IN THE ATHEIST FAD OF THE OO's I shocked some people online when I pointed out that in many cases history is capable of producing some far less conditional and ambiguous facts than even physics can. I gave the example of the date when the Nazi government invaded Poland, which any rational person looking at the documentary evidence would acknowledge to be certainly and reliably known. That wouldn't, possibly, keep liars and the willingly gulled from denying that evidence but such deniers would have, even then, I assumed, rightly be seen to have discredited themselves for any honest, rational consideration. At least the kind of honest, rational consideration that used to be the milieu in which serious adults operated in most of their lives. That assumption has undergone extreme revision in witness to the Trump phenomenon and the journalistic and judicial handling of its blatant lies. Now the treatment of many I once had some respect for of Putin's lies.
I still hold that that is one of the potential strengths of history, especially when that is an honest, non-ideologically controlled view of and analysis of what primary documentation there is of what is being studied.
Of course, history being something created by People, it is vulnerable to all of the practices and procedures, for good and bad, that humans will bring to it. There is nothing in human culture, even the most exact sciences that is not vulnerable to human folly, weakness and dishonesty and, most of all, our limits. About history as an academic study, we are allowed to admit that, about the sciences, we are generally required to deny that, especially in the milieu of modern intellectualism. But anyone who looks at the historical and continuing record of retractions and scandals in the scientific literature and the fact that even physics and chemistry sometimes undergo minor and, periodically, major revisions of even some of its most basic current holdings can't rationally hold the naive, ideological faith that science produces absolute truth about some of the simplest, most reliably generalized phenomena of the physical world. And much of what is included in "science" is nowhere near as possibly rigorous as physics and chemistry. Some of it is, I would assert, less rigorous than the best of history.
I think the rigorous methods of history can do, sometimes about some things, what science never could about extremely complex phenomena of human experience, produce absolutely reliable knowledge. But not about everything. In order to get on with that you have to maintain a level of faith in the reliability of the evidence of history and that evidence has to be subjected to a rigorous evaluation as to its reliability, though there is never going to be an absolute and objective means of doing that. NOTHING IN HUMAN CULTURE IS POSSIBLY REMOVED FROM THE LIMITS OF HUMAN MINDS THAT PRODUCE THAT. The idea that there is any such thing as "objective truth" is a myth created by ill-considered and non-rigorous thinking about whatever is under discussion.
It was one of the great achievements of modern physics that it finally admitted that the act of human observation could not be removed from the science of physics as a major and necessary component of its results. I think that is something which will, actually, withstand any level of future testing because it is a basic, foundational condition under which any science, history, philosophy, religion, political behavior, etc. will ever be done. We can't escape our own limits and our own necessity of acting and thinking from our own location and times and experience, at least not while we're confined to physical bodies with the limits that physicality imposes on us. If those who believe that the soul continues on are right, perhaps we will, then, enjoy a freedom to find absolute truth that is impossible for us now.
The complaints about what I've been writing about during Holy Week impinge on the question asked by Pilate in the Passion story as told by John, 18:33-38
Then Pilate entered the headquarters again, summoned Jesus, and asked him, Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you ask this on your own, or did others tell you about me?” Pilate replied, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests have handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom is not from this world. If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not from here.” Pilate asked him, “So you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate asked him, “What is truth?”
NRSV
It's easy to hear Pilate drawl that question in the tones of a bored, cynical, college-credentialed, modernist. When those like Richard Dawkins and his fellow atheists rail against the "post-modernist" skepticism about the declarations of science, especially the imprecise sciences such as so many of them are high-priests of, if they had more discernment they'd know that comes from the same place they pioneered in their materialist-atheist-scientistic dismissal of so much of non-science.
Jesus does not answer the question but he did. He testified to the truth. Pilate didn't have the prerequisites that would allow him to understand it. There is no easily or quickly given answer and none that won't be accepted by those who don't want to believe it.
Having started in on Luke Timothy Johnson's book The Real Jesus - which I honesty had not intended to use as much as I suspect I will, now that I've re-read it - in Chapter 4, The Limitations of History, he starts by pointing out something seldom taken into consideration:
Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the spate of Historical Jesus books is their authors' assumption that "history" is unproblematic. They apparently think there is no need to define what is meant when the term "history" is used since none of them bothers to do so. The confident contrast made, without any further explanation, between "faith" and "history" assumes a shared understanding of those terms.
In fact, however, the nature of history and the historical is deeply problematical. It is not clear how aware the authors of these books are of the problems. What is clear is that they are trading on popular rather than critical understandings. In popular usage, the term "historical" is often opposed, for example, to the mythical with the assumption being that one refers to "what really happened" and the other to "something that is made up." In popular usage, the historical can likewise be opposed to the fictional, with the same implied contrast between what is "real" and what is "made up." In short, casual usage bears within it the implications that "historical" equals "true" and "nonhistorical" equals "false." The Jesus Seminar exploits this popular distinction when it speaks of its historical deliberations delivering "the real Jesus" in contrast to the "Christ of faith," who is by implication somehow less than "real."
It is important to sort out some of these claims. A good start is to consider in a straightforward way what the business of history is, what its problems and possibilities are, and how these apply generally to the study of early Christianity. Then we shall be in a better position to think more clearly about "the historical Jesus."
And that, my friends, shows that the book is worth the time spent reading it and re-reading it. He goes on in the book to investigate just how problematic the problems are and that the methods of voting on what experts think doesn't really do much to mitigate those problems. Those problems we will always have with us.
Johnson's book is a quarter of a century old, now, as is the product of The Jesus Seminar, it was written just at the start of the widespread use of the internet, the e-mail debate I linked to a couple of weeks or so ago among Johnson, John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg may have been one of the earliest such debates I've come across. It wouldn't have fit on Twitter or been tolerated on most third-party blogs I was aware of. Such is the popular degeneration from even those more promising uses of the internet.
I think a lot of what Johnson assumed about the sophistication of even those on the PhD level, distinguishing between history and fiction was naively complementary of the educations of those within our "educated class" because it was one of the most shattering discoveries of interacting with even sophisticated academics online that a dangerously large number of them either can't or choose not to discern those distinctions on a routine basis, especially when the topic is a matter of ideological polemics.
I found out that many people with such credentials regularly believed that overtly fictitious books and movies were historically reliable, even in the case of Shakespeare in Love when you could produce the quote by the author who admitted that every single thing in his screen play was fiction, in the case of The Crucible when the age of the characters made it clear that Arthur Miller's story proved he hadn't done much in the way of research - unless he wanted us to understand his hero was a child raping pedophile, for which there is no historical evidence - you can find some brawls about those and me mocking the historical credulity of the college-credentialed such as I've encountered online. Perhaps my feeling that Biblical Studies and, especially, theology are conducted at a somewhat more rigorous level of self-doubt than much of the rest of academic life, these days is somewhat accurate. Like the scientific study of psychic phenomena, they always know they're facing against strong headwinds and conduct their research accordingly. At least sometimes.
I don't remember which historian of philosophy once summed up the 19th century as "the century of ideology" but I don't see any evidence that the 20th or 21st century escaped that through "analysis." I think it's possible that the adherence to rigid ideological loyalties and preferences is as bad as that ever was. And a lot of it doesn't even rise to the level of the ideological but is more like a tribal identity than having even the intellectual rigor that the debased adherence to an ideology requires.
This meditation on Pilate's question is more random than I'd intended it to be because the longer I go on the more complex it is. I think that's what you get when you try to find absolute truth on the basis of logical analysis of evidence, I think in the end, you have to make a choice. You have to choose. That's a choice as old as Deuteronomy 30:15-20, the choice of the way of life and the way of death. You are free to make the choice, there isn't any way you can foist that off to some alleged oracle of "objectivity." You can choose the truth and it will set you free or you can choose something else, fiction, make-believe, being fashionable, being "more popular than ever," nationalism, racism, etc. and it is the way of death.
I have to admit that it was about the time that I read Johnson's book that what I'd gained by reading Crossan's The Historical Jesus was shaken, though the choice I made from reading it didn't change. I will say that one of the earlier problems I had with it came from me reading a translation of The Gospel of Thomas which I'd had hopes for from reading Crossan's evaluation of it. Reading it didn't do much for me. The idea that it was not, as Crossan claimed, based in what might have been among the earliest traces of the literature but a later production influenced by the canonical Gospels made sense to me. I haven't gone into Johnson's skepticism over Crossan's claims about an "earlier version" of the apocryphal gospel of Peter to support his entirely unevidenced claims about what became of the body of Jesus. I do remember wondering what Crossan based his unequivocal declarations about that on. I believe it was hearing him make the declaration that "the dogs ate it" on a talk show even before reading his The Historical Jesus, that I wondered what evidence he had for that and found, on reading the book, that he had no evidence at all.
I say that while saying I still respect Crossan's scholarship more than I do a lot of what gets out there. I just don't believe a lot of what he concludes or claims based out of that assumption. Like I've said about someone I respect far less, Carl Sagan, when he's based solidly on factual evidence, he's very good, when he goes much farther than that, not nearly as good. I remember that I was at first very hostile to Luke Timothy Johnson when I first encountered what was written about him because I thought he was unfair to the Jesus Seminar, but then I read him and I had to admit I found him persuasive on many points, especially because he was so honest about what he believed to be on the basis of faith, something which the more would-be scientific academics seldom if ever admit to.
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