides as he writes, and we as we read, are not looking into a kaleidoscope at a fictitious landscape. Nor are we looking through a slightly angled mirror which merely reveals where Thucydides, or we ourselves, happen to be standing. We are looking at events. The lens may distort, or the fact of looking with only one eye may lead us into errors of perspective; we may well need other lenses and viewpoints to correct such errors; but we are looking at events none the less. Critical realism, not the abandonment of knowledge of the extra-linguistic world, is required for a coherent epistemology.²¹

As applied to the gospels, this clearly means that, although we must read them with our eyes and ears open for the evangelists’ own perspective, and must be aware too that part of that perspective is their wish to involve their readers in the material itself (they are no mere cool, detached observers, and nor do they wish us to be), this of itself in no way cancels out the strong possibility that they are describing, in principle, events which actually took place. If we reject this or that event, we must do so on quite other grounds from those regularly advanced or hinted at, namely that the evangelists are not ‘neutral’, that their work reveals their own theology rather than anything about Jesus.²² We might apply the same point to the vexed question of Pauline theology. The discovery that Paul was addressing a particular situation, and looking at it in a particular light, is frequently hailed as indicating that the passage in question is therefore purely situational, and does not express or embody a basic theology, or worldview. This is simply bad logic. It is a false either-or, typical of the traps into which biblical scholarship regularly falls.

In particular we must note that the answer to the question ‘what is a historical question?’ is not ‘a question about mere facts’.²³ History is primarily the history of human beings, and it attempts to plot, uncover, and understand from the inside the interplay of human intentions and motivations present within a given field of initial investigation. What a positivist would call ‘the facts’ are part, and an inseparable part, of a much larger whole. The move from ‘fact’ to ‘interpretation’ is not a move from the clear to the unclear: events are not mere billiard-balls cannoning into one another, to which different ‘meanings’ or ‘interpretations’ can be attached quite arbitrarily, according to which game is being played. Some ‘meanings’ or ‘interpretations’ will be, as we shall see presently, more appropriate than others. This point affects the study of the New Testament in all sorts of ways. Attempts to split off two levels of questions (first we ask when, where and by whom a book was written, then we ask what it says) are actually absurd, for all their popularity. In order to address either set of questions we must integrate it with the other. This will require that we produce historical hypotheses which take into account the complexities of human motivation, which in turn need an exploration of the worldviews and mindsets of the communities and individuals involved.

As I just hinted, this argument should not be taken to mean that all angles of looking at events are equally valid or proper. As critical realism gets to work, it is discovered that some angles of vision do less justice to the information than others. Arguably, the Gospel of Thomas presents a considerably more distorted angle on Jesus of Nazareth than does the Gospel according to Mark; and even those who disagree, and who would put the matter the other way around,²⁴ would agree that some accounts are closer to the events they purport to describe than are others. All accounts ‘distort’, but some do so considerably more than others. All accounts involve ‘interpretation’; the question is whether this interpretation discloses the totality of the event, opening it up in all its actuality and meaning, or whether it squashes it out of shape, closing down its actuality and meaning. To return to our billiard-balls: a Martian, observing a game of billiards, might guess that these strange humans were testing the ballistic properties of some new weapon. A human observer who had seen snooker played, but never billiards, might imagine that billiards was a poor attempt to play snooker with limited equipment and a good many mistakes. Both ‘interpretations’ of the data would distort, closing down the event and rendering many aspects of it incomprehensible. The watcher who knew what billiards was all about would, in one sense, likewise distort: he would at once limit the range of possible interpretations, and if by chance the players were after all testing a new weapon he would come to the correct interpretation long after the Martian. But in principle his interpretation would disclose more than it concealed, opening up the event so that more and more of it fitted. His story would be more complete and satisfying. The historical analogue for this is the account which not only describes ‘what happened’ but which, as we shall see, gets to the ‘inside’ of the event.

(ii) The Causes of the Misconception

Why then the problem? In particular, why have so many scholars been coy, to say the least, about ‘events’ in the gospels being actual events, rather than simply fictions in the mind of the evangelists?

It is sometimes thought that the real reason is the rejection of the ‘miraculous’, and hence the felt impossibility of using the gospels as serious history. About this I shall have more to say later, when writing about Jesus.²⁵ But a basic point must be made here. Accounts of strange happenings in any culture or tradition are of course subject to legendary accretions. But one cannot rule out a priori the possibility of things occurring in ways not normally expected, since to do so would be to begin from the fixed point that a particular worldview, namely the eighteenth-century rationalist one, or its twentieth-century positivist successor, is correct in postulating that the universe is simply a ‘closed continuum’ of cause and effect. How can any scientific enquiry not allow for the possibility that its own worldview might be incorrect? (If it is replied that certain types of argument and enquiry would cut off the branch on which the worldview was sitting, the counter-reply might be that, if that is where the argument leads, you had better find yourself another branch, or even another tree.)

This is emphatically not to say that the pre-Enlightenment worldview was after all correct. Why, once we challenge the prevailing dualisms, should there only be two possibilities, the ‘pre-modernist’ and the ‘modernist’ ones? To say that the gospels cannot be read as they stand because their view of the ‘miraculous’ conflicts with the Enlightenment worldview does not of itself mean that they can only be read as they stand from within a pre-critical Christian faith. There might be plenty of other worldviews, not necessarily Christian ones, within which one could read the gospels without being offended by the ‘miracles’. Nor is it to say that if we are to read the gospels as they stand, ‘miracles’ and all, we must frankly admit that we are ceasing to do ‘history’ and are now doing something else, namely ‘theology’, or a kind of meta-history. Only if we have devalued ‘history’ so that the word now means ‘the positivist recounting of those sorts of events which fit with an eighteenth-century worldview, and which seem to have actually happened’, would we need to think that. My whole argument here has been that ‘history’ ought to mean more than this, namely the meaningful narrative of events and intentions; and it is vital that we do not foreclose too soon on the possibility of ‘meanings’ other than we had originally envisaged. The closed mind is as damaging to scholarship as the ‘closed continuum’ idea is to history itself. If we are committed to history, there is always the possibility that when, after several trips around the hermeneutical spiral, we find certain places to stand from which we can see the material in an appropriate light, we will find that some of those places are something like Christian faith. This is not a certainty before we start. Nor would it necessarily be the case that the sort of Christian faith that we might discover in practice to be such a vantage point would look at all like what is, or what has been, thought of as orthodoxy.

The problem about ‘miracles’ may have been a proximate cause of the desire on the part of some theologians (Reimarus, Strauss, Bultmann, etc.) to read the gospels in a non-historical way. I do not think it was the only, or even the most pressing, reason. There were deeper reasons, lying not in the eighteenth century (when ‘miracles’ began to be perceived as a problem) but earlier. Many critical methods were devised not in order to do history but in order not to do history: in order, rather, to maintain a careful and perhaps pious silence when unsure where the history might lead. As a child in a fairground might stick out her foot to prevent herself from sliding down a ramp too fast and out of control, so many theologians have refused to abandon themselves to the changes and chances of the historical enterprise, and have either kept the brake firmly on or, in extreme cases, simply refused to join in the fun at all. Or, to change the metaphor, they are frightened of history as a walker is of a swamp: one might sink without trace.²⁶ If there is a convenient bridge, so much the better. If the swamp won’t hold us, so much the worse for the swamp; we shall decide not to cross it at all.

One particularly prevalent form of this argument is the suggestion, most appealing in Lutheran circles, that to base one’s faith on history is to turn it into a ‘work’, and thus of course—within that confessional perspective—to falsify it. That is at least part of the reason, along with the neo-Kantian rejection of ‘objectification’, for Bultmann’s adoption of this perspective. But this argument would only hold if it were the case that early Christianity held a thoroughly non-Jewish, perhaps a Gnostic, premise (which was of course precisely what Bultmann then argued at a history-of-religions level; this argument has recently been given a new lease of life)—a premise, that is, that true religion was to be found by abandoning history and finding salvation in a realm completely outside it.²⁷ But using such an argument is not only totally untrue to the thought of the early church, which as a whole (Paul and John included) remained far more Jewish than Bultmann ever imagined: it is also confused as to the nature of faith. Faith may be the opposite of sight. It is also, in some important senses, the opposite of doubt. To say that basing one’s faith on events is to turn it into a ‘work’ (as though one were oneself responsible for those events!) is to be justified not by faith but by doubt. This of course begs the question of what an ‘event’ is. As we shall see when considering Jesus’ life, and particularly his death, an event is a highly complex thing, being not merely a set of happenings in the public world but the focal point of a variety of human intentionalities. Within those intentionalities—themselves the proper object of a certain type of historical questioning, however difficult—there may (or may not) be found what is sometimes thought of as significance or meaning. Again I must stress: the only sense in which this kind of understanding is inaccessible to the historian is if by ‘historian’ we mean ‘someone holding an eighteenth-century European worldview, and committed to the belief that significance is not to be found within ordinary events’.

There is another related reason why some biblical scholars, within post-Bultmannian theology at least, have wanted to reduce the telescope provided by the gospels to either a kaleidoscope or an angled (and distorting) mirror. This reason is the desire for relevance, perceived in terms of universalizability. How can the teaching of Jesus, and the events of the gospel narratives, have ‘meaning’ for those outside that time and place? If we are merely looking at events in the life of Jesus, they cannot have anything to say to us. They must just be examples of the higher truth which they embody, mere manifestations or examples of the ‘real thing’; it was perhaps wrong-headed or even dangerous to write them down, because people might mistake them for the real thing; maybe it shows a failure of nerve on the part of the early church, who should have been looking to the living Lord of the present and the coming Lord of the future, not to the Jesus of Nazareth of the past. We must not (this view continues) be deluded into thinking that the events themselves are important. Thus it is that parables which originally contained Jesus’ message to Israel are made to contain instead a universally relevant message.²⁸ The Procrustean bed of the ‘timeless Jesus’ myth is then used as the measure for lopping off all the bits which do not fit, and we are reduced to a ‘historical Jesus’ who just happens to have lost all his main connections with his own actual historical place and time. We shall address these issues in their proper place; for the moment we note them as a further problem in one common would-be ‘historical’ reading of the gospels.

We must therefore challenge several of the assumptions which have commonly been made about history in general and the gospels in particular. First, we must reject the idea, common since Reimarus, that ‘real’ history will undermine the ‘interpretative’ and particularly the ‘theological’ elements in the gospels. All history involves interpretation; if the evangelists offer us a theological one, we must listen to it as best we can, and not assume that our own, especially a ‘neutral’ or positivist one, will automatically be right. It could just be that at the end of the day some ‘interpretation’—or perhaps more than one—might after all bring out as well as seems possible the full significance of the events. To rule out such a possibility a priori would be an odd way of striving after ‘objectivity’. History does not rule out theology; indeed, in the broadest sense of ‘theology’ it actually requires it.

Second, as the mirror-image of this point, we must insist that the gospels, though they are (as redaction-criticism has emphasized) theological through and through, are not for that reason any the less historical. The fact of their being interpretations does not mean they are not interpretations of events; if it did, there would be no events, since as we have seen all events in history are interpreted events.²⁹ Theology does not rule out history; in several theologies, not only some Christian varieties, it actually requires it.

Third, we must note in a preliminary way (we shall return to the point later) the multiple possibilities inherent in the word ‘meaning’ as applied to history. At its basic level, the ‘meaning’ of history may be held to lie in the intentionalities of the characters concerned (whether or not they realize their ambitions and achieve their aims). Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon ‘meant’ that he intended to set himself up above the law of the Republic. At another level, ‘meaning’ may be held to lie in the contemporary relevance or consequence of the events. Those who farmed on the Italian side of the Rubicon would have said that Caesar’s crossing ‘meant’ certain things in terms of the subsequent state of their land. Again, the fact that we have uncovered a certain set of human motivations may suggest parallels in other historical events, including those contemporary with ourselves, where a similar set of intentionalities may be present, and from which we may deduce a ‘meaning’ in terms of our own world.³⁰ Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon ‘means’ that would-be tyrants are to be watched carefully when they make vital symbolic moves. At yet another level, ‘meaning’ may be attributed to events on the grounds that they reveal the divine intention, and thus speak powerfully, whether to the ancient or the modern world, pagan as well as Jewish or Christian, of the nature and/or purposes of ‘God’, or a god. Caesar’s eventual fate ‘means’ that his hubris did not go unnoticed, or unpunished, by divine vengeance.

Granted, then, that we are interested in ‘what actually happened’, we (and by ‘we’, I here mean historians in general) are also interested in why it happened. That question, in turn, opens up to reveal the full range of explanations available within any given worldview, including (in the case of answers available within first-century Judaism) the intentions not only of humans but of Israel’s god. If we are to understand how things looked in the first century, and how things look to us, this full range of explanation must be kept open. We shall explore these various aspects of the subject more fully in the next chapter.

(ii) The Requirements of a Good Hypothesis

There are thus three things that a good hypothesis (in any field) must do. Each of these needs further discussion, but it is important to get the shape clear at this stage.

First, it must include the data. The bits and pieces of evidence must be incorporated, without being squeezed out of shape any more than is inevitable, granted that I am looking at them through my own eyes, not from a god’s-eye-view. It will not do to pretend that the smoke was a low cloud, or to imagine that the ‘explosion’ was simply the slamming of a large door nearby.

Second, it must construct a basically simple and coherent overall picture. It could be that neither the explosion, the smoke, the fire-engine nor the police car had anything to do with each other, but until we collect more data, such as observing the police car going away from the fire and towards a bank which is being robbed, it is simpler to suggest that they are parts of the same reasonably straightforward whole.

These first two aspects of a good hypothesis—getting in the data, and simplicity—are always, of course, in tension with each other. It is easy to create simple hypotheses at the expense of some of the data; it is easy to suggest explanations for all the data at the cost of producing a highly complex and convoluted hypothesis. Both these alternatives are encountered frequently within New Testament studies, not least the study of Jesus. ‘Jesus the simple Galilean peasant’ is straightforward, but ignores a good deal of the evidence, and the hypothesis is not noticeably strengthened by the addition of all kinds of speculations which purport to account for how the rest of the data were dreamed up by imaginary groups in the early church. Conversely, most ‘conservative’ readings of Jesus include all the data, because that is their aim, but without any historically cogent account of Jesus’ aims and intentions during his ministry.

In any given field, it is quite likely that there will be several possible hypotheses which will include more or less all the data, and do so with reasonably simplicity. There is therefore a third thing that a good hypothesis must do if it is to stand out from the others. The proposed explanatory story must prove itself fruitful in other related areas, must explain or help to explain other problems. In my original example, other problems would include the explosion, and extra things to which I had not originally paid much attention, such as the fact that a side-road I passed earlier had been closed off.

When we apply these criteria to hypotheses about Judaism, Jesus, or to the whole business of the origin of Christianity, we find that the problems are naturally somewhat more complex than a city fire. First, we find that the stack of data to be included is vast and bewildering. In a historical hypothesis the data are of course source materials: in the ancient period this means written documents mainly, but there are also inscriptions, artifacts, archaeological evidence and so forth. A mass of material has to be assembled, and the historian who wishes for simplicity will find plenty of temptation to leave out half the phenomena in the interests of coherence.³³ The Jewish sources alone are a lifetime’s study; the gospels present a range of problems quite unique in themselves; the forms of speech and writing the early Christians used, not least the apocalyptic imagery so familiar to them and so strange to us, will constantly lead us astray unless we keep on our guard. And, as always with ancient history, sources have a habit of not telling us what we really wanted to know. They do not explain something which they could take for granted; we may have to reassemble it painstakingly.³⁴ We are like paleontologists struggling to piece together a set of bones which a dinosaur had used all its life without even thinking about it. Simply seeing and assembling the data is a monstrous task.

Second, and consequently, the construction of an essentially simple historical hypothesis is likewise a major problem. It involves keeping all the key questions about Jesus in mind continually, and refusing to admit a solution in one area which leaves the rest in turmoil and disorder. It is at this stage, as we shall see later, that some New Testament scholars have evolved highly sophisticated ways of getting off the horns of the dilemma posed by these two criteria. If parts of the data do not fit the simple hypothesis (e.g. that Jesus expected the end of the world very shortly, and therefore had no time to think of founding a church), then we have ways of dealing with the recalcitrant data: there are several tools available which purport to show that it comes, not from Jesus himself, but from the later church. The data thus disappear from the picture of Jesus, but at a cost.³⁵ And the cost is the resultant complexity of the picture of the church and its creative activity and traditions. Anyone who has studied modern traditio-historical criticism of the gospels knows just how intricate that can be, and how few fixed points there really are. What we are seeing in such a situation is the high degree of implausible complexity in detail that is the purchasing price of simplicity, in outline, either of a portrait of Jesus, or of the picture of the early church and its hypothetical development, or for that matter of Pauline theology. It is only when we keep in mind the importance of the essential simplicity of the whole jigsaw that we become dissatisfied (intellectually; we may well feel other sorts of dissatisfaction with the present state of tradition-criticism) with results of this sort.

The third criterion (making sense of other areas outside the immediate chosen field) obviously has to do, in the case of work on both Jesus and Paul, with the wider jigsaw of the first century as a whole. In particular, large problems have been raised about the relation between our two main subjects themselves, and any hypothesis about the one which makes good sense as it points towards the other must have a decided advantage over one which leaves the two simply poles apart. It is when scholars try to keep Jesus and the early church at arm’s length from each other that extra phenomena are imported, such as Paul’s supposed Hellenization of the original Jewish gospel. This saves the phenomena, and deals with the wider issues, at the cost, once again, of simplicity.

We have so far omitted one criterion which regularly plays a part in historical hypotheses about the New Testament. I refer to the contemporary practical relevance, actual or imagined, which the hypothesis may have. We have seen a little of this already, in chapter 1, and will look at the particular forms it has taken in the introductory chapters to successive volumes. Here the point to be made is quite simple, though at this point the effects on Jesus-study and Paul-study divide.

Few people, faced with the uncomfortable fact that Jesus did not after all underwrite their favourite project or programme, are prepared to say ‘so much the worse for Jesus’. That, after all, was what his contemporaries did, and we have become used to criticizing them for it. This was why, as George Tyrrell said, the nineteenth-century liberal ‘lives of Jesus’ succeeded only in seeing the reflection of their own faces at the bottom of a deep well.³⁶ Thus the many highly varied models of Christianity currently available, all of which have some sort of a place for Jesus, strongly resist any change in their own version of his portrait, since, as they rightly perceive, this might have considerable and perhaps unwelcome effects in other areas of life and thought. This innate conservatism has of course meant that the average churchgoer (and many theologians are, or were at one time, average churchgoers) has an inbuilt resistance to mere innovation or silliness. It also means that serious and well-founded suggestions for modifying the picture of Jesus are sometimes wrongly dismissed out of hand. Such a process of rejection operates (as of course do innovative proposals) at a variety of levels, which it would take a sociologist or psychologist to explore.

What about Paul? We have already mentioned the way in which the portraits of Judaism, and of the early church, have been bent to suit the requirements of contemporary hermeneutical schemes. Sometimes, the Jews are the villains; sometimes, the tragic heroes. Sometimes, the earliest Christians are the noble pioneers; sometimes, the peculiar primitives. When we turn to Paul, as a special case within the early church, we discover a rather different phenomenon. It is common for people to say, in effect, that Paul believed x but we believe y, which is incompatible with it. Plenty of people still want to have Paul as an ally, but, perhaps understandably, there are far fewer scholars who are committed to this position than there are who want to keep Jesus on their side. One might have thought that this would have meant a greater degree of ‘objectivity’ in the results: if we are free to disagree with Paul, we are also free to let him be himself. Things are not, alas, as easy as that. What quite often happens in Pauline scholarship is that Paul is assumed to hold a view credited to him by some of his expositors, and a scholar who disagrees with that view criticizes Paul as though he were responsible for it. Two good examples are Schoeps’ scolding of Paul for being a Lutheran, and Maccoby’s even less temperate dismissal of him as a Hellenistic Gnostic.³⁷ Alternatively, some scholars come from traditions (some English ones, for instance) in which it has long been fashionable to be somewhat patronizing and dismissive of Paul: a fine fellow, no doubt, but a bit muddled and over-dogmatic, and in short not quite the sort of theologian one would care to have around in polite society. It then becomes important to find enough points of agreement to retain credible continuity with him, and enough points of criticism to avoid being tarred altogether with the Pauline brush.

It is of course part of a coherent epistemology, as I argued in chapter 2, that the knower cannot know without being involved. Positivism is no better when studying history than at any other time. In addition, as I suggested in chapter 1, the fact that the controlling story of some people’s lives includes Jesus, and perhaps Paul, in a highly positive light means that there need be no pretence of ‘neutrality’, which is often simply a smokescreen for unexamined prejudice. But if the controlling criterion for a particular story is its ability to legitimate a particular stance, whether Christian or not, we have collapsed the epistemology once more in the opposite direction, that of phenomenalism. The historical evidence is only to be used provided it functions as a mirror in which we can see ourselves as we wanted to see ourselves. And this would be to deny the possibility of new stories, of subversion or modification to the stories we already tell ourselves. That way, philosophically, lies solipsism, as we have already seen; that way, historically, lies the closed mind. That way, theologically, lies fundamentalism, the corporate religious solipsism that cannot bear the thought of a new, or revised, story.

Thus, if the proposed hypothesis turned out to point us towards a form of Christianity which some people found unacceptable, or if it suggested the abandonment of Christianity altogether, it would be open to anyone to propose going over the argument again to see if a mistake had not been made. But one could not use the perceived unacceptability as a ground in itself for rejecting the historical hypothesis.³⁸ If we are to test the hypothesis, we must proceed strictly on the stated grounds: getting in the data, achieving appropriate simplicity, and proving fruitful in other fields. Of course, such ‘verification’ consists of humans telling stories perceived to be successful explanatory stories, and this will always involve interaction between knower and data. But one must not allow that inevitability to lure one into simply projecting on to the material either the position one wants to embrace or the position one desires to reject.

History, then, just like microbiology or indeed anything else, proceeds by hypothesis and verification. This, I suggest, is how it has always been, even with the study of Jesus and the gospels and Paul and the epistles. Schweitzer, Bultmann, and the rest, including the ‘New Quest’ practitioners who argued so long about appropriate criteria ³⁹—all of them were appealing tacitly to this scheme of thought. All had in mind some hypothesis, some controlling story, which they were defending by the claim that they were dealing with the data, operating with as simple a scheme as possible, and trying to see how this would shed light on other surrounding material. The trouble has been that this method, though used in fact, has often been unacknowledged, and so has not always operated properly; bad arguments have passed unnoticed because attention was diverted away from the danger signs (carelessness about data, or happy acceptance of unnecessary complexity) which would have warned that all was not well. In particular, scholars have worked with dominant but misleading models of the early church, which as we shall see have exercised a major though often unnoticed influence on the study of Jesus and Paul.

As an example of the latter phenomenon, we may consider Wrede’s celebrated hypothesis about the so-called ‘messianic secret’.⁴⁰ First there was Jesus, who in no way thought of himself as Messiah. Then there was the early church, who hailed him as such (why?) despite his innocence of the idea. Then there was the ingenious and anonymous hero who, faced with this anomaly, invented the explanation that Jesus had after all spoken of himself as Messiah, but had always kept the matter strictly secret. Then there was Mark, who took this scheme and deliberately embodied it in a continuous narrative. Even he did not do such a good job, since there are still oddities, such as those times in the gospel when it seems as though the secret is being let out too soon. And all this is supposed to have happened within forty years. This is not to say that quick and dramatic theological development is impossible. It quite often happens, and the first century is a good example. But development of this oddity and complexity, for which complex and bizarre motivations have to be invented, stage by stage, out of thin air—this is asking us to believe quite a lot. A hypothesis which explains the data without recourse to this kind of thing is always going to prove more successful, and rightly so. Wrede paid dearly for the simplicity of his basic (and simple) idea—that Jesus did not think of himself as Messiah—at the cost of ultra-complexity everywhere else, and even then there was a lot of data which still refused to fit. It is no good cleaning out under the bed if the result is a pile of junk under the wardrobe.⁴¹

(iii) Problems in Verification

There is currently much proper and necessary discussion, for instance among philosophers of science, as to (a) the relative weight to be attached to the different criteria used in the verification or falsification of hypotheses, and (b) the proper working out, in any particular field, of what will count as satisfying each criterion in itself. These are important problems, and we must examine them more closely.

It is clear that the sort of balance required between inclusion of data on the one hand and simplicity on the other will vary according to the subject-matter. The paleontologist has a skeleton to fit together. If she creates a beautifully simple structure which omits a few large bones, her colleagues may accuse her of satisfying the second criterion at the expense of the first, and will take with a pinch of salt her theory that the other bones belong to the animal who was eating—or perhaps being eaten by—the one now constructed. Simplicity has been achieved at the cost of getting in the data. If, however, a second paleontologist produces a skeleton which cunningly uses up all the bones but has seven toes on one foot and eighteen on the other, the opposite conclusion will be drawn: the data have been included, but simplicity abandoned, and distrust will this time be levelled at any bizarre evolutionary explanation of the new story. But which of the two theories will be preferred? On balance, I think, the former: it is harder to imagine the peculiar mutation ever really existing than it is to suspect that a few extra bones may have intruded into the pile. But this victory of simplicity over data (which only means that one story is better than the other, not yet that it is the best possible one, nor yet that it is true) cannot be assumed to hold in all fields of enquiry, and human history is a case in point. The very subject-matter of history is unruly, and all attempts to reduce it to order by a sort of intellectual martial law are suspect. The more one knows about any event, the more complex one realizes it to be. Simplicity is much easier to project on to events when little evidence is to hand. Thus, though there will be an eventual or ultimate simplicity about a good historical hypothesis, and though one should not rest content with odd complexities, inclusion of data is ultimately the more important of the first two criteria.

But what precisely counts as inclusion of data? The details of this as applied to the gospels will be worked out later. But for the moment we must at least say that this aim, the first goal of any hypothesis, must be achieved by treating the evidence seriously on its own terms. A literary text must be treated as what it is and not as something else. The present debates about the genre and intention of the gospels are particularly germane to this. Likewise, a paragraph in a gospel must be studied as what it is and not as something else, and new directions in form-criticism may have something to say about that. We have seen far too much would-be historical reconstruction of Jesus in which tools of thought and criticism have been used in an ad hoc, indiscriminate fashion. First we take some inconvenient passage in the gospels and dismiss it as evidence for Jesus by treating it casually as an early church production. In doing so, we quietly ignore, or postpone, the ever-increasing set of traditio-historical problems thus created at the ‘early-church’ point of the jigsaw: how can we explain such complex material being produced by the early Christians, if it does not go back to Jesus? In addition, we quietly ignore the actual nature of the material itself.⁴²

At this point in the historical study of the New Testament some pressure is regularly exerted within the guild to show how ‘critical’ one’s scholarship really is—i.e. to show whether or not one really belongs to the post-Enlightenment club of historical scholarship—by demonstrating one’s willingness to jettison this or that saying or incident in the gospels, or this or that paragraph in Paul, in the interests of a particular hypothesis. This pressure acts (among other things) as a sort of guarantee that one is not after all a fundamentalist in disguise. But this legitimate desire for serious historical and critical reading of the sources, and the proper refusal to go back behind Reimarus to a day when such questions could not be raised, is perverted if it leads us to ignore the fact that, in history, it is getting in the data that really counts. And we need at this point to reopen the question, often closed this century: does it really count as ‘getting in the data’ to say ‘this is a creation of the early church’? It might, if we could produce a really workable hypothesis about the early church which would support this theory, but in my judgment such a story has not yet been suggested. Study of the actual history of the early church is in its infancy, but already the young child is showing signs that it will soon become vigorous enough to attack the speculative hypotheses that have for so long usurped its place in the family (see Part IV).

A good deal of New Testament scholarship, in fact, and within that a good deal of study of Jesus, has proceeded on the assumption that the gospels cannot possibly make sense as they stand, so that some alternative hypothesis must be proposed to take the place of the view of Jesus they seem to offer. It has been assumed that we know, more or less, what Jesus’ life, ministry and self-understanding were like, and that they were unlike the picture we find in the gospels.⁴³ But hypotheses of this sort are always short on simplicity, since they demand an explanation not only of what happened in the ministry of Jesus, but also of why the early church said something different, and actually wrote up stories as founding ‘myths’ which bore little relation to the historical events. We may grant, of course, that the truth in these matters is likely to be very complex. But we are faced with three factors which militate against this sort of complexity. There is, (on any showing) the comparative chronological closeness of the gospels to the subject-matter they purport to describe.⁴⁴ There is, second, the high probability that the earliest Palestinian Christianity continued in many important respects the sort of ministry in which Jesus himself had engaged.⁴⁵ There is also the fact that we have available within current scholarship several quite plausible hypotheses about Jesus which include whole reams of data that it was formerly thought impossible to include.⁴⁶ As a result, the position of those who insist that the story of the gospels cannot be taken in any sense as history begins to look like that of the paleontologist who, finding a skeleton actually preserved all together, insists that there was not and could not have been an animal like that, and that it must somehow therefore have been put together at a later date (perhaps by Theissen’s ‘committee for misleading later historians’).⁴⁷ As soon as a simpler hypothesis turned up—or even before that!—it would be a bold scientist who continued with such an argument. It is my contention, in the field of the historical study of Jesus, that the present state of traditio-historical study of the gospels has reached this sort of point, and that a simpler hypothesis, doing more justice to the data as a whole, is within reach.

The same, once more, is true of hypotheses about Paul’s thought. There are several hypotheses on offer which achieve an apparent simplicity at the cost of either stripping away several verses as later accretions—i.e. removing evidence—or suggesting that many of the major themes and passages are actually self-contradictory and incoherent—i.e. admitting intractability of evidence. There is, of course, such a thing as later glossing of old texts. There is also, of course, such a thing as incoherence, and it is possible, in principle as well as in practice, that any writer, ancient or modern, may be guilty of it. But one should never suggest removing evidence which does not fit the theory unless there are good arguments for doing so on quite other grounds.⁴⁸ And the latter possibility—the admission that the evidence seems intractable—must be considered very carefully, both in itself and in its damaging effects on the hypothesis which contains or requires it, before being adopted. Such a position positively invites a new proposal for a clear solution which resolves the difficulty.

Granted all this, what is to count as satisfying the criterion of simplicity? Historians, as we suggested above, need to take care at this point. Scholars who enjoy tidiness, perhaps for quite other reasons, may well inflict their desire for order on to the material, leaving the historical workshop so tidy that no-one can find where anything is. History is not about tidiness, but, most often, about the odd, the unrepeatable and the unlikely. It is therefore important to state that not all forms of simplicity are of equal value. If we are to attempt to distinguish, in the limited field of history, between different types of simplicity (or, negatively, between different types of complexity), we might do so as follows. The areas where simplicity might count strongly are in human aims and motivations, in the continuity of the person. Granted that human beings are highly complex entities, living in a highly complex world, and very often failing to achieve a high level of behavioural consistency, there is still nevertheless such a thing as coherence and stability of character, so that unusual or abnormal behaviour (that is, behaviour unusual or abnormal for that person, granted what else may be known about him or her) invites special investigation and explanation. In the same way, actions and events simply do have consequences and sequels. An apparently odd jump or break in a chain of events invites similar investigation. Here we are justified in looking for simplicity: can we understand something at least of how the central actors in the drama were motivated and behaving, and of how, as a result, events took the course they did?⁴⁹ It is precisely because this sort of simplicity is important that the major questions we shall raise about Jesus in volume 2 are what they are. The complexity of many hypotheses at just these points is one of their major undoings. Once again, the same would be true of Paul. Any hypothesis which can display an overall consistency of thought, provided that the data are retained and enhanced, and provided that there is at least the promise of coherence with wider fields of study, will always be preferable to one which leaves the writer as a scatty individual, chopping and changing his mind at every turn.⁵⁰ The same would in principle be true if we were studying Aristotle, Athanasius, Beethoven or Barth.

There is a different sort of simplicity, however, which has been very attractive to New Testament scholars, but whose value is extremely questionable. Many hypotheses have been constructed whose simplicity lies in straightforward ‘movements’, and in the unilinear developments of great ideas. Christianity, it is imagined, began very simply, and then developed into increasing complexity.⁵¹ But this is just not true of ideas and how they work. If anything, the ‘simpler’ form is likely to be the developed and polished result of many years of work whereby a complex phenomenon has been patiently tidied up and made more manageable. Another example is the scheme proposed last century by F. C. Baur, which still exercises a good deal of influence in some quarters today. How simple, how tidy, to have Jewish Christianity developing this way, Gentile Christianity developing that way, and then the two joining together to make Early Catholicism!⁵² To object that such a scheme smells of Hegel is to miss the serious point. Nor will it do to suggest that the scheme cannot be true because it began as an intellectual construct (in the mind of F. C. Baur) and was only subsequently worked out in its details. It is not a valid criticism to say that the hypothesis was the beginning, rather than the end, of a large study of the data. All hypotheses, as we have seen, work like this. They all begin either as a modification of a story already told by a group or individual, or as the story at which, by an intuitive leap, the researcher arrives. Rather, such a scheme fails as history, because—as can be seen in the havoc it makes of the actual data—history simply does not seem to have moved like this, in neat unilinear patterns. We find regress as well as progress. There is downright change, not simply smooth observable development. People and societies retrace steps, try different paths. They do not always march forward in a straight line. This is not to deny that there are such things as movements of thought. I have elsewhere tried to describe some that are going on at the present time among New Testament scholars.⁵³ But, as has been shown powerfully in recent years, the simplicity of Baur’s idealist scheme was deceptive. The time available for it to have taken effect is simply too short; there is too great a multitude of data to which it has to sit loose (the fact, for instance, that our main evidence for ‘Jewish Christianity’ as such is late, and for ‘Gentile Christianity’ very early); and its pet theories about history-of-religions derivations, especially in the area of christology, have collapsed entirely. There is a tidiness proper to full human life. There is also the tidiness of the graveyard.

The final problem about hypotheses is that, when all is said and done, there may be more than one possible hypothesis which fits the evidence. The question may, in technical language, be underdetermined. This is particularly likely in ancient history, where we have so little data to work with, in comparison with what we have for, say, the sixteenth century.⁵⁴ We are inevitably, to some extent, like the paleontologist who ‘reconstructs’ the brontosaurus from half a dozen small bones. Perhaps after all it was a mastodon. The theoretical possibility of two or more equally good solutions is, however, a problem that most historians are happy to live with. Since it is extremely difficult, to put it mildly, for any one of the guild to hold all the relevant data in his or her head at one time, we need each other, and should welcome, in the best scientific tradition, having our attention drawn to bits of evidence we had overlooked, to unnecessary complexities in the hypothesis, or to parts of neighbouring subject-areas where the hypothesis seems to create new problems instead of solving old ones. As to what happens when we finally arrive at two or more significantly different hypotheses which both seem to meet all the criteria equally adequately—well, we will cross that bridge when we come to it. I do not expect that to be soon.

(i) Event and Intention

History, then, is real knowledge, of a particular sort. It is arrived at, like all knowledge, by the spiral of epistemology, in which the story-telling human community launches enquiries, forms provisional judgments about which stories are likely to be successful in answering those enquiries, and then tests these judgments by further interaction with data. But there are three more levels of understanding, proper to history in particular, at which we must now look.

To begin with, history involves not only the study of ‘what happened’ in the sense of ‘what physical events would a video camera have recorded’, but also the study of human intentionality. In Collingwood’s language, this involves looking at, or at least for, the ‘inside’ of an event.⁵⁵ We are trying to discover what the humans involved in the event thought they were doing, wanted to do, or tried to do. The apparently obvious counter-example proves the point: when historians try to write about pre-human or non-human history they regularly invoke some idea of purpose, whether that of the cosmos, of some sort of guiding life-force, or even some sort of god. The argument for total randomness becomes harder and harder to sustain. Odd things happen, but as soon as they happen somebody starts to ask ‘Why?’ And (to return to ordinary, human, history), the answer to the question ‘Why?’ normally involves not only the physical properties of the ‘objects’ involved (the vase broke because it was made of glass and came into contact with a hard floor) but also the aims, intentions, and motivations of human beings and how these affected the observable events. The vase broke because (a) part of my overall aim is to live in a beautiful house, and I perceive that if I encourage my children to decorate it with flowers this will be a means to achieve this aim; (b) my intention was to hand my daughter a vase to put flowers in, and (c) I was motivated to do so at that moment; but (d) she was not expecting me to let go of it when I did (we might perhaps speak of my inappropriate motivation), and so there came a time when nobody was holding the vase, and it fell to the floor. The ‘outside’ of the event is that the vase broke. The ‘inside’ of the event is a story, not only about the physical properties of vases and floors, but more particularly about human aims, intentions, motivations and consequent actions. About these we must say a few more words of explanation; this is an area where important points will be made later on.⁵⁶

By aim I mean the fundamental direction of a person’s life, or some fairly settled subset of that fundamental direction. This aim is thus the directional aspect of an individual’s mindset, by which I mean the individual subset of, or variant on, the worldview held by the society or societies to which the individual belongs.⁵⁷ Talking about the ‘aim’ enables talk about worldviews and mindsets to be given its proper directional aspect (i.e. the sense that they involve purpose and movement) without which they might collapse back into an apparently static form, in which humans were simply machines which, once programmed, stayed in the same place performing the same mental or physical operations. This, I believe, would be fundamentally counter-intuitive. When, therefore, we ask about someone’s ‘aim’, we are going ‘inside’ an event to the point where some of the most basic questions are to be found.

By intention I mean the specific application of the ‘aim’ in a particular (and in principle repeatable) situation. Obviously, the line between the two is fairly arbitrary, and it might even be possible to reverse the two words without doing violence to the English language. But some such division is often helpful. It was Paul’s ‘aim’ that he announce Jesus as Messiah and Lord in cities and towns around the Mediterranean world. It was his ‘intention’, as one result of this aim, that he should work his way around the Aegean seacoast, and, having finished there, move on to Rome. When we look at Jesus’ ‘intention’ in going to Jerusalem for his last and fateful Passover, we must see it in the light of his overall ‘aim’: how did his intention on this occasion relate to the underlying aims and goals which motivated him throughout his ministry?

By motivation I mean the specific sense, on one specific occasion, that a certain action or set of actions is appropriate and desirable. Jesus’ aim was (we may say) to inaugurate the ‘kingdom of God’; his intention, towards the end of his life, was to go to Jerusalem; within both of these, he was motivated on one particular day to go into the Temple and set about overturning tables. Within Paul’s general aim and intention, he was motivated on one particular occasion to debate with philosophers in the Athenian market-place; on another, to write a highly rhetorical letter to Corinth; on another, to initiate a collection on behalf of the church in Jerusalem.

It is, of course, quite possible that particular motivations will conflict with aims and intentions: Aristotle devoted a sizeable discussion to this problem, and he was by no means the last to do so.⁵⁸ It is one of the problems of discussing (say) Judas Iscariot that we find it difficult to discern a motivation, for his crucial action, that makes sense in itself and in relation to the aims and intentions that we must assume for him during the time of his following Jesus. But in a great number of cases we can see at least a broad fit between aim, intention and motivation. I aim to become a Cabinet Minister; I intend to become master of my corner of the political world; having a spare weekend, I am motivated to read up a new part of my field, or make the acquaintance of some useful contacts. If, granted the presence of suitable opportunities, I am never sufficiently motivated to do these things, it is appropriate to question the truth of the claim about my aims and intentions. Weakness of will (what Aristotle called akrasia) does of course occur, so that the challenge might be resisted; but it makes sense to offer it.

History, then, includes the study of aims, intentions and motivations. This does not mean that history is covert psychology. It is no doubt possible in principle to move beyond the three aspects already studied, and to ask, of particular characters, why they had that particular set of aims or intentions; or why, on that particular occasion, they were clearly motivated to act (as we might say) ‘out of character’. Possible in principle, maybe; very difficult in practice. As anyone with any counselling experience knows, it is difficult and delicate to ask these questions of a friendly, honest and outgoing individual who, sharing the same culture as ourselves, is sitting with us and co-operating in the process. Much harder with a depressed, confused or hostile subject; harder still with a subject of whom we only know what history has happened to leave behind. We might be able to make intelligent guesses at the psychological state of Napoleon, or Martin Luther, or even Jesus; but to do so is to face enormous difficulties. We must insist, however, that to study the ‘inside’ of an event does not mean going that far. We can say, as historians, that King David chose Jerusalem as his capital because (a) his aim was to unite the twelve tribes of Israel, (b) his intention was to find a capital that would not obviously ‘belong’ to any one of them and thus be suspect, and (c) his motivation, at a particular moment, was to take Jerusalem, as being an obvious and well-situated case in point. We can say, as historians, that Augustus Caesar’s aim was to bring peace and stability to the Roman world, that his intention was to do this by means of securing power for himself and settling problems around the frontiers of (what became) the empire, and that his motivation was to confirm Herod in power in order to keep Palestine in good order. I think we can say, of the Teacher of Righteousness, that his aim was to found the community of the True Israel over against the usurpers in Jerusalem, that his intention was to do so by giving his followers a solid basis of biblical exegesis and a community rule, and that his motivation was, on particular occasions, to write this text now. We can say similar things, as I shall argue later, about Jesus and Paul. In no case does this involve us in psychological speculation. It involves the historical study of worldviews, mindsets, aims, intentions and motivations. We are on ground which can be debated without necessarily having to invoke Freud or Jung, and without pretending that we can see, in the case of a subject from the distant past, what would be hard enough to see in a co-operating contemporary.

Finally, if history involves all these things it must clearly involve them not just at the level of individuals, whose mindsets are involved directly, but also of societies, whose worldviews are at stake.⁵⁹ But how do we study societies and their worldviews? By means of their symbols, their characteristic behaviour, and their literature, particularly the stories they tell explicitly and implicitly. Societies and cultures reveal their worldviews by the cultural objects they produce, from banknotes to bus-tickets, from skyscrapers to subway cars, from pottery to poetry; from temples to Torah scrolls, from military emblems to funerary monuments, from gymnasia to amulets. Symbols provide the interpretative grid through which humans perceive both how the world is and how they might act within it: they provide a vision of reality and a vision for it.⁶⁰ Symbols cluster around the characteristic behaviour of a society, and vice versa: the celebration of festivals, the regular means of dealing with dissonance, the rituals associated with birth, puberty, marriage and death. And, in many cultures, symbol and characteristic behaviour are also focussed in literature of all sorts. It is by studying these things that the historian can uncover the worldview of another culture, and thus set the stage for enquiring about the mindsets of individuals within that society.⁶¹

The task of the historian is thus to address the question ‘Why?’ at all possible levels, down to its roots in the way the people under investigation perceived the world as a whole. But if this is so it will not do to answer the question simply by listing various antecedent circumstances in any particular order. The historian’s job is to examine the balance of factors and reach a conclusion which sets out the connected train of events, giving them their appropriate weighting.⁶² How is this to be done?

(ii) History and Narrative

The task of the historian is not simply to assemble little clumps of ‘facts’ and hope that somebody else will integrate them. The historian’s job is to show their interconnectedness, that is, how one thing follows from another, precisely by examining the ‘inside’ of the events. And the model for such connections is not simply that of random atoms cannoning into one another. It is that of the interplay of fully human life—the complex network of human aims, intentions and motivations, operating within and at the edges of the worldviews of different communities and the mindsets of different individuals. To display this, the historian needs (it will come as no surprise) to tell a story.⁶³

This is the point at which the historian needs to use an intuitive or imaginative construction. As I argued in chapter 2, this is something that binds the historian to all other disciplines. All knowledge proceeds by the telling of new stories, and these stories make their way by the process of verification discussed earlier. But the historical hypothesis itself, like all steps forward in knowledge (once naïve realism has been abandoned), comes from within the historian, and thus from the resources of story-telling inherent in his or her direct or second-hand experience. This may include analogy, the recognition of similar patterns of events in two different periods, but may well go beyond it. I have frequently asked my students why Rome was especially interested in the Middle East. Few of them come up with (what seems to me) the right answer: that the capital needed a constant supply of corn; that one of the prime sources of corn was Egypt; and that anything which threatened that supply, such as disturbances in neighbouring countries, might result in serious difficulties at home. (It is the more surprising that this story does not come readily to mind, considering the obvious analogies with late-twentieth-century politics: substitute oil for corn, certain other countries for Rome on the one hand and Egypt on the other, and the equation still works.) But this account of how things were—of why, for instance, someone like Pontius Pilate was in Palestine in the first place—is not read off the surface of one particular text. It is a story told by historians to explain the smaller stories they do find on the surface of their texts. Reaching even so simple a story requires controlled and disciplined imagination, but imagination none the less.

It is important to stress this because, as we shall shortly see, a great many people within the guild of New Testament specialists have written very little history as such. Attention to particular problems, yes; attempts to write the connected history of even part of the first century, no.⁶⁴ There are few books in the field which correspond to (say) J. B. Bury’s History of Greece, or even Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy.⁶⁵ More characteristic of the discipline as it has been practised, since the First World War at least, are commentaries on particular books, detached studies of smaller-scale problems, and exegetical notes on detailed texts. There is no recent work which does for the early church, or yet for Jesus, what the new edition of Schürer’s classic History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ does for its subject-matter, showing en route that despite the fears of New Testament scholars first-century history is alive and well.⁶⁶ Anyone who doubts whether one can write actual history based on sources most of which were written from positions of faith (not Christian faith, as it happens, but positions of faith none the less) should read the first volume of Schürer and observe the critical sifting of sources, the narrative construct in which the writers project themselves by sympathetic imagination into the worldviews and mindsets of the characters involved, and the synthesis which results.⁶⁷ The result is a narrative, a story, in which the data are contained, for the most part, within a comparatively simple scheme, which contributes substantially to our knowledge of events in other areas as well. This is what history—real history, not some strange figment of the critical imagination—looks like. Thus, even if no recent comparable work on early Christianity has yet been written, there is no good reason in principle why it should not be. We have, granted, no Josephus for early Christianity. But the other sources for Jewish history are no more or less scattered and fragmentary, no more or less biased and partial, than the Christian ones, and the task of reconstruction is no more or less hazardous and (in the senses discussed already) ‘subjective’.

The trouble is that when New Testament scholars are faced with page after page of historical description and narrative, albeit peppered with explanatory footnotes and discussions of tricky points, they feel uncomfortable—especially when the subject is Jesus. They feel sure that questions must be being begged, that unwarranted harmonization must be going on somewhere. I submit that this fear is unnecessary. Of course there is to be harmonization. All serious historical writing presupposes that a sequence of events did actually take place, a sequence which has an ‘inside’ as well as an ‘outside’. A good historical account offers precisely a harmonious treatment of the whole; that, as we have seen, is one of its tasks if it is to be taken seriously as history.

That is not to say, of course, that a harmonious account is necessarily correct. It could not be: Meyer, Harvey, Borg, Sanders, Horsley, Crossan and many others in the last fifteen years have stood out against the general trend and written internally harmonious accounts of Jesus—and they all disagree with each other at various points. They cannot all be right all of the time.⁶⁸ Harmonious accounts must be tested like any other hypothesis. But it is to say that a harmonious account is not by its very nature in correct. Certain events did happen, and it is in principle possible to work towards finding out what they were, and to improve on previous attempts at the task. It is this sort of exercise that will be attempted in Parts III and IV of the present volume, and throughout the next one.

One important aspect of the narrative is the sequel. It is one of the problems about studying ‘contemporary history’ that one has no sequel to work with; and where a sequel is lacking, an appeal, perhaps tacit, can be made to ideology to fill up the vacuum.⁶⁹ There is, of course, a great danger about sequels. ‘Hindsight’ tends to be an abuse word when we are analysing a period: we want to see and feel what it felt like at the time. But it is equally true that the full story of the ‘inside’ of an event may only be unfolded gradually, in the light of subsequent and consequent events. It was only in the years after the Second World War, as the truth about the ‘Final Solution’ came to be known, that one could really understand what had been going on all along in Germany in the 1930s. There are, of course, such things as effects which are intended by no-one. There are also effects which are intended by someone, or some group, and which only gradually come to light. As Albert Schweitzer saw, we need to understand something of the second generation of the Pauline communities in order to understand fully just what Paul himself was up to.⁷⁰ As Ben Meyer argues, it may be ‘in the tradition generated by Jesus that we discover what made him operate in the way he did’.⁷¹ The narrative must therefore point forward beyond itself to embrace the future. And in doing so historians find themselves, from time to time, using the word ‘meaning’. This causes problems of its own.

(iii) History and Meaning

It is within this framework that we can at last approach the vexed question of ‘meaning’. There has been a well-known debate about the meaning of meaning running in philosophical circles for some time, and, like a good deal else in this volume, we cannot pursue it here.⁷² It is, however, necessary that I should offer at this stage a brief account of what I at least understand by the concept. It may be clearest if we work up from the smallest units to the largest.

First, the meaning of a word (following Wittgenstein) I take to be its use in a context, or an implicit context; that is, its use or potential use in a sentence or potential sentence.⁷³ If I say ‘book’, the meaning of this is in doubt until I form a sentence: ‘I am going to book the tickets’; ‘The book is on the desk’; ‘The criminal was brought to book.’ Even where a word is clearly univocal, we can never rule out possible metaphorical meanings, and in any case we only know the univocal meaning through experience of sentences in which it has become plain.

Second, the meaning of a sentence is its place in a story or implicit story.⁷⁴ ‘The book is on the desk’, spoken by my assistant, carries a different meaning (a) in an implicit story in which I have been searching my shelves in vain for a particular book, and (b) in an implicit story in which I had intended to hide the book before the next person entered the room. ‘Jesus was crucified’ carries different meanings in the story told by the centurion as he reported back to Pilate, in the story told by the disciples to one another the same evening, and in the story told by Paul in his mission preaching.

Third, the meaning of a story is its place in a worldview. (This assumes, no doubt, several intermediate stages, in which lesser stories acquire meaning within larger ones, and so on.) As we have seen frequently, stories relate in a variety of ways to worldviews: they articulate them, legitimate them, support them, modify them, challenge them, subvert them, and even perhaps destroy them. The same story can have different meanings in relation to different worldviews. The parable of the Good Samaritan, told to an ardent Jewish lawyer, would be bound to threaten or subvert his worldview. The same story, told to an ardent Samaritan nationalist, might reinforce his. The story of the collapse of the Berlin Wall is already being widely used to reinforce the Western liberal-capitalist worldview. The same story is being used by neo-Marxists to subvert older Marxist theory: that experiment failed, but we will get it right next time. The stories that historians tell gain their meaning from an overall worldview. In the introduction to the second edition of his book on the nature of history, E. H. Carr faces the possibility that the story of events between the first and second editions might subvert his worldview, his belief in progress, and then advances other arguments to suggest that he can still retain it after all.⁷⁵ And it is quite clear, as we suggested a moment ago, that the question of sequel looms large in these discussions. If things really turn out differently in the end, the meaning of a story, including the early parts, will be different. If the owner of the vineyard had returned, ignored the tenants’ behaviour, and let them keep the vineyard in perpetuity, the meaning of all the earlier events would have to be seen in a different light. The ending of a story or play, being the sequel to the main part of the action, forces us to look back on earlier scenes with new eyes: is The Merchant of Venice, when all is said and done, really a comedy, or is it in fact a hidden tragedy?

What is true of stories is emphatically true of events. The meaning of an event, which as we saw is basically an acted story, is its place, or its perceived place, within a sequence of events, which contribute to a more fundamental story; and fundamental stories are of course one of the constituent features of worldviews. The fall of Jerusalem possessed one meaning for the writer of 4 Ezra, who saw it as an unmitigated disaster, subverting his expected story as thoroughly as the hypothetical ending to Little Red Riding-Hood which had the woodcutter freeing the wolf and marrying the heroine. It had a radically different meaning for Josephus, who tried at least to make out that he saw it as the result of Israel’s god going over to the Romans, thereby perhaps tacitly revising his worldview to take account of the new situation. It had yet another meaning for the author of Mark 13, where it is seen as the destruction of a neo-Babylon. Thus, at every level with which the historian is concerned, from individual words right up to whole sequences of events, ‘meaning’ is to be found within a context—ultimately, within the context of worldviews.

Does this mean that ‘meaning’ must always remain private? Have we, by implication at least, moved so far away from a positivistic idea of ‘meaning’, from the belief that there is a ‘real’ or ‘true’ meaning somehow ‘out there’, waiting to be discovered, that we have collapsed the whole scheme into a solipsistic phenomenalism? By no means. Two counter-arguments may be advanced.

First, events and their sequels are essentially public. Though the historian (and, for that matter, the lawyer, and a good many private individuals) wants to know about the inside of the event, the event itself is public property. The worldview of the Flat Earth society is progressively undermined by each round-the-world sailing, each photograph from space; when Guildenstern says to Rosencrantz that he doesn’t believe in England, the response (‘The conspiracy of the cartographers?’)⁷⁶ loses its plausibility when they eventually arrive (or do they)? If events are public, they can be discussed; evidence can be amassed; and some worldviews become progressively harder and harder to retain, needing more and more conspiracy theories in order to stay in place, until they (sometimes) collapse under their own weight. We have witnessed this on a grand scale in recent events in Eastern Europe.

Second, worldviews, though normally hidden from sight like the foundations of a house, can themselves in principle be dug out and inspected.⁷⁷ Reaching them is signalled by some such sentence as ‘that’s just the way the world is’. When someone else says ‘no, it isn’t, either the conversation stops or battle is joined; and the battle consists of each side telling stories designed to subvert the other or to reinforce itself. And, in this discussion, what is really at stake is precisely the adequacy or appropriateness of the meanings assigned to a variety of stories and events within the worldview itself. This process, then, which belongs fairly obviously to the critical-realist epistemology I have been advancing all through, guarantees in principle that, though ‘meaning’ can never be separated from the minds of humans who suppose it, nor can it simply be reduced to terms of those humans themselves, whether individuals or groups. Dialogue is possible. People can change their beliefs; they can even change their worldviews. At the beginning of John 20 Thomas would have assigned one meaning to the crucifixion. By the end he had assigned it another. Conversion happens: Saul becomes Paul; Francis embraces a new vision of what it might mean to be human. ‘Meaning’, like events, is ultimately a matter that comes into the public sphere.