Lee Martin McDonald, The Story of Jesus in History and Faith, Baker Academic: Grand Rapids, 2013; 416 pp.: 9780801039874, £17.65/$30.00 (pbk)
The present book provides the standard repertoire of what even critical scholars admit to be historically known about Jesus. Despite its scepticism of the post-enlightenment focus on ‘history’ at the expense of ‘faith’ (‘historical inquiry, in a stricts sense, is not a science’ (p. 13)), it focuses on the historical Jesus, and on what one can ‘reasonably determine from a historian’s perspective’, even if this is not ‘essential for Christian faith’ (p. 35). Why, then, if historical data are not core to the Christian faith, is this book not more critical? As it dismisses all non-canonical and biblical sources such as apocryphal gospels, Greco-Roman and Rabbinic traditions (‘minimal value’ (pp. 134–5)), it leaves us with the canonical Gospels. These are ‘not unbiased’, as they do not ‘distinguish between history and interpretation’ (p. 50), but they give ‘a sufficiently reliable portrait of Jesus’ (p. 49). With the burdening of proof on them, Mark is seen as the earliest Gospel, dated to ‘64–5 or as late as the early 70s’ (p. 80), followed by Matthew (‘not later than ad 90–100’, based on ‘possible references’ to it in Revelation and the Didache which is dated to 90 (pp. 100–1)) and Luke (‘after ad 70’ (p. 92)) who drew on Mark and also on a common written and oral source, called Q, with John being from the ‘last decade of the first century’, based on an early dating of P52 to the early second century (pp. 71–2, 114). Yet, the latest scholarship on P52 holds that this witness is a hundred years younger. Likewise, the dating of the Didache is problematic, as the sources from which this text has been reconstructed all derive from the fourth century and later. If there are no sound anchors for dating the canonical Gospels into the first century, the entire list of ‘items that reasonable historians can affirm about Jesus in history’ might be no more than a reflection of the author’s Christian bias (p. 12). This would be fine, as long as the author would not claim to provide a book which follows the historian’s principles of an ‘autonomy’ of sources, ‘a closed causal nexus’, ‘analogy’ and ‘probablity’ which, indeed, cannot grasp an assumed ‘uniqueness of Jesus and of God’s activity’, the phenomenal or miraculous. If the Gospels were not first-century sources, perhaps ‘what we can know about Jesus is’ not ‘considerable’, whereas these texts provide rather information that is relevant to faith more than to ‘historical inquiry’. If history is defined ‘as the reality of the past, whose reality is found in facts, whose essence is obtained through historical processes’ (p. 10), the interpretation of these cannot be assumed to be simply subjective, guided by ‘peculiar interests, philosophies, and worldviews’ (p. 12). As we can see with the dating of the Gospels – subjectivity does not start with the interpretation of facts, it starts with the factualization of facts.
