Dangerous History

"The gospel narratives are historical." - Yes, but in what sense do they offer us history? While seeming to be historical, they take on a very religious character as well. One might think that they offer us history as a backdrop for the religious meanings merely; one might think alternatively that that the gospel narratives offer us history merely, leaving the religious meanings as colossal hostages to fortune. So in what sense do the gospel narratives offer us history? Because this question, in our society at least, is bound up with questions of how they offer us religious meanings, we perhaps can see that the two questions can share one and the same answer. Or perhaps not. But I wish that the following be construed, not as an answer to either question or even to both, but as an answer based on one question that can be asked in two different ways. That question may or may not bet he same for everyone.

The gospels do not offer us history in the way that a window offers a view. Looking out at the window next to me I can see a green field with tall trees growing in an beside, and across the street there are more trees on one side, and buildings on the other. The trees are moving in the wind, especially the younger ones. It is easy -- in fact, I did this without at first realizing what I was doing -- to take this scene as a template for my own scene: I fill in details such as temperature, humidity, and the mood of the human members of the scene with my own ideals. Depending on which details I supply and how I supply them, the scene can be anywhere on the spectrum from idyllic to unattractive. But whatever I do, I turn the view from the window into something only like the experience I would have were I actually outside in the sweltering heat and amid the fumes of automobiles. There is nothing particularly wrong in this instance with projecting myself onto the scene in this way (it can even enhance ones enjoyment of particular aspects of the scene, such as the swaying of the trees in the wind, for example), as long as I refrain from insisting that my friend imagine the scene his eyes bring him to be a certain temperature, while he prefers to imagine another. But the gospels do not offer us history in this way, in the way a window offers us a view of a scene.

I have heard a man remark that one can turn philosophy into the study of the (mere) history of philosophy, thereby removing its "fangs". To be sure there are pictures of fangs, but nothing that bites. This surely is an accurate picture of what might happen when we study someone like Moses Maimonides or Avicenna. Even the study of figures who still have great influence today can be defanged -- read an encyclopedia article on , say, Muhammad or Wittgenstein. It is possible even to produce a story of Jesus that is thus without the potential to "bite" us. But the gospel narratives do not offer us history in this way, in the way that defangs events by making them mere history.

How then do the gospels offer us history? What are the "fangs" of the events, the details of the scene that we cannot get from a window-view? The non-windowish way in which the gospels narratives offer us history is the way they offer us more than a picture of the political and cultural affairs of first-century Palestine: in some way this is also our story, these are our affairs. They reach out and sink their teeth into us by immersing all history, previous and subsequent, in their meaning. These are ancient events, but they are contemporary, more relevant to the present than the present itself. History they are, happening in space and time, but they do not stay as merely such, ready to be interpreted in whatever way strikes our fancy (as with the window-scene). They sink their teeth into our flesh by sinking our heart, mind, soul and strength into the event and its meaning -- and its Meaner. It is in this that they have significance religious and historical at the same time: they offer us themselves, and by so doing they offer us the Messiah.