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The problem that underlies much of contemporary New Testament scholarship, Johnson says, is a serious misunderstanding about what constitutes historical knowledge. Indeed, he argues, fundamentalists and skeptical historical-critical scholars share the same error: they believe that history--understood as what can be known using modern techniques of historical reconstruction--is the ultimate criterion of truth against which the Gospels must be judged. (It should be noted that Johnson's use of the term "fundamentalist" is elastic, at some points referring to views that would be held by a majority of evangelicals. The same ambiguity attends his references to "conservative" scholars.)

The more literalistic fundamentalists believe the Gospels can be proven historically true; the modern skeptics believe they can be proven historically false; but both believe that "history" is the ultimate judge of the "truth" of the Gospels. This is a burden that history (as a discipline) simply cannot shoulder.

Johnson observes that this attitude itself displays a remarkably "pre-critical" understanding of history. Far from being a neutral record of "what really happened," history is a creation of the human intellect, a creation based not merely on highly fragmentary evidence but also on the personal concerns and prejudices of the people writing the history.

Johnson demonstrates that, despite unending claims of "value-neutral," scientific rigor, the scholarship that undergirds the Jesus Seminar and similar enterprises is based on wild speculation and minuscule evidence. For example, whereas in the past New Testament scholars thought they saw hints of common sources used by the New Testament writers--most famously, a hypothetical collection of Jesus' sayings, called Q, used by Mark, Matthew, and Luke--some of today's scholars now brazenly assert they can reconstruct, with precise detail, both these sources themselves and their stages of development. They now speak about Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4.

This, Johnson avers, is preposterous, and explains why so much of contemporary New Testament scholarship is viewed with derision by mainstream historians. The entire edifice is "a house of cards," he says. "Pull out one element and the whole construction crumbles."

In fact, Johnson argues, authentic Christian faith is not now, nor ever has been, based on historical reconstructions of who Jesus was. He reminds his readers that Christians do not have faith in this or that scholarly account of the historical Jesus, but in the living Christ raised from the dead. "Christian faith is directed to a living person," he writes. "The 'real Jesus' for Christian faith is the resurrected Jesus, him 'whom God has made both Lord and Christ' (Acts 2:36)."

According to Johnson, the Resurrection (the heart of the Christian faith) should be understood as a " 'nonhistorical' event that has historical effects." Being "nonhistorical" does not mean that the Resurrection did not happen, only that determining whether or not it happened is beyond the scope of the historian. One needs more than the facts of history to do that. History may provide many details consistent with a traditional understanding of Christ's resurrection (the formation of the church and its early writings), but the discipline has reached its limits when it encounters "the passage of the human Jesus into the power of God. . . . The problem lies with history's limited mode of knowing." According to the church, one needs to meet Christ today to make sense of what happened in the tomb on Easter.

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April 29 1996, Vol. 40, No. 5