More than 30 historians, theologians, scientists, philosophers, and clergy from around the world gathered in Dallas to respond to the latest scholarly efforts to disprove the biblical claim that Jesus of Nazareth was both divine and human.
The conference, called “Jesus Christ: God and Man,” set out to correct the impression that the best in modern scholarship conflicts with the fundamental tenets of the Christian faith. The event was cosponsored by Dallas Baptist University and Truth, an interdisciplinary journal of Christian thought.
“The study of history is a buttress of faith,” said historian Paul Johnson. He added that recent historical and archeological evidence confirms the Gospels as “authentic documents describing actual events.… The late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century notion that the New Testament was a collection of late and highly imaginative records can no longer be seriously held.”
Jesus Of History
According to the conference brochure, efforts to demythologize Scripture have produced “confusion in the theological world … [in which] many theologians intimate that the deity of Christ is a premedieval idea which more enlightened Christians can shed and still remain Christians.” To counter such a skeptical bias, conference participants cited the rediscovery of the Jesus of history, the confirmation of the authenticity of biblical accounts, and the dating of New Testament documents closer to the events they describe.
Participants stressed that scholars must “see with the eyes of faith”—the faith of a people responding to actual, extraordinary events—in order to more accurately interpret Scripture. “It is in the irresistible impact of Jesus himself that we must find the origin of Christology,” explained New Testament scholar R. T. France. The doctrine of the Incarnation, he said, developed not because pagan ideas of divinity were added to, and therefore changed, the original understanding of Jesus. Instead, he argued, the source of “high Christology” is discovered “in the impact Jesus made on those who saw and heard him.”
François Dreyfus, of Jerusalem’s Ecole Biblique, underscored the need to grasp the historical experience of faith. A Jewish convert to Christianity, Dreyfus said modern scholars “minimize the stumbling block” that Jesus of Nazareth presented to first-century Jews. He said those who came to believe in Jesus as the Son of God soon after the Resurrection were compelled by the clearest evidence.
James Dunn, regarded as one of the most influential New Testament scholars in England, said the perspective of history has brought a “renewed phase” of biblical criticism, one in which a scholar must understand with the “heart and mind” of the people of faith. “I want to get as far as possible into the heads of the people for whom Matthew was writing, Mark was writing, and so on, so I can hear with their ears and begin to understand. I want to be the bridge-man between the first century and the twentieth century.”
Faith And History
Disagreements arose over the interdependence of faith and history, with some scholars arguing that theology is more important than the historical events on which it is based.
While the writings of Saint John, for example, are rooted in history, Dunn said, “to insist that he can only feed our faith if we understand him as saying everything in a straight historical way may be misunderstanding him and impoverishing the faith.” However, John Alsup, author of The Post-Resurrection Appearances of the Gospel Tradition, cautioned the other scholars: “[It is] dangerous to separate theology and history.”
In general, biblical scholars at the Dallas meeting agreed that Christians have history, as well as faith, on their side. There was a sense that this renewed cooperation between scholarship and faith may establish the basis of a new theology that would replace the skeptical outlook of recent times.
“Scholarship is now, quite objectively, on the side of Christianity,” said historian Paul Johnson. He added that scholarship “cannot establish the truth of Christianity. All it can do, and what it does now, is remove obstacles to faith.”
By William A. Durbin, Jr., in Dallas.
