The Crucial Role of Presuppositions in Historical Jesus Research (Part 4)
What is a presupposition? It is something you assume to be true right from the start that colors your whole approach to a subject. For example, if you are a physicist, you assume from the start that nature is intelligible; the behavior of its fundamental particles and forces, under normal circumstances, can be described in terms of natural laws and mathematics, if only you are smart enough to uncover those laws. The physicist therefore goes in search of those laws, based on his/her fundamental presupposition that they can be found.
Historical Jesus research, like most forms of historical study, involves the careful testing of hypotheses: proposals about what happened in the past that are fashioned in part from philosophical and personal presuppositions about reality. These presuppositions affect how the historian views the relevant data available, and the weight he/she accords to the various facts on hand. Hypotheses that have at least some facts that seem to back them up, but are not solidly established yet, we call theories.
As the Princeton historian Becker famously remarked, “The historian needs the facts” if he or she is not to be writing mere fiction or propaganda, but equally “The facts need the historian,” because it is the historian (aided or hindered by philosophical and personal presuppositions) who must decide which facts are significant and which are not, and who must arrange them into a plausible theory and story, an historical reconstruction that makes sense. But it is the presuppositions they bring to their research right from the start that tend to guide and direct the story they eventually piece together.
Of course, historians often ignore certain facts altogether that do not fit with the theory they are trying to establish, or they implausibly attempt to explain away inconvenient data. Too much of this, and the hypothesis can be shown to be a relative failure on evidential grounds alone. For example, 19th century historians of the New Testament who hypothesized that Jesus was just a teacher of ethics, and nothing more, usually started with the philosophical presupposition that “miracles never happen.” So when faced with the story of the Feeding of the Multitudes in the gospels, therefore, they tried to explain it away. They either dismissed it as legend, without further consideration of the evidence (because stories that involve the supernatural simply have to be legend or myth) or they explained it away as a pre-scientific and metaphorical way of expressing what really happened: that people were so moved by the teachings of Jesus that they freely shared all the food they had brought with them that day, so that everyone had enough. Needless to say, there is not a shred of evidence that this is what really occurred, but their ironclad presuppositions led these historians to believe it was the most likely explanation anyway. The idea that Jesus was primarily a teacher of ethics, by the way, died a long time ago because there were just too many facts on hand that didn’t fit with that hypothesis.
Theories prominent in historical Jesus study today (e.g., that Jesus was essentially a Cynic-like Galilean peasant, or a mystic and non-violent social reformer, or the divine Son of God who came among us as one of us to show us the Father’s love and die for our sins) can be tested in two ways: “vertically” and “horizontally.”
First, does the theory include all the facts of the case without ignoring or contradicting any? Such is the vertical test. All of the relevant historical data must find a plausible place under the “dome,” so to speak, of the interpretive grid of the theory if it is to have a strong probability of being true.
Second, the horizontal test: does the theory cohere with all of the secure findings of other relevant fields of inquiry, such as archaeology, psychology, and philosophy (as we shall see, one’s philosophical lens will greatly color one’s reading and evaluation of the evidence as a whole). Moreover, this horizontal test involves the internal consistency of the theory itself: in other words, an historical hypothesis that significantly contradicts itself is hardly worthy of our assent (for example, the psychologically implausible hypothesis that the apostles stole the body of Jesus from the tomb, invented the lie that he had risen from the dead, and then suffered a lifetime of persecution and even martyrdom without revealing the hoax for what it was). In general, the extent to which a theory passes these vertical and horizontal tests is the degree to which it ought to command our respect.
Again, Allison admits that historical hypotheses and reconstructions cannot be attempted in a philosophical vacuum. An historical reconstruction all too often is fashioned to fit “horizontally” with the historians own philosophical presuppositions. For example, if we go to our historical research on the life of Jesus already convinced in advance (on what we sincerely believe to be solid philosophical and personal grounds) that there exists one infinitely powerful, infinitely wise, infinitely good transcendent creator God — if that is one of our presuppositions — then we are likely to assess the evidence concerning the supernatural elements of the Jesus-story (the healings, exorcisms, nature miracles, and Resurrection) rather differently than someone who does not share this presupposition.
Another example: some scholars argue that we cannot discover through historical research what Jesus really said and did based on the documents we possess, but only what the authors of those documents believed about him (i.e. their “perceptions” and “interpretations” of his teachings and deeds). These scholars are very likely to be operating with a Kantian philosophical lens, with its wide gulf separating what the philosopher Kant called noumena (what things are in themselves) from phenomena (things merely as they appear to us). It is understandable that an historian wearing such skeptical philosophical spectacles from the outset will conclude that we cannot with any confidence get behind the perceptions of the early Christians to learn what Jesus really did and taught.
Given the influence of philosophical and personal presuppositions in the formation and evaluation of historical theories, one wonders how those in the field of historical Jesus research can engage in fruitful dialogue about their work at all. Of course, they usually (and rightly) try to point out the evidential shortcomings of each other’s efforts: which facts about Jesus are being avoided, and which ones are being implausibly “explained away”? But judgments about what is “plausible” or “implausible” operate to some extent under the guidance of one’s philosophical presuppositions. Thus, as Allison rightly suggests, the whole field of study would be much advanced by a more honest and careful consideration of the philosophical, ideological, and religious presuppositions that historians bring to bear on their study of the life of Christ. Pope Benedict XVI drew our attention to the importance of this in his Apostolic Exhortation on Holy Scripture, Verbum Domini:
In applying methods of historical analysis, no criteria should be adopted which would rule out in advance God’s self-disclosure in human history. The unity of the two levels at work in the interpretation of sacred Scripture presupposes, in a word, the harmony of faith and reason. On the one hand, it calls for a faith which, by maintaining a proper relationship with right reason, never degenerates into fideism, which in the case of Scripture would end up in fundamentalism. On the other hand, it calls for a reason which, in its investigation of the historical elements present in the Bible, is marked by openness and does not reject a priori anything beyond its own terms of reference.
Allison argues that a more cautious and humble attitude to our “predilections” by all concerned will result in more modest claims about what we can really know with any confidence about the life, teachings, and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. Recall the quote from David Hay at the start of the book: in the end, we are left with a choice between “living with uncertainty” about Jesus, or “closed-mindedness.”
Maybe not.
History deals with mere “probabilities,” to be sure. But probabilities can converge to such an extent that they bring us to a point of psychological exclusion of doubt, that is, to a legitimate and firm conviction. As we said earlier in this web series: in a court of law, we can sometimes reach a verdict about someone’s past deeds that is “true beyond a reasonable doubt” (what philosophers call a state of “moral certainty”). For example, what student of history lacks moral certainty about the existence of Napoleon Bonaparte, and at least the main actions he performed in his public career? Allison himself arrives at some fairly solid convictions about the teachings and deeds, identity and religious significance of Jesus before his book is through.
In several places in his book, however, he implies that those who are truly open-minded will not arrive at convictions on this subject that fully harmonize with the traditional Christian faith in Jesus as the divine Son of God incarnate. As a matter of fact, some important New Testament historians working in the field today — scholars whose work Allison does not discuss in any depth (e.g., Craig Blomberg) — actually began their study of the historical Jesus as relative sceptics, and ended up as orthodox Christians. They did so by paying close attention to the presuppositions of historians at work in Jesus research, and to the weight of the evidence on hand, precisely as Allison bids us to do.
In fact, the very same thing happened to me.
Next Time: My Own Search for the Truth about Jesus of Nazareth
Robert Stackpole, STD
© The Mere Christian Fellowship, 2017
