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Jesus Christ in History and Scripture
A Poetic and Secretarian Perspective
by Edgar McKnight
Jesus Christ in History and Scripture highlights two related bases for the current revolution in Jesus studies: (1) a critically-chastened world view that is satisfied with provisional results and (2) a creative (or "poetic") use of the sources of study of Jesus.
The first part of the book shows that "precritical," "critical," and "postcritical" epochs and attitudes (all alive today) support different sorts of knowledge concerning Jesus (historical reconstructions; historic memory and appropriations; imaginative, poetic, and artistic creations; and theological formulations) and that the Gospels themselves support different sorts of knowledge and approaches.The Gospels were composed by Christians who combined historical information and historic memory in imaginative ways to present a Jesus who was relevant to their congregations as he was to the earliest disciples.The creative contribution that readers of the Gospels make in their reconstructions of Jesus is a recapitulation of the creative activities of the earliest evangelists.
The central section of the book provides a philosophical rationale for correlating the historical-critical methods of biblical scholars and the rationalist methods of theologians and for correlating these "modern" Enlightenment modes of knowledge with feeling, lived experience, and praxis. It also traces the attempts to do justice to the historical Jesus with particular attention to the different philosophical and theological presuppositions supporting the different attempts.
A final section discusses the values of non-foundationalist hermeneutical approaches for the broader questions of the use and authority of the Bible. In the end, ecumenical rather than divisive approaches are advocated. Different ways of doing church and different ways of discovering and creating truth demand an ecumenical approach.
Edgar McKnight serves as Research Professor and William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor Emeritus of Religion at Furman University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen volumes in biblical studies.
"McKnight offers a thoughtful approach, by a mature scholar, to gospel studies. His arguments for the hermeneutical validity of literary approaches are important."
Mark A. Matson, Milligan College in Interpretation
"McKnight has taken on a massive task: to describe the many twists and turns of near-recent and current scholarly studies of Jesus and to relate their myriad conflicting results with the traditional Jesus known from faith and ecclesiastical tradition. This task has often been previously attempted, but seldom with such success. Here the persevering reader meets the usual suspects: form- and redaction-criticism, hermeneutics, Bultmann, Schweitzer, Crossan, Gadamer, and the endless jargon and personalities that populate the closed world of scientific biblical specialization. McKnight’s sollution to the conundrum: the firsthand documents must be accepted by faith, but complemented by scholarly and imaginative controls and supports, thereby uniting "competence and faith." Not a new answer, and not really sectarian, but classic and true nevertheless.
Casimir Bernas
Holy Trinity Abbey, in Religious Studies Review, January 2001
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