Jesus. The Apostle's Creed signals the importance of history for the Christian faith by affirming that Jesus 'suffered under Pontius Pilate', an actual historical figure, though doubtless one who would have little importance were it not for his connection with Jesus. The Apostle Paul tells the Corinthians that if the resurrection did not occur (and I believe it is clear that Paul conceives of the resurrection as an historical event), then 'your faith is futile and you are still in your sins'.1 It is not surprising then that Christians have usually followed the writer of the fourth gospel in affirming the importance of knowing about the life of Jesus. There, after recounting the 'many signs' that Jesus did that were performed 'in the presence of his disciples', and affirming that Jesus did many others, the author tells his readers that these were written 'that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name'.2 Though Christians have traditionally affirmed the importance of this historical knowledge (or rational belief),3 they have not been in agreement as to how this knowledge is obtained. In this paper I propose to describe in some detail two accounts of how this knowledge is supposed to be obtained, looking at both classical and contemporary versions of each. I shall term these two approaches the evidentialist and non-evidentialist accounts. These two accounts have often been taken to be rivals, but I

Evidentialist and non-evidentialist accounts of historical religious knowledge

A Defence of Christian Revelation

The question of who Jesus is often arouses cognitive as well as affective responses that have far reaching influences on people‟s faith. The category of those who subscribe to the affective mode with foot in systematized cognitive investigation of the question often experience what Ratzinger refers to as “a clutching of the air”1 in an attempt to form a relationship with Jesus. In other words, the role of modern biblical critical method of studying the Gospels, with its characteristic scientific approach to the question of who Jesus is, is said to often create a gap between belief and practice. Among scholars who have attempted to bridge such a gap are Rudolf Schnackenburg and Joseph Ratzinger. The latter has attempted a theological and spiritual hermeneutics in approaching the question. The general intent of this paper is an appraisal of his method for reading the gospels as highlighted in two of his writings: Jesus of Nazareth and "Biblical Interpretation in Crisis”. While the central effort of the paper is to evaluate the adequacy or otherwise of Ratzinger‟s model for Christians‟ faith enhancement, the guiding question shall be what possibility such method has in ameliorating the “danger of clutching the air” and in establishing an “intimate friendship with Jesus” through the gospels.

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Joseph Ratzinger’s theological hermeneutics for Christians’ faith enhancement: An appraisal

Modern historical criticism of the gospels and Christian origins began in the seventeenth century largely as an attempt to debunk the Christian religion as a pious fraud. The gospels were seen as bits of priestcraft and humbug of a piece with the apocryphal Donation of Constantine. In the few centuries since Reimarus and his critical kin, historical criticism has been embraced and assimilated by many Christian scholars who have seen in it the logical extension of the grammatico-historical method of the Reformers. The new views of New Testament exegesis and of early Christian history are important and well known. Many New Testament scholars would now hold with Schweitzer and Bultmann that Jesus was a preacher of the imminent end of the world. He may have secretly considered himself to be the Messiah, or he may have simply sought to pave the way for another, the apocalyptic Son of Man. After his execution, his disciples' experiences of his resurrection forced on them a conclusion already implicit in his teachings and personal piety: that Jesus was indeed, or had become, the Messiah, and was in fact God's Son. They expected he would soon return as the Son of Man he had predicted.

Robert M. Price

Papers

Is there A Place for Historical Criticism