6 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus
By Marcus J. Borg

I am a historian and a Christian. As a historian, I am engaged in the study of the historical Jesus and Christian origins. As a Christian, I am a committed layperson, deeply involved in the life of the church. Thus I live in two worlds: the secular world of the academy and the Christian world of the church.

As a scholarly discipline, historical Jesus research is now located primarily in the world of the secular academy. This is a recent development. Not long ago, the majority of Jesus scholars (and biblical scholars generally) taught in seminaries, divinity schools, and church-related colleges and universities. Institutional settings provided the connection to the Christian tradition and the life of the church. But now the majority of us teach in public universities or pluralistic and, thus, secularized private institutions. For the same reasons of pluralization and secularization, our major professional organizations focus on the non-sectarian study of Jesus and Christian origins.

As participants in a discipline, we are involved in what John Maier asks us to imagine in the introduction to his multi-volume study of the historical Jesus:

Suppose that a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, and an agnostic-all honest historians cognizant of 1st century religious movements-were locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library, put on a spartan diet, and not allowed to emerge until they had hammered out a consensus document on who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended in his own time and place.¹

Marcus Borg is Hundere Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University. His most recent books are Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (1994) and Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (1994).
¹ John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew.- Rethinking the Historical Jesus (New York: Doubleday, 1991), vol. 1, P. 1.

7 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

In such a setting, perceptions of Jesus dependent upon Christian faith claims have to be set aside.

I am also a Christian living in the world of the church. I grew up in the church and, except for a self-imposed exile during my thirties, I have lived there ever since. My involvement is both personal and institutional. I go there to worship and pray. I listen to the stories and sing the songs. I say the creeds and receive bread for the journey. I often teach and sometimes preach.

In an important sense, these worlds are separate. One can be a historical Jesus scholar without being a Christian, and one can be a Christian without historical knowledge of Jesus. But for me, because of my personal and vocational commitments, they overlap, and I am regularly involved in bringing the worlds of the historian and the Christian together. In this essay, I will describe how I as a historian see Jesus and how I relate my historical perceptions of Jesus to my life as a Christian.

I will speak about both the pre-Easter Jesus and post-Easter Jesus. By the pre-Easter Jesus, I mean, of course, Jesus as a figure of history before his death. By the post-Easter Jesus, I mean the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience.

This distinction between two referents of the name "Jesus," common to this century's scholarship, is most often made using different language, namely, "the Jesus of history" and "the Christ of faith." For the latter, I prefer "the post-Easter Jesus." Whether intended or not, the phrase "the Christ of faith" suggests to many people a hypothetical or "iffy" reality, one that can only be believed in (whereas, in contrast, "the Jesus of history" was "real"). I seek to avoid this inference by stressing that the post-Easter Jesus is the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience. He is an experiential reality, not just an article of faith, a point to which I shall return in the section on the post-Easter Jesus.

How I, AS A HISTORIAN, SEE THE PRE-EASTER JESUS

My way of seeing the pre-Easter Jesus uses a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary approach. To some extent, this is the result of developments in the discipline. A central characteristic of the contemporary renaissance in Jesus scholarship, or "third quest" of the historical Jesus, is the use of models and insights from several disciplines and subdisciplines.² These include cultural anthropology, history of religions, political economy, sociology of religion, and psychology of religion; studies of peasant societies, purity societies, patriarchal societies, honorshame societies, and so forth.³

² See my essay, "A Renaissance in Jesus Scholarship," first published in THEOLOGY TODAY 45 (1988), pp. 280-292, and reprinted in my Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge: Trinity Press International, 1994), pp. 3-17.
³ The best single volume for seeing a multi-disciplinary approach at work is John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant (San Francisco: Harper, 1991).

8 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

My use of an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach is also the result of my teaching situation. It reflects the separation of Jesus scholarship from its Christian roots. For most of the last twenty years, I have taught in secularized institutions, initially in a private liberal arts college that disaffiliated from its Protestant church connection a year after its founding well over a century ago and in which the largest single religious grouping was Jewish, followed by Roman Catholic. I now teach in a state university supported by public funds in the relatively unchurched Pacific Northwest, in which the largest religious grouping is skiers followed by hikers.

In settings such as these, it is inappropriate to approach the study of Jesus with Christian presuppositions and agenda. Moreover, such an approach would also miss where my students are. For most of them, the question in their minds is not, How does historical-critical study of Jesus relate to Christian faith and theology? but, What was Jesus like?

Thus, for pedagogical reasons, I needed to find non-Christian ways of speaking about Jesus. For this purpose, I found the use of cross-cultural categories to be fruitful. They make possible a perception of Jesus not directly tied to Christian language and not dependent upon explicitly Christian beliefs, which to my students are often unfamiliar, suspect or both. In particular, I make use of a cross-cultural typology of religious

"One can be a Christian without historical knowledge of jesus.

personality types as a way of generating a basic image or sketch of the historical Jesus.

My sketch has five strokes, each corresponding to a type of religious figure known cross-culturally in the religious experience of humankind.⁴ style='mso-spacerun:yes'>  Of these, the first is most important, indeed, foundational.

(1) Jesus was a religious ecstatic. He was one of those persons who, in non-ordinary states of consciousness, frequently and vividly experienced reality quite differently from how most of us experience it most of the time. The varieties of ecstatic religious experience cover a wide spectrum. They include visions (a sense of momentarily seeing into another level of reality), shamanic experiences (a sense of journeying into another level of reality), nature mysticism (an eyes open form of mysticism in which one sees the world "filled with the glory of God"), introvertive mysticism (an eyes closed form of mysticism in which one experiences a strong sense of communion or union with God), enlightenment experiences (such as

⁴ For a more extended development of this sketch, see my Jesus: A New Vision (San Francisco: Harper, 1987) and Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper, 1994). I sometimes speak of a four-stroke sketch, combining the two strokes of "religious ecstatic" and "healer" into the single stroke of "Spirit person" (similar to what Rudolf Otto meant by "holy man").

9 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

reported of the Buddha and others), moments of Buber's "I-Thou," and "peak experiences" such as those described by the psychologist Abraham Maslow.

These non-ordinary states of consciousness are experienced as a "knowing" and not just as an ecstasy of emotion. People who have them are deeply convinced that they know something they didn't know before. For them, "the sacred" is an element of experience, not simply an article of belief. To echo William James, for such persons religious conviction is based on first-hand religious experience rather than second-hand belief in the reports of others. When once one sees that there really are people like this, in the Jewish tradition and in other religious traditions, it seems obvious that Jesus was one of these.

(2) Jesus was a healer. Paranormal healings are reported within many cultures, including Judaism both before and in the time of Jesus. Such healings are typically the work of religious ecstatics, though not all religious ecstatics become healers. But some do, becoming mediators of the sacred. Strikingly, more healing stories are told about Jesus than about any other figure in the Jewish tradition. He must have been a remarkable healer. ⁵

(3) Jesus was a wisdom teacher. More specifically, he was a particular kind of wisdom teacher: He taught an alternative wisdom that subverted conventional wisdom and imaged another way. In this, he was like seminal figures in other traditions as well as his own. Like Lao Tzu in China, the Buddha in India, and Socrates in Athens, Jesus challenged the conventional wisdom of his time, taught in his own manner that the unexamined life was not worth living, and spoke of an alternative way of being and living. It is reasonable to surmise that his alternative wisdom flowed out of an enlightenment experience. Like the author of the book of Job, he was among those who could say not simply, "I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear," but also "my eye sees you" (John 42:6). He spoke differently because he had seen differently.

(4) Jesus was a social prophet. Here, the social prophets of ancient Israel provide the model. As persons who experienced the pathos or passion of God, the classical prophets of the Hebrew Bible knew God's suffering in the suffering of the oppressed and knew God's anger toward those who were the source of oppression. Like them, Jesus indicted the domination system of his day with its sharp social boundaries, warned the ruling elites of impending judgment, and advocated an alternative social vision grounded in a politics of compassion.

⁵ Some medical anthropologists make a distinction between disease and illness and a corresponding distinction between curing and healing. Disease refers to a physical condition, illness to the social meaning attached to that condition; curing goes with disease and healing with illness. When once one sees this distinction, it is possible to affirm that Jesus healed illness, even while denying that he cured disease. However, I think Jesus did both, and when I speak of him as a healer, I mean both that he cured disease and healed illness. Presumably the only reason for denying that Jesus cured disease would be a belief that paranormal cures do not happen. But there is strong (even if not incontrovertible) evidence that they do.

10 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

(5) Jesus was a movement catalyst. In the past, I have spoken of him as a movement founder, but I don't think there was a moment when Jesus thought or said, "I hereby establish a movement." But, to say the obvious, a movement came into existence around him. I think this happened during his lifetime (at least as a following), and not simply after his death. Moreover, the shape of the movement as we can discern it from early layers of the tradition subverts the sharp social boundaries of his world and embodies a strikingly inclusive alternative social vision.

What began as a pedagogical strategy has now become foundational for my methodology as a historical Jesus scholar. With E. P. Sanders, I agree that developing one's methodology by beginning with the sayings of Jesus has not often been productive.⁶ Focusing on the sayings often generates a pervasive skepticism that paralyzes historical reconstruction, making it seem questionable to the point of futility. By concentrating on the micro-analysis of texts, it inhibits seeing a larger picture. The cross-cultural typology of varieties of religious personalities provides a way out of this impasse. The types function as models that help to gestalt or constellate early traditions about Jesus into a whole.

This approach also has an interesting apologetic function, especially when speaking to "the cultured despisers of religion."⁷ Many of my students, as well as many other people in our culture and churches, are in this category. The central claims about Jesus to which a cross-cultural approach leads become very credible. When one realizes, for example, that there are religious ecstatics and paranormal healers and enlightened teachers in other religious traditions, then the claims that Jesus was each of these are no longer tied to a specifically Christian estimate of him. To recognize him as a remarkable figure does not depend upon Christian beliefs. Thus, it seems to me, the use of these types not only enables us to see the traditions about Jesus more clearly, but also gives them a credibility that they do not have when they are seen simply as Christian claims about Jesus.

How I, AS A HISTORIAN, SEE THE POST-EASTER JESUS

In the introduction to this essay, I defined the post-Easter Jesus as the Jesus of Christian tradition and experience. As the Jesus of Christian tradition, the post-Easter Jesus includes the Jesus we meet on the surface level of the Gospels. Of course, the Synoptic Gospels also contain material about the pre-Easter Jesus, but in their present form they are the developing traditions of the early Christian movement in the decades after Easter. The post-Easter Jesus also includes the Jesus we meet in the

⁶ See his comments in Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985), pp. 3-18.
⁷ The phrase, of course, echoes the title of Friedrich Schleiermacher's 1799 book, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (for a recent translation with introduction and notes, see the volume by Richard Crouter, published by Cambridge University Press, 1988). Schleiermacher addressed the book to the intellectuals of his time who, deeply affected by the Enlightenment, no longer thought religion made sense. In an important sense, they are the ancestors of many of us in the modern world.

11 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

rest of the New Testament: Jesus as Son of God, Word of God, Wisdom of God, Lamb of God, Lord and Christ, great high priest and sacrifice, and the like. Ultimately, the post-Easter Jesus includes the Jesus of the great creeds of the church, in which he is spoken of as the second person of the Trinity: He is very god of very god, begotten not made, and of the same substance as God.

The question I now wish to address is this: How do we get from the pre-Easter Jesus to the post-Easter Jesus? How do we get from a finite human being of the past, who was an ecstatic, healer, wisdom teacher, social prophet and movement catalyst, to a divine reality who is one with God? How do I think that happened historically? What was the process? And what is the meaning of language about the post-Easter Jesus? How are we to understand these affirmations?

The process begins with Easter. I see the central meaning of Easter to be, in one sense, very simple: The followers of Jesus continued to experience him after his death, but in a radically new way. They no longer knew him as a figure of flesh and blood, but as a spiritual reality. They no longer experienced him as limited by time and space, but could experience him anywhere.

This kind of experience has gone on ever since. People have experienced Jesus as a living spiritual reality from the first century down to the

"Jesus spoke differently because he had seen differently. "

present. These experiences range from dramatic visions to a quieter sense of a presence that is felt to be the living Christ. This Jesus is a figure of the present and not just the past. This is the truth and ground of Easter. Thus, the post-Easter Jesus is not simply the Jesus of Christian tradition, but also the Jesus of Christian experience.

To add two clarifying remarks, I have no idea if Easter involved anything happening to the corpse of Jesus or an empty tomb. Crucial to this remark is the distinction between resuscitation and resurrection. Resuscitation intrinsically involves something happening to a corpse: A dead person comes back to life, resumes the life that she or he had before, and will die again. Whatever the resurrection of Jesus was, it wasn't that. Instead, resurrection means entry into another kind or mode of existence, one beyond life and death, beyond time and space. A resurrected person will not die again. Resurrection need not involve something happening to a corpse.⁸

Second, I do not understand the Easter stories in the Gospels as straightforward historical reports, as if they were describing the kinds of

⁸ Interestingly, Paul (our earliest literary witness to the resurrection) explicitly denies that it is the physical body that is raised; the resurrection body is spiritual, not physical. See I Cor. 15:35-50.

12 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

events that could be captured on a videocam. My favorite illustration is the Emmaus Road story in Luke 24. Two followers of Jesus journey with him for several hours on Easter Sunday without recognizing him. Then, in the evening, when the day is far spent and darkness is falling, they recognize him as he breaks bread, whereupon he promptly vanishes from their sight. I cannot imagine that one could have filmed the events this story reports. As a historical report, the story lacks credibility, but as a metaphorical narrative, it powerfully speaks the truth of Easter. The risen Christ journeys with us, even when we are unaware of that. I do not think Emmaus happened, but I think Emmaus happens again and again.⁹ Thus, I see the Easter stories as narrative metaphors expressing the foundational experience, then and now, of the Christian tradition: Jesus lives and is lord. The post-Easter Jesus is an experiential reality, not simply an element of belief or article of faith.

Now, to state my central claim or thesis: The post-Easter Jesus (the notion as well as how he is talked about) originates because of the combination of on-going religious experience and the emergence (initially) of a metaphorical tradition and (ultimately) an ontological tradition for speaking about it. To echo Paul Ricoeur, the experience of the risen Christ gave birth to symbols, which gave birth to thought. Meta-

style='mso-spacerun:yes'> 

"Resurrection need not involve something happening to a corpse "

phors and images are the first language of religious experience; concepts and doctrines are the second language.

Thus, I see the post-Easter Jesus initially with images generated within the early Christian movement in the decades after Easter. The "I am" statements of John's Gospel provide an excellent illustration. The Jesus of John's Gospel says about himself, "I am the light of the world," "I am the bread of life," I am the resurrection and the life," "I am the way the truth and the life," and so forth. As a historian, my historical judgment (in common with most New Testament scholars) is that Jesus didn't say any of these things about himself. Why then does John's Gospel have him speak this way, and what are we to make of these statements? The most satisfactory answer, it seems to me, is that the community out of which John's Gospel comes had experienced the post-Easter Jesus in all of these ways: as the light that had brought them out of darkness, as the spiritual

⁹ My language echoes my colleague John Dominic Crossan, who has said many things I wish I had said. Crossan calls the Emmaus Road story "the metaphoric condensation" of several years of early Christian experience into "one parabolic afternoon," and then concludes: "Emmaus never happened; Emmaus always happens." See his Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (San Francisco: Harper, 1994), p. 197.

13 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

food that nourished them in the midst of their journey, and as the way that led from death to life. Experience gave birth to images. Thus the images contained within John's "I am" statements, though they do not go back to the historical Jesus, are a powerful and truthful testimony to what the post-Easter Jesus had become in their experience.

To move beyond John's "I am" statements, the post-Easter traditions of the New Testament contain a wide variety of images for speaking about the significance of Jesus. Jesus is the Word of God, the Wisdom of God, the Lamb of God, and the Son of God. He is the divine warrior who triumphs over the enemies of God. He is the great high priest and sacrifice, the Messiah, and the servant of God.

To select a central image to illustrate the process of moving from experience to metaphor to doctrine, "Son of God" initially was a relational metaphor. So it was in the Jewish tradition. In the Hebrew Bible, "Son of God" can refer to Israel as a whole or to the king. Near the time of Jesus, it was also used to refer to Jewish charismatics (who, interestingly, were religious ecstatics and healers).¹⁰ What Israel, the king, and the charismatic all had in common was a relationship of special closeness with God. "Son of God" as a relational metaphor used the imagery of parent and child to express intimacy with God.

It is just possible that Jesus himself may have used the metaphor of parent and child to speak about the intimacy of his experiential relationship to God. In any case, the early Christian movement obviously did. Initially, some texts suggest, "Son of God" applied to the post-Easter Jesus: Jesus became "Son of God" through his resurrection from the dead." As the post-Easter tradition developed, this relational metaphor became virtually biological in the birth stories. Now Jesus is "Son of God" because he was conceived through union of the Spirit of God with a human mother: God is Jesus' "father" in a quite direct sense. Indeed, when these stories are read biologically, metaphor has been superseded. 12 Finally, relational metaphor and biological claim become ontological, reaching classic expression in the doctrine of the Trinity and the creeds: Jesus is of the same substance as God, indeed, is God.

This process of development should not be seen as wrong. It is very natural: Experience gave birth to symbols (metaphors) that gave birth to thought (doctrine). Moreover, even its full doctrinal expression in the Nicene Creed continues to reflect early Christian experience. Experiences of the post-Easter Jesus as divine made a doctrine like the Trinity

¹⁰ In contemporary scholarship, see above all Geza Vermes, Jesus the Jew (New York: Macmillan, 1973).
¹¹ See, e.g., Rom. 1:4.
¹² I do not know how literally or metaphorically the authors of Matthew and Luke understood the statement that Jesus was conceived by the Holy Spirit. I do know that at the level of popular Christianity in the centuries since, the statement has most often been understood quite literally: Jesus is "the Son of God" because God (and not a male human being) was his father.

14 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

necessary. How, within the framework of monotheism, could one do justice to the experience of the post-Easter Jesus as a divine reality? Only by affirming that God and Jesus are, in an important sense, one. The Trinity is the conceptual attempt to reconcile Christian experience of Jesus as divine with monotheism.¹³

To return to the main thread of my argument, "Son of God" is thus one of several metaphors used by early Christians to speak about the central figure of their movement, the one whom they knew as both the pre-Easter Jesus and post-Easter Jesus. The multiplicity of metaphors should alert us to their essential character as metaphor. It is not that Jesus was (is) literally some of these, and only metaphorically others. Rather, metaphorically, Jesus is all of these: Son of God, Wisdom of God, Word of God, Lamb of God, and so forth .¹⁴

THE HISTORIAN AND THE CHRISTIAN

In brief, this is how I as a historian see both the pre-Easter Jesus and post-Easter Jesus. How do I put this together with being a Christian? To be both personal and general, how do I reconcile this understanding of Jesus with my own Dartici Dation in Christian worship and life, and what significance do I think this approach has for Christians?

I begin with an important prologue: The historical approach is not essential. Being a Christian is perfectly possible without it. Our Christian ancestors didn't know about it, for modern historical study was born only a few hundred years ago in the Enlightenment, Even now, probably the majority of Christians are either unfamiliar with the historical approach or reject it. Yet it seems to me to be very helpful in at least three ways: its effects upon Christian understanding, worship, and vision.

Christian Understanding-This approach can remove artificial stumbling blocks to being a Christian. Many of us who grew up in the church reached a point in our lives where the claims we heard about Jesus and Christianity in our childhood no longer made sense.¹⁵ As children, most of us heard these claims literally, for we received them in a state of "pre-critical naivete" or "natural literalism."¹⁶ In this state, it did not occur to us to wonder whether, for example, the birth stories (or the feeding of the five thousand or walking on water, or the Gospel of John) were historical reports or symbolic narratives.

¹³ With these comments about the Trinity, I leave my area of technical scholarly competency. I am not trained in patristic theology or the nuances of Trinitarian theology, which are complex areas of study with pitfalls all about.
¹⁴ For further development, see my Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, pp. 108-111, and my appreciative remark about Crossan's way of making this point (n. 54, p. 118).
¹⁵ For my autobiographical account of this experience, see my Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, pp, 3-15.
¹⁶ For further development of these terms, for which I am indebted to Paul Ricoeur and Paul Tillich respectively, see my Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, pp. 6,17, and Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship, pp. 175-178.

15 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

But for most of us, the literalism of childhood eventually became highly questionable. Several factors were at work: conflicts with modern knowledge (especially science); differences within the Gospels themselves; awareness of religious traditions in other cultures and a sense that Christianity cannot be the only way of salvation, despite what some verses in the New Testament say.

When this point is reached, three possibilities present themselves. One is conscious literalism, an insistence that the Gospels are literally and historically true, despite any difficulties we might have with them (essentially the fundamentalist option). A second is doubt and a deepening skepticism, often accompanied by a sense that one is no longer really a Christian. Modern historical scholarship provides a third option by seeing the Gospels differently. As a combination of historical memory and metaphorical narrative, they express the early Christian movement's witness to both the pre-Easter Jesus and post-Easter Jesus.

This option transforms the Christian's relationship to the Gospels. The point is not to believe them, regardless of what they say; the point, rather, is to understand what they are saying about the Jesus of history and the Jesus of Christian experience. From this understanding can flow a vision of the life of which they speak.

Christian Worship-These awarenesses make possible full participation in Christian worship. To explain: Christians who have become aware of the differences between Jesus as a figure of history and the Christian estimate of him often find some of the language used about Jesus in Christian worship to be problematic. To use the creeds as an example, saying them is often not easy for such Christians. To put the issue in bold form, if one thinks, as I do, that Jesus was not born of a virgin, did not think of himself as the Son of God, and did not see his own purpose as dying for the sins of the world, what do I understand myself to be doing when I recite the creeds?

For me, the key lies in the preceding analysis of language used for the post-Easter Jesus and the relationship of that language to early and on-going Christian experience. Among other things, it means that one should not take literally something that is metaphorical and that one should not understand a much later ontological claim as a historical statement about Jesus. Jesus would not have thought of himself as the only begotten son of God, and if one of his disciples had spoken of him with the words of the Nicene Creed, one can only imagine him saying, "What?"

But as the development of a metaphor, which may have flowed out of Jesus' own ecstatic religious experience of God, and certainly out of the post-Easter community's experience of the risen Jesus as a divine reality, the Nicene affirmation of Jesus as "Son of God" strikes me as completely appropriate. I do not see it as a statement of historical fact about Jesus that is to be believed but as a highly abstracted metaphor pointing beyond

16 - The Historian, the Christian, and Jesus

itself to the post-Easter Jesus of Christian experience. It is an expression of, and witness to, the Christian experience of Jesus as God.

"If one of Jesus' disciples had spoken of him with the words of the Nicene Creed, one can only imagine him saying, What?'

This same awareness also enables me to appreciate and participate in Christian expressions of devotion to Jesus as God in praise, hymns, and prayers. I now understand that some Christians are more christocentric, others more theocentric, not just theologically, but devotionally and experientially. For the former, Jesus is the primary content and focus of their religious experience and life; for the latter, God is. My own experience is primarily the latter. But it is not a matter of one being better than the other; they are simply different forms of devotion to the same reality, the post-Easter Jesus, who is also the face of God turned toward us.

Christian Vision-Finally, study of the historical Jesus has a more specific function: it can be epiphanic. From a Christian point of view, Jesus was an epiphany of God, a manifestation or disclosure of God. Thus, to the extent that historical study provides us with glimpses of Jesus (of what he was like, what he taught and did, and what his own passion and vision were), it is an epiphany of an epiphany. As such, it can provide content for our vision of what it means to take Jesus seriously as an epiphany of God.

What would it mean to take the God of Jesus seriously? It seems to me, from what I have been able to see thus far as a historian who is also a Christian, to include the following: It means to see God as an experiential reality, not simply an article of belief. It means to live by an alternative wisdom, whose primary content is a relationship with the same Spirit Jesus knew. It means to actualize compassion in the world, both as an individual virtue and as the core value of the alternative social vision of Jesus. And it means to be part of a community of memory that celebrates, nourishes, and embodies the new way of being that we see in Jesus.

Our ancestors didn't know any of this. To be more specific, they didn't have the awarenesses that flow out of a historical approach to Jesus (even though, for some of them, the Christian tradition itself seems to have mediated a similar vision of the Christian life). Yet for us living in an age in which pre-critical understandings of Christianity have become problematic, the work of the historian can be very helpful. Indeed, for me, the historian has made it possible to be a Christian again.