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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Christianity, as everyone knows, is a historical religion — historical because belief in Christianity involves belief in various claims about what happened in the past. This seems simple enough, but it really is not. For the more that one thinks about it, the more complex this ‘historical’ aspect of Christianity becomes. One's faith in Christianity involves beliefs about the man Jesus, to be sure; yet how can one's beliefs about the past save anyone? Does God judge people on the basis of the opinions that they hold, and only choose for his kingdom those who hold correct opinions about the historical Jesus? If that were the case, one would expect tremendous interest in historical research on the life of Jesus; people would be desperate to find out all that they could know.
1 Kierkegaard, Søren, Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1941), p. 25.Google Scholar
2 Ibid., pp. 42–43.
3 Ibid., p. 32.
4 Ibid., p. 182.
5 Ibid., p. 33.
6 Ibid., p. 45.
7 This is why Kierkegaard says that there is essentially no difference between a ‘disciple at first hand’, who has an eye-witness's knowledge of Jesus, and a ‘disciple at second hand’, who must depend on others for reports about the life of Jesus. See his Philosophical Fragments (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1962), chs. IV–V, passim.Google Scholar
8 Harvey, Van Austin, The Historian and the Believer (New York; The MacMillan Co., 1966), p. 286.Google Scholar
9 Ibid., p. 125.
10 Postscript, p. 183.
11 This is one of the reasons why Kierkegaard objected to Hegel, who gave just this kind of interpretation to the central claim of Christianity, dissolving the appearance of contradiction.
12 Ibid., p. 90.
13 The suggestion that the supernatural nature of Christian beliefs reflects the supervenience of Christian claims requires a more detailed elaboration, but that would require another essay altogether.
14 To the extent that a historian can take supervenient principles for granted, he can write histories containing moral evaluations or even ultimate teleological judgments. But he cannot defend these interpretations on purely historical grounds; he has to assume that his interpretive principles are not in doubt.
15 Harvey, op. cit., p. 18.
16 Postscript, p. 29.
17 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, On Certainty (Oxford; Basil Blackwell, 1969) entry number 162; see also 94, 102–3, 105.Google Scholar
18 That is why Allegro's, John M.The Sacred Mushroom and The Cross (Garden City; Doubleday and Co., 1970)Google Scholar attracts so little attention from other scholars. Allegro argues that Christianity had its origin in a mushroom cult, citing primarily linguistic evidence for this conclusions. But the other evidence for the historicity of Jesus is so strong, and his arguments are so speculative, that his book has scarcely made a dent in scholarship.
19 Harvey, op. cit., p. 102–3.