I continue reading The New Testament and the People of God in chapter 4 (pp 81-120), on history and the first century. Yet again, I find myself having made simplistic assumptions about the nature of history and access to the historical record that need refinement and Wright provides assistance in revisiting (and revising) these assumptions.
History is not, as I had thought, simply an objective report of the facts. All history involves selection and interpretation into narration (83). This is, upon reflection, rather obvious, even in how one reports events in one's own life. I do not (and can not) report every detail--colors, objects, and most events are selectively eliminated. If I tell a story about going to the grocery store, I will avoid describing every car in the lot, every stop sign, tree, and basket I come across (lest I drive away the listener). Thus, Wright defines history as "the meaningful narrative of events and intentions." (82) The selection and interpretation embedded and communicated in the story is exactly what history is, not a reason to reject it. The author's bias is no reason to reject the story as it is reported (89).
One of the big issues in New Testament studies is that the stories contain reports of events that to the modern mind are impossible (miracles). Wrights counters that "one cannot rule out a priori the possibility of things occurring in ways not normally expected, since to do so would be to begin from the fixed point that a particular worldview, namely the eighteenth-century rationalist one, or its twentieth-century positivist successor, is correct in postulating that the universe is simply a 'closed continuum' of cause and effect." (92) I'll put it a different way. The writers of the New Testament intended to change the reader's worldview! Trying to fit Jesus into the "good teacher" straight-jacket fails to account for the majority of the New Testament data. This brings us to Wright's three-point suggestion for a good hypothesis.
A good hypothesis is one that includes the data, constructs a simple and coherent picture, and assists in explaining other problems (99-100). Wright traces examples of theories which satisfy the second while failing badly at the first (like the 'good teacher' hypothesis). We must be careful in our reading of history and the criteria that we use as we read. Wright argues, "If the controlling criterion for a particular story is its ability to legitimate a particular stance, whether Christian or not, we have collapsed the epistemology once more in the opposite direction, that of phenomenalism. The historical evidence is only to be used provided it functions as a mirror in which we can see ourselves as we wanted to see ourselves." (103, emphasis original) Wright argues that both the fundamentalist and the secular scholar have read parts of Jesus the way they wanted him to be (or not to be), failing to either account for all the data, or failing to provide a coherent picture. This is a danger in any historical reading. Part of the critical realist approach is a spiral of hypothesis and verification with the text and other historical sources. A great example of this, to be discussed in the future, is the whole debate around the New Perspective on Paul. Much of the debate surrounds reading the sixteenth century Luther-Catholic debate of faith-works back into the first century of Paul's writings. To provide a very silly analogy, we would never think that had Lincoln encouraged Grant to beat the South by any means necessary, it would have been an authorization to use nuclear weapons--those didn't exist in the nineteenth century!
Wright then discusses the relationship between history and meaning, and in particular, that it is possible to get to a certain set of meanings even with the historical method (ie, the 'why')! Some might argue that historical knowledge is limited only to the event itself and any other discussion moves into the area of psychology. On the contrary, Wright says, "History, then, includes the study of aims, intentions, and motivations. This does not mean that history is covert psychology." (111) In other words, we don't need to ask Jesus to lay down on the therapist's couch to determine his intention in telling the story of the Good Samaritan to a Jewish audience (modifying Wright's imagery on 116). At a minimum, we can certainly say what his intentions were not (winning more Jewish friends, for example). Ultimately, the meaning of an event may impact and change the hearer's worldview (117). As suggested earlier, this is precisely what the authors of the New Testament authors intend.
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