How is the gospel true?

Abstract

In order to answer this question and for other purposes I intend principally to describe, comment on and include some of the thought of Hans Frei and Paul Ricoeur. I include Frei because he, while unable to ‘prove’ Jesus' presence, can ‘make sense of the gospel story’ in his own way, especially with his idea of the ‘history-like’ quality of the story which he believes prevents its acceptance as myth. I too cannot hope to ‘prove’ Jesus’ presence, nor would I account him as mythic. Frei does not, however, account for rhetorical persuasion. While he explains how we can accept the story as true by cutting between history and myth, it still remains to understand why and how the story is offered. But Ricoeur can help to answer the how and the why through his analysis of the coincidence of divine will and human contingency in biblical story, with Jesus as destined and God the Father as Destinator. I take this idea further by showing how in John's gospel Peter, through his own contingent acts of denial, his human fallibility, is rescued by love, the final contingency. Ricoeur also makes a case for ‘manifestation’ rather than ‘verification’ of the gospels, the one through poetic discourse superseding the other by scientific description. Hence, there is a rhetorical – literary argument for reader identity with Jesus, based in part on Aristotle's tragic emotions and in part on our human inconstancy and inconsistency as understood by Ricoeur and Montaigne to show how these qualities work out in Peter. Both Frei and Ricoeur find their way to the Jesus of faith past the Jesus of reason and myth to the Jesus of story. The goal of this article is to show how we are persuaded by John to identify with Jesus with the rhetoric of love.