Marcus Borg and Tom Wright, together with their mentor George Caird, represent an important strand in thinking about the Historical Jesus. Their national and political approaches criticise earlier schools of thought such as: the eschatological orientation of Johannes Weiss and Albert Schweitzer; the Protestant liberalism of Adolf von Harnack and his followers; and the German existentialism of Rudolf Bultmann, Günther Bornkamm and Hans Conzelmann. Their jointly authored book, The meaning of Jesus, is a readable and stimulating introduction to their shared approach and to the wider debate.
Despite their commonalities, Borg and Wright take sufficiently different stances for there to be a genuine debate covering many of the issues raised by the search for the historical Jesus. Their differences arise from their methods, personal interests, work contexts and faith journeys. Borg divides the Gospel materials into history remembered and history metaphorised while Wright argues for the basic factuality of the Gospels. Wright approaches the historical materials on the basis of hypothesis and verification: the most satisfactory hypothesis being the one that incorporates the most data. Borg operates on the basis of source criticism, constructing his hypothesis from the sources considered to be earliest. Borg teaches comparative religion in secular institutions and so his portrait of Jesus is painted in language that is not exclusively Christian and emphasises features common to cross-cultural religious experience. Wright is a Church of England Bishop with a fascination for first-century Judaism so, in describing Jesus uses Judeo-Christian terminology and sets him emphatically within his context. Borg’s faith journey has involved rejection first of an undiscriminating Christianity that says it is all true, then of a narrow modernism that says none of it is literally true, so it is not true at all. His approach, therefore, is concerned to make intellectual distinctions between literal and metaphorical truth. Wright’s faith journey, however, has seen his historical debate contained within a continuing, though at times troubling, walk with God. His approach, therefore, is inclusive of that knowledge which comes through relationship.
One of the most fascinating aspects of the book is their unresolved debate with post-modernism and relativism. Both are at pains to flag up the provisional nature of the conclusions that they draw, influenced, as they understand themselves to be, by the factors noted above. Yet neither can abandon the belief that objective truth can be attained through the application of scientific methodology to historical evidence.
That their debate with post-modernism is unresolved and that they clearly believe in the validity of the quest for the historical Jesus means that they do not fully engage with other approaches to the Gospels. Scot McKnight made a telling comment when he said that: “Historical Jesus study today is actually the place many of us who were once Gospel students belong, since we were more often than not concerned with history than with the literary and narrative shapes.”
Borg and Wright, while the comparison of their differing perceptions does genuinely open up debate, do not engage in this book with other approaches to the Gospels such as the literary and narrative approaches that McKnight mentions. Interpretive thinking often occurs within specialist and developmental streams and, as a result, individual interpreters do not engage fully with the range of insights available across the specialisms and within less contemporary aspects of the interpretive tradition.
The result is that the title of their book cannot be fully accurate. ‘The Meaning of Jesus’ cannot be fully identified through the historical approach alone or by the political and national approach that Borg and Wright share or through their particular enthusiasms. The meaning of Jesus will only become fully apparent through a broader, less partisan endeavour.
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Steve Taylor - Jesus Is For Losers.
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