INTRODUCTION

Summary

‘Historical tradition in the Fourth Gospel.’ But is there such a thing as an historical tradition in the gospels at all? The revolt against ‘historicism’ which declared itself in Germany during the second decade of this century was comparatively slow in making its full impact upon theological thought in this country; but in recent years its influence has been wide and deep. The climate of our studies is transformed. The ‘quest of the historical Jesus’, which stimulated the critical study of the New Testament in the nineteenth century, is by some of the most influential theologians of our time no longer believed to be a profitable, or indeed a feasible, enterprise. A study of the theological symbolism and typology embodied in the gospels will (it is urged) bring us further in understanding them than any attempt to establish a residuum of factual record. In any case they were written (in the current cliché) ‘from faith to faith’. To seek in them sources of historical information is to misunderstand their character and the intention of their authors.

It is of course possible, without proceeding to the extreme position here adumbrated, to believe (as I do myself) that the revolt against ‘historicism’ was a salutary reaction, justified by the increasing sterility of ‘liberal’ criticism in its latest phase, and to welcome the awakened interest in the witness of the gospels to Christian faith and worship as expressed in the liturgy and theology of the early Church.