This article argues that the quests for the historical Jesus have largely operated with an understanding of history hindered by a severely constricted range of divine and human possibilities. By outlining human ‘self-understanding’ as a historiographical question, it emphasises the determinative role in historical judgement played by the historian's assumptions about the range of possibility available to the processes of human thought. Highlighting three particular concerns that historians tend to connect to ‘docetism’, it suggests a couple of ways that metaphysical and theological forms of reasoning could expand the horizon of possibilities available to historical Jesus scholarship in a way that will augment access to the historical figure of Jesus.

International law, government policy, and a range of academic disciplines all demonstrate different approaches to the task of defining who is a refugee. Yet how do refugees define themselves? When, how, and why do they come to identify with this term, or not? This essay offers reflections on these questions based on interviews with hundreds of displaced Syrians in the Middle East and Europe from 2012 to 2018. Syrian experiences illustrate how individuals’ self-understandings as refugees evolve over time as a contingent process not necessarily coterminous with actual physical displacement. I trace how these self-understandings are generated as shifts in three indicative relationships: displaced persons’ relationships to their expectations of return to their homeland; their relationships to their pre-flight lives; and their relationships to the word “refugee” itself. This focus on the bottom-up, organic development of a new subjectivity suggests how one's self-definition as a refugee might be less a quality or state that exists synonymously with forced migration than it is an identity that comes into existence gradually over time. That is, it is the product of a process of “becoming” more than “being.”

Much contemporary theory suggests that, unlike works of biography or autobiography, human life itself is fundamentally comprised of disconnected moments and is thus devoid of literary form. People may seek to bind these moments together as narratives in the course of their efforts at self-understanding; but these narratives, it is often held, are little more than fictions or myths, impositions of form and order upon the flux of experience. In Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilych, we find a powerful refutation of this view. For what we see in Tolstoy's story are the grave consequences of a life lived moment to moment, without any sense of the whole. Only in the face of death could Ivan Ilych gain the requisite distance to behold the true meaning of his dismal life and only upon beholding this meaning could he see the contours of the life well-lived, that is, the life possessed of narrative integrity. By exploring the relationship between death, narrative integrity, and the radical challenge of self-understanding via the story of Ivan Ilych, the present essay seeks ultimately to identify ways in which the study of ageing might contribute to our identifying the good and virtuous life.