These different approaches to sources lead to a different handling of the other key difference between Borg and Wright, their handling of story. There are two important aspects to story in relation to Jesus; the stories that we tell about him and the story that he told himself. The examples given earlier of the “many faces” of Jesus within twentieth century art are evidence of the multiplicity of stories currently told about Jesus.
In many respects, it is the quest for the Historical Jesus that has opened up the possibility of this multiplicity. This is ironic because the quest was an attempt to pin down the person of Jesus one way or the other. To demonstrate that the historical figure of Jesus either was just a man or was the Son of God as orthodox Christian belief states. Instead, far from establishing truth, it has led to pluralism of personal opinion about Jesus. As with all pluralism, the question is raised, are all stories/beliefs relative or is there a shared understanding to be gained? Both Wright and Borg would seem to argue for the latter. Wright argues for the centrality of the story that Jesus told, and within which he saw himself, as the common core to which we can turn. Borg, despite its ironic result, argues for identification of the actual words of Jesus through source criticism.
For Wright, human life can be seen “as grounded in and constituted by the implicit or explicit stories which humans tell themselves and one another”. Stories are “one key element within the total construction of a worldview”. Worldviews are a vital part of the historical hypothesis, both the worldview of the society/culture and the mindset of the individual within that culture. In searching for the aims of Jesus, Wright argues, “we are looking for a particular mindset within a particular worldview, quite possibly challenging that worldview in some ways, but with intentions that make sense in relation to it”. He sets Jesus and his mindset within the story of the coming kingdom of Israel’s God arguing that “the crucial element in his prophetic activity was the story, both implicit and explicit, that he was acting out”. This was “Israel’s story reaching its climax”.
Borg may accept the approach but not its conclusion. His reconstruction of Jesus’ mindset is built from a smaller pool of material than that of Wright. One effect of this approach is to divorce Jesus from much of the Gospel materials that explicitly link him to Israel’s meta-narrative, the story of salvation history. Borg views material from the Gospels that either makes an explicit reference to an Old Testament passage or prophecy, or material that is constructed to echo an Old Testament story, as history metaphorised. In this way, Borg isolates the historical Jesus from a key element in his context.
As well as taking this significant step away from the first-century context, Borg also sets the historical Jesus in the context of another story - the story of the history of religions. Aspects of this story could be told in terms of the first-century Jewish context. This would involve debates about syncretism, worship of idols and purity codes, but this is not the story that Borg tells. Instead Borg’s storybook is William James’ 1902 book, The Varieties of Religious Experience. The story within which Borg sets the historical Jesus is not a first-century one at all instead, it is a twentieth century history of religious experience. The categories that Borg uses to describe the historical Jesus are not first-century Jewish categories that Jesus and his contemporaries would have recognised and used. Instead, they are twentieth century categories used in academic cross-cultural religious studies.
In choosing, through his methodology, not to engage with Israel’s meta-narrative Borg loses not just valuable data for his hypothesis but two important dimensions of faith - revelation and relationship. Salvation history is where God communicates and interacts with human beings. The quest for the historical Jesus, like the history of religions, has a human starting point and is predicated on the basis of what is knowable through reason and empiricism. Salvation history, however, has a divine starting point and is predicated on the basis of God’s revelation of himself.
It is not a question of one being right and the other wrong, an either/or. That would be dualistic. It is a question of both/and. Without salvation history to provide its context, the quest for the historical Jesus is open to personal bias and restricted meanings. Without the kind of grounding in historical, cultural and psychological data that the quest for the historical Jesus has attempted to provide, salvation history exists solely as an internal hermeneutic and cannot effectively be communicated to those outside the Church.
We stand at a point in the history of Christianity where we no longer have to have the either/or, of saying either that it is all literally true or that none of it is literally true. We stand at a point in time where we can combine natural theology and revelation and where historical re-construction can be set within the meta-narrative of God’s acts in history. To do this, we need to examine all the source data with all the tools available, within the over-arching context of the story of God’s self-revelation within history. Only then will the radical Jesus emerge. The Jesus who “used the language of his time to give the old war cries a totally new and broader content”. The Jesus of God’s narrative, not the Jesus of our personal preferences.
The story that we tell about Jesus and the way in which we tell that story is vital because it is not simply about a theoretical set of our beliefs but about the story within which we will live out our lives. The story that Jesus told and within which he lived has to operate for us, as Christians, as a regulative narrative. We cannot do that if we extract Jesus from his context within the story of God’s dealings with the world in history through Israel (both the Jewish people and the Church). This is why Wright’s emphasis on the importance of faith knowledge in relationship with historical knowledge is spot on and to be defended against the arguments of Borg.
In Sophie’s World, the philosopher Alberto Knox hopes that Sophie’s religion teacher will “succeed in showing what a exceptional man Jesus was”. Knox’s letter continues:
“With Jesus we see how dangerous it can be to demand unconditional brotherly love and unconditional forgiveness. Even in the world of today we can see how mighty powers can come apart at the seams when confronted with simple demands for peace, love, food for the poor, and amnesty for enemies of the state.”
It is easy, in this debate over sources and story, historical knowledge and faith knowledge, understanding Jesus in context and Jesus’ self-understanding, to lose sight of the point that, in knowing not just the meaning of Jesus but the man himself, “Jesus [will] inspire us to prolong the logic of his own ministry in an imaginative and creative way amid changed historical circumstances." We must tell and act out our story within the story that Jesus told and lived, as opposed to telling the story of Jesus from within our story, our understanding and our sources.
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Gavin Bryars - Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet.
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