The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus by C

Author:C. [C.,, Allison, Dale Jr.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780802862624

with passing of time, the particulars fade and opportunities multiply for interference - generated by later, similar experiences - to blur our recollections. We thus rely ever more on our memories for the gist of what happened, or what usually happens, and at tempt to reconstruct the details by inference and even sheer guesswork. Transience involves a gradual switch from reproductive and specific recollections to reconstructive and more general descriptions.5

Given that we typically remember the outlines of an event or the general purport of a conversation rather than the particulars and that we extract patterns and meaning from our memories, it makes little sense to open the quest for Jesus by evaluating individual items with our criteria, in the hope that some bits preserve pristine memory. We should rather be looking for repeating patterns and contemplating the big picture. We should trust first, if we are to trust at all, what is most likely to be trustworthy.

Although we may, after reading Thucydides, be confident that there was a Peloponnesian War, we may well wonder about many of the details of his account. The larger the generalization and the more data upon which it is based, the greater our confidence; the more specific the detail and the fewer the data supporting it, the more room we have for doubt.

With regard to the sources for Jesus, the traditional criteria of authenticity privilege the parts over the whole. It seems more prudent to privilege generalizations drawn from the whole than to concentrate upon one individual item after another. As a demonstration of how this works in practice, consider the following traditions:

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