Should the Historical Jesus matter to people of faith?
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In this post I want to try to respond to one of the comments that was left on my last post on whether or not the historical Jesus can be recovered. I argued that I am quite sure that we can recover very early memories of Jesus, but whether or not these get us to the historical Jesus himself is still open for me because of the way in which social memories are constructed from the get-go (both as a natural process or a conscious plan). I think we would need to look at the picture of the early memories we recovered and then do some evaluating from there, with the caveat that we are treading on very dangerous waters.
The questions left in the comments?
For me personally this is very difficult for me to answer because even though my project is not about faith - it is an historical project - the results matter for some people of faith.
I have found that for some Christians they could care less, because for them the Jesus they know is the Jesus of the spirit and the scripture, the Jesus of faith as you put it. There is nothing that an historian is going to say that will make a bit of difference to their religiosity or change their perception of their own experience of God. They are like Paul, the apostle who knew next to nothing about Jesus' life or teachings, and this didn't seem to matter one bit to him in terms of his faith which was based on a mystical experience and conversion.
But then there are those Christians who want their faith to be factual, because for them only facts are true/truth. So they want to align their faith with what they understand to be historical facts about Jesus. It is for these people that the Jesus Seminar was so valuable, because it gave them a new "scientifically"-constructed red letter edition of Jesus' teaching, minus all the supernatural stories and theology.
For me to suggest that the Jesus of history may be lost to us, and all we have are memory constructions of him by Christians writing long after he is dead, can be traumatic for some Christians because we live in a society where truth and fact are equated, and where myth-story-memory-experience (which are definitely not observable empirical facts) are what? Untruth? Highly suspect? False?
So now we see scholars like Richard Bauckham coming to the rescue of these "faithfully nervous", trying out the argument that the early memory constructions in the gospels must have been those of eyewitnesses (they do?) because the texts make this claim (so what?) and because these eyewitnesses were the apostles (they were?) we can trust them (we can?) because they wouldn't purposefully lie to us (they wouldn't?) and we all know that our memories are fairly accurate anyway (they are?).
So I don't know if this answers your questions, which are honest and good questions. But should this information be distributed from the pulpit? I have found in my classroom when students begin to think critically about the scripture, many become angry and confused, wondering why they didn't hear about any of this in their churches. To these people, it matters.
The questions left in the comments?
I'm a preacher who has had no anxiety (or little, at any rate) about preaching what has been called the "Jesus of faith." Can you say what you think the implications of your method of constructing Jesus might have for those who preach, who take" the quest," as you have described it seriously? Is this something that simply doesn't belong in the pulpit? Or... do you have no opinion on this, since your project is scholarly and not about faith?There is a long history about this very issue - of faith and reason and whether reason should matter to faith. I leave that to your reading.
For me personally this is very difficult for me to answer because even though my project is not about faith - it is an historical project - the results matter for some people of faith.
I have found that for some Christians they could care less, because for them the Jesus they know is the Jesus of the spirit and the scripture, the Jesus of faith as you put it. There is nothing that an historian is going to say that will make a bit of difference to their religiosity or change their perception of their own experience of God. They are like Paul, the apostle who knew next to nothing about Jesus' life or teachings, and this didn't seem to matter one bit to him in terms of his faith which was based on a mystical experience and conversion.
But then there are those Christians who want their faith to be factual, because for them only facts are true/truth. So they want to align their faith with what they understand to be historical facts about Jesus. It is for these people that the Jesus Seminar was so valuable, because it gave them a new "scientifically"-constructed red letter edition of Jesus' teaching, minus all the supernatural stories and theology.
For me to suggest that the Jesus of history may be lost to us, and all we have are memory constructions of him by Christians writing long after he is dead, can be traumatic for some Christians because we live in a society where truth and fact are equated, and where myth-story-memory-experience (which are definitely not observable empirical facts) are what? Untruth? Highly suspect? False?
So now we see scholars like Richard Bauckham coming to the rescue of these "faithfully nervous", trying out the argument that the early memory constructions in the gospels must have been those of eyewitnesses (they do?) because the texts make this claim (so what?) and because these eyewitnesses were the apostles (they were?) we can trust them (we can?) because they wouldn't purposefully lie to us (they wouldn't?) and we all know that our memories are fairly accurate anyway (they are?).
So I don't know if this answers your questions, which are honest and good questions. But should this information be distributed from the pulpit? I have found in my classroom when students begin to think critically about the scripture, many become angry and confused, wondering why they didn't hear about any of this in their churches. To these people, it matters.