What Most of Us Get Wrong About (the Quest for) the Historical Jesus

Or At Least Westerners

Photo by Ries Bosch on Unsplash

I am having to read literary and historical author Michel de Certeau for a seminar, and while his writing is decidedly tough to decipher, he is repeatedly insightful. He often cautions against a “progress” mindset that the Western way of doing history and writing history is inevitably more truthful than ancient ways of remembering. In fact, he seems to argue that the Western and colonial way of doing history had (and has) a hubris that we, with our instruments, can keep the past while previous civilizations relied on fables that forget or lose their origin. Here is Certeau talking about the heavy hand of a colonial writing of history (of note, he is not talking about the writings of Jesus, but how colonizers would produce and remember history).

Here the decisive element is the possession or privation of an instrument that at the same time ‘keep things in all their purity’ and stretch all the way ‘to the other end of the world’. In combining the power to keep the past (while the primitive ‘fable’ forgets and loses its origin) with that of indefinitely conquering distance (while the primitive ‘voice’ is limited to the vanishing circle of its auditors), writing produces history. On the one hand, it accumates, keeps an inventory of the secrets from the West, it loses nothing, it preserves in an intact state… With writing the Westerner has a sword in his hand which extend its gesture but never modify its subject (Certeau, The Writing of History 215–216).

So what does this have to do with Jesus?

If you get into research on uncovering the historical Jesus and the treatment of sources, you will inevitably hear phrases like

“Ancient authors didn’t care about history in the way we care about history.”

“They’re not doing history in our sense.”

“There is nothing truly historical about the gospel writings of Jesus.”

Make no mistake, the early writings about Jesus are not history as we understand it in our Western way of categorizing. However, there is a veiled value judgment in these types of sentiments that our way is inherently superior. Or even, that there is no actual history or reality in ancient material simply because they do not remember in the same way that we remember. It is why Christian apologists can get under my skin sometimes because they try to fit the writings of Jesus with common categories like eyewitness testimony, verbatim reporting, and other modern categories that simply do not map onto the gospels. Skeptical apologists can similarly get under my skin because they dismiss the writings about Jesus as being completely fictionalized solely because they are not historical in the way we categorize historical.

Hear me clearly, I am not commenting on whether I believe certain things happened in history or in reality. I am not saying there was no such thing as myth or ahistorical writings, I am commenting on the Western mindset to think that we can better capture the past in a way ancient people could not. That in some sense, we can verify something as historical, and if ancient people only had our tools, then we could be certain about certain events or happenings of the past.

Heck, we can barely capture our present with videos and photos very well, and we are living it (take the recent shooting of Renee Good)!

This is about the hubris of trying to make ancient people “remember the past” in the same way we do, and of dismissing or accepting them based on these Western criteria. Despite common thought, our methodology of doing history cannot capture the past or uncover it in its purity. Not to relativize the past, but to put limits on how well we can describe reality. Perhaps oral cultures had ways of remembering the past that had certain advantages when compared to our ways. Or perhaps, they simply had different ways. Let me relate it back to our thoughts on the “historical” Jesus.

In a sense, I think we should not come to the writings about Jesus as conquerors, looking to make them our type of history or dismiss them as not our history. Rather, to try to carefully and humbly decipher how and when they are writing their present and remembering the past.

Looking at Jesus as either “the Jesus of history” or the “Christ of faith” is perhaps already limiting how ancient people remembered their past or thought about their present. Whether we notice it or not, often when we view historical writings, we believe we can “keep things in all of their purity”. That we, distanced and divorced from the culture and the times can replicate history with a certainty. Therefore, what both Christian and Skeptical apologists get wrong is that there is a dichotomous choice between “Primitive Fable” and “True History”. This is not at all saying there was not a reality or true facts that happened and that can in some way be verified. However, it is trust in a methodology that can somehow keep the past pure while other people(s) had no recourse to it.

As I’m doing a longer series on the historical Jesus, Certeau has at least got me to think on this. I am not set in my ways, so let me know what you think, or maybe what your disciplines and areas of study can contribute to thinking about history and the writings about Jesus. I’m especially interested in people involved in the sciences think about history and the methodology of history.