Testing the Gospel story
Johnson, Luke Timothy
Meier has pursued with such diligence, intelligence, and integrity. I note with some bemusement that the advance readers' copy I am using for this review trumpets the volume as "John Meier's quest...
...I suspect that when the dust settles— even on this long road—we shall find that the "historical Jesus" is just where he was all the time: in the fourfold testimony and interpretation of the Gospel narratives...
...I think Father Meier's achievement is this: against all the crazy theories that pretend to be critical yet are not, and press the pieces into any number of dubious shapes, he shows that several of the pieces that the Gospel narratives emphasize as important to the figure of Jesus have a very high degree of historical verifiability...
...For, if what is essential to a person is not the facts of when and where or the facts of what was said and done, but rather the meaning of those facts for those whose experience and memory of the person was also part of their historical reality, then there is no place else for us to look...
...Things that can be determined by historical methods, furthermore, are rendered neither more nor less real by such determination than those things that cannot be determined by historical methods...
...What is most important about any human character—and this holds as true for Meier and me and Socrates as it does for Jesus—is precisely what eludes the methods of critical historiography, namely the meaning of that character...
...I think probably not...
...As I have suggested, even if we are able to determine pieces of the gospel tradition that most probably go back to Jesus, we are not thereby allowed to make inferences from a collection of facts to the sequence, frequency, proportion, relative importance, and above all, meaning of these facts...
...One can show that Jesus exorcized demons, spoke in parables, and spoke of God's rule, but from this evidence one cannot say why he so acted, or what it signified to him...
...The problem here is not the lack of data but the intrinsic inaccessibility of meaning, which must derive from the interpretation of the facts rather than the facts themselves...
...This is a claim that Meier himself has repeatedly and explicitly rejected...
...He knows that his method will not yield "the real Jesus...
...35...
...All that is affected is the quality of our knowledge of those things...
...It has simply become more "historical" in character...
...The harder question is whether it can yield anything more than "the historically verifiable Jesus...
...I note with some bemusement that the advance readers' copy I am using for this review trumpets the volume as "John Meier's quest for the real Jesus...
...It should be observed further that what can be verified historically (that which is "most probable" in historical terms) is not at all necessarily what is most central or pivotal to Jesus' ministry, any more than we can deduce from what is unique to a person what is essential to that person...
...That is, they are the "most certainly historical" elements of the Gospel...
...I suspect, however, that Meier hoped also to finish the quest for the historical Jesus by finally doing it right...
...Not a meager accomplishment...
...This method enables the examiner to reach elements that probably went back to Jesus...
...Nor is our knowledge made greater or better or even more certain...
...But "most certain" in historiography means simply "most probable...
...And he may do so, precisely by revealing how, when it is done right, it does not get us where we wanted to go...
Vol. 121 • November 1994 • No. 20
