Documents - Historicity of the Gospels

The Gospel Accounts
Here are some excerpts from a lecture given by Julián Carrón at the Milan Cultural Center on February 23, 2004, an exciting contribution to the debate on the relationship between present-day man and the figure of Christ

by Julián Carrón

“How can those who encounter Jesus Christ a day, a month, a hundred, a thousand or two thousand years after His disappearance from earthly horizons be enabled to realize that He corresponds to the truth which He claims? … How can I, who arrived the day after Christ left, know that this is really something of supreme interest to me, and how can I know this with any reasonable degree of certainty?… It is important, therefore, that he who comes after the event of Jesus of Nazareth–a long time after–may draw near to Him today in such a way as to arrive at a reasonable and certain evaluation befitting the seriousness of the problem” (L. Giussani, Why the Church?, pp. 8-9).
The most widespread method for reaching this reasonable evaluation is that of historical research, the study of the Christian sources, mainly the Gospels, and all the ancient sources that can tell us something about Jesus. As an example, it is enough to browse through one of the more recent books on the subject published in Italy, G. Barbaglio, Gesù ebreo di Galilea. Indagine storica [Jesus, Hebrew of Galilee. A Historical Research] (Edb, Bologna 2002). In the preface, the author refers us to the growth of high-quality studies carried out over the past twenty years and their results, an impressive series of hypotheses and reconstructions: “An ‘eschatological prophet’ bent on the re-aggregation of the twelve tribes of Israel; a charismatic of enormous appeal capable of miraculous feats; a subversive teacher of life or a revolutionary guru; a Mediterranean Jewish peasant of cynical tendencies; a cynic philosopher; a non-violent social revolutionary; a Jew who exalted the Mosaic Law radicalizing its requirements, in particular that of love of neighbor; a Pharisee with Hillelite tendencies; a marginal Jew; a rabbi; a magician who used secret arts to heal the sick and to cast out demons.” Someone who wants to form a sound opinion about Christ today finds himself faced with an impressive series of hypotheses. Some are not so skeptical concerning the Christian sources. Klemens Stock, Professor of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome, drew attention to His true nature. Jesus, he reminds us, was never a solitary man. From the start, He formed a group of disciples around Himself, who had been struck and moved by His presence. For this reason, it is not only Jesus’ words that speak of Him, but also the impression He produced in those near Him. “Therefore, the main thing that remains of Jesus after Easter–along with the presence of the Spirit–are not anthologies of authentic words of His and actions narrated exactly, but living men who have had the opportunity to know His person and His message by living together with Him. Jesus did not confide His actions to documents, but to living witness. He is welcomed and remains present not in tachographic reproductions, but in witnesses.” This explains the nature of the Gospels. “We need to see the Gospels, along with the almost inseparable collection of what comes originally from Jesus and what comes from the witnesses who came after Him, as an account of Jesus’ works [Wirken] in words and deeds, and at the same time as a record of Jesus’ influence [Wirkung] molded in the encounter and in the life together.” Looked at in this way, the Gospels enable us to reach the real Jesus. “Those who want to know the real Jesus, His real intentions and His real message, do well to listen to the Gospels.” This description bridges the rift between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith witnessed in the Gospels, but for present-day man is it enough to listen to the Gospels in order truly to reach Jesus? We shall see that right from the start things are not so simple. This is the value of the history of research that we present in synthesis.

The Church has always approached
Scripture in the ambit of Tradition
The Christian experience is indispensable for the authentic interpretation of the New Testament in general and of the Gospels in particular, and the case of the Galatians makes this particularly clear.
The members of this community had received the Gospel message thanks to the Apostle Paul’s missionary activity. After a short time they are disturbed by some intruders who proclaim another gospel to them, that, along with faith in Christ, requires circumcision and the works of the law for personal salvation (Gal 4:21; 5:2; 5:4; 6:12). The Galatians find themselves face to face with two versions of the Gospel, and they have to choose between the two.
Surprised by the speed with which the Galatians are switching to “another gospel,” Paul writes them the Letter showing them that “there is no other gospel” apart from the one he has taught them and that the other is nothing but a deformation of the one Gospel of Christ (cf. Gal 1:7).
Paul knows from his own experience that what brought him to conviction over the truth of Christ was the experience of his encounter with Christ. If we consider this, it is not surprising that Paul begins by reminding the Galatians of their own experience.
In this passage, Paul puts before their eyes firstly that they have received the Spirit and the wonders that this Spirit has worked among them. As A. Vanhoye acutely observes, “In the context we have necessarily an observable, tangible fact, otherwise it could not serve as an argument.” If it is a tangible fact, the Galatians have been able to have an experience of Him. This permits St Paul to appeal to this experience as the decisive criterion for solving the dilemma in which they find themselves. So, “Paul’s appeal to experience,” as J. D. G. Dunn stressed, “is not marginal or casual.”
Once Paul has reminded them of the great things that they have experienced, he can put the crucial question, “Does He who grants you the Spirit and works marvels amongst you, do so thanks to the works of the law or because you have believed in the preaching?” (Gal 3:5). If they are true to the experience they have lived, they can recognize in this experience that the great things that have happened amongst them do not come from observance of the law, since the Gospel preached by Paul did not include this, but only in the obedience of faith. This alone is the source of the fruits that they see with their own eyes. This is the reason why they had best continue to embrace that Gospel that has produced such precious fruits amongst them. With this appeal to their experience, Paul offers them the method for overcoming their perplexity.
Their experience enables them to judge for themselves, without depending on either Paul or the intruders. It is in this experience that the truth of the Gospel Paul preached to them becomes clear. The senselessness of the Galatians, the irrationality of their attitude, lies in the fact of not wanting to submit their reason to their lived experience. The event of Christ, died and risen, who, by the work of the Spirit, becomes present in the Church and by communicating Himself through the Church to man’s reason and freedom, makes possible an experience that makes the Christian announcement understandable and enables us to choose in any moment amongst the various interpretations of Him that appear in human history.
The Christian event, which the Church goes on transmitting down the ages “in its doctrine, in its life, and in its worship,” to use an expression of the Conciliar Constitution on Divine Revelation (Dei Verbum 8), makes possible for all those who, through grace, accept to belong freely in their lives to that experience, to reach certainty about the truth, about what it announces. This is what permits them to approach the Scripture with this experience in their eyes. “In manibus nostris sunt codices, in oculis nostris sunt facta” (“In our hands are the books, in our eyes are the facts”), as St Augustine would say later. This is why the Church has always approached the Scripture in the context of the tradition in which it was born and constituted the place where the Christian event, of which the Scripture is witness, was transmitted. From a certain point forward in modern history, the experience witnessed by St Paul’s letters and the ancient and medieval Church was no longer considered possible.

The Protestant novelty: sola Scriptura
As we have seen, from the start, the Church had approached Scripture in the ambit of Tradition. So it is easy to understand the novelty of the Protestant principle: sola Scriptura. The fact that the Church is made up of sinful men, says Protestantism, made it impossible for her to transmit the purity of the origin. Only Scripture had preserved it. Therefore, only Scripture guaranteed a real relationship with the origin. This purity shines out in the Scripture with such clarity that it was sufficient in itself for its understanding. It has no need of any human authority for authentic interpretation. Scripture is its own interpreter.
Despite the principle of sola Scriptura, the Reformation did not totally break the link with Tradition; it reads the Scripture in the ambit of the great councils of the Early Church, which the Reformation accepts. But the principle had been established. It did not take much time to see that the use of this principle by the Reformers was unable to resist cultural pressure.

From sola Scriptura to sola Ratio: the Enlightenment
With the coming of the Enlightenment, we see a sort of secularization of the Protestant principle: sola Scriptura becomes sola Ratio. Since it lacks the experience that the early and medieval Church witnessed, reason remains isolated from the experience of faith and it asserts itself as measure of all things.
Set up as the final tribunal of judgment, reason recognizes the methods used in the natural sciences as the only ways to approach the Scripture. This would be the only way to avoid the interference of the subjects beliefs, that is, of Tradition, in approaching Scripture.
Faith was excluded a priori from the method. The fact that Scripture was a literary work of antiquity required that it be approached by means of the methods used for understanding any work of the past: literary, historical and philological methods. This new approach responded to a valid need. The word of God was witnessed by human words and only through these words could one reach the word of God. In this way, the historical character of the biblical message remained evident, but the recognition of this valid need was not accompanied by the recognition of the limits of this methodology. The ideal of an objectivity free from interference by subjectivity proved, with time, to be impossible. Despite the use of methods that promised this objectivity, the divergence in the results proved that it was impossible to eliminate the subject using the method. The tomb of this position was the work of Albert Schweitzer, The History of Modern Research on the Life of Jesus, which showed clearly that a historical reconstruction of the life of Jesus was impossible, and revealed his real objective: “The historical research on the life of Jesus was not born of a truly historical interest, but rather sought in the Jesus of history a help in the struggle to free himself from dogma.”

Recognizing the presence
of the subject in the research: hermeneutics
It was therefore the development of research itself that forced people to recognize that it is impossible to eliminate the participation of the subject using the method. Everyone described Jesus according to his own preconceptions. “No method is innocent,” Paul Ricoeur proclaimed.
However, if preconceptions are inevitable, “How is it possible,” asks Cardinal Ratzinger, “to reach an understanding that is not founded on the whim of my presuppositions, an understanding that permits me truly to understand the message of the text, giving me back something that does not come from myself?” How can I be sure that I am not listening to myself when I believe I am listening to the Scripture?

The answer of Vatican II
to the challenge of the Enlightenment
“ God speaks in Sacred Scripture through men in human fashion” (Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, 12).
Thus Dei Verbum indicates a basic theological principle for approaching the Scripture: only in the ambit of the living Tradition of the whole Church and of the rule of faith can one discover the true meaning of the sacred text. So the Council does not consider the Tradition an obstacle that makes access to the true sense of the text difficult, but what makes this access possible.
“ But this theological criterion of method is indisputably in contrast with the basic methodological orientation of modern exegesis; or rather, it is precisely what exegesis tries at all costs to eliminate. This modern conception can be described in this way: either the interpretation is critical, or one refers to the authority; the two things are not possible together.”
Is an articulation of reason and tradition possible in such a way that neither of them is stifled?

Event and reason
In order to resolve the question, the Second Vatican Council gave a great contribution with the recuperation of the category of “event” to describe Revelation.
The Council adds that this Event of Revelation, Jesus Christ, remains present in history, transmitting Himself through the Church’s life as a whole. This is what we call Tradition.
The importance of this category of event in relationship to reason and freedom was emphasized in the encyclical letter Fides et Ratio. According to Fides et Ratio, the adventure of knowing starts off from the wonder aroused in man by created reality: “Human beings are astonished to discover themselves as part of the world.” This elementary experience contains all the basic factors of all knowledge: the whole of man, his reason and freedom, is struck by the reality in which he is immersed. This realization is, therefore, the beginning of a journey in which reason and freedom are called to fulfill their nature. The same phenomenon happens when what comes to meet man is revelation. If revelation has the nature of an historical event, when it enters into relationship with man it cannot fail to strike him, provoking his reason and his freedom. The Gospel accounts bring this out in a simple way, witnessing the wonder that Jesus aroused in those who met Him, evoking the question, “Who is He?” (Mt 8:27). Therefore, without the event of Revelation, reason and freedom are not able to be themselves, because the capacity of reason has been “clouded” as a consequence of original sin (Fides et Ratio, 22). “The eyes of the mind were no longer able to see clearly: reason became more and more a prisoner to itself.” Only an intervention from without was able to change this situation, restoring to reason all its original openness. “The coming of Christ was the saving event which redeemed reason from its weakness, setting it free from the shackles in which it had imprisoned itself” (Fides et Ratio, 22). Thanks to this liberation, reason can reach the object of its knowledge no longer imprisoned within its own measure.

Conclusion
The Christian event frees reason from the limits in which it usually languishes, following the customs of its own culture and tradition. It gives it back its own proper dynamism, which is that of opening itself freely to the understanding of reality as a whole in its radical novelty, as presence of God amongst men; it carries it gratuitously beyond where it could reach by its own strength alone. When the freedom of those who meet Him does not draw back from the attraction that the presence of the Christian event provokes in them, it inevitably sets about verifying the correspondence with all aspects of reality, thus reaching the certainty that permits it to adhere to Him rationally.
The case of Paul and the Galatians is paradigmatic in any moment of history, since, just as for them, the Christ Event becomes contemporary in the life of the Church to every man in his historical and cultural circumstances, permitting him to have the same experience. As H. Schlier wrote, “The intimate and peculiar meaning of an event and therefore of the event itself in its truth, always opens up (reveals itself) only to an experience that abandons itself to it, and in this abandonment seeks to interpret it, to an experience that is true if it is adequate to the event in question.”
This experience provides that “affinity lived with that of which the text speaks,” which is, according to the document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission, what makes accessible the true knowledge of the biblical text and therefore its authentic interpretation.
In this context, the Church acknowledges the usefulness and promotes the use of all the methods that can contribute to the understanding of the Scriptural text. The very acknowledgment of the usefulness of these methods is a proof of the trust that the Church has in the correctness of its starting point: she believes that the efforts of study, in freedom and with all its own means, will bear fruit precisely because anchored to that Tradition which can lead to a true understanding of Sacred Scripture. Far from feeling threatened, reason and freedom are thus exalted by the fact of participating in the event of grace present in the Church.