When History and Faith Collide: Studying Jesus

For many Christians, studying the historical Jesus disrupts and challenges their comfortable faith in the divine Christ of the creeds they have repeated all their lives. According to Hedrick (Parables as Poetic Fictions), such conflict can ""bring new insights, a broader understanding, and a deeper appreciation for the complementary relationship between faith and history."" His book focuses on 1st-century accounts and on 20th-century interpretations of the life and work of Jesus. Hedrick notes that an examination of the canonical and noncanonical accounts of Jesus' life involves asking four questions: What constitutes the reality that human beings perceive? What aspects of these portraits seem to have a greater grounding in historical reality? Which of the two approaches--history based on a historian's faith or history written on the basis of observation--will be most apt to reconstruct events as they would have appeared to objective observers of the past? Is the value of the gospels diminished because of their diversity, their differences, and because they were themselves shaped by early Christian faith? He proceeds to examine the ways in which 1st-century readers of the Gospels would have understood them as well as the diversity among the reports of Jesus' life and ministry. In clear and precise prose, Hedrick asserts that the best way to understand the historical Jesus is to study the Gospels as 1st-century texts that present us with information about the life and death of Jesus. His book serves as an introduction to the central conflicts inherent in the contemporary study of Jesus. (Apr.)