When I purchased Verdict on Jesus: A New Statement of Evidence, published by SPCK in 2010, I hoped it would confront me with the very latest attempt to vindicate Christian doctrines. In fact the book turns out to be fundamentally a reissue of a very conservative apologetic work of that title, first published sixty years earlier by an Anglican – Leslie Badham, who later became Vicar of Windsor and chaplain to the Queen. Admittedly, he updated the book in 1971, and in 1983 his son, the Revd. Professor Paul Badham, further revised it after the author's death, and later reissued it as a fourth edition, with further revision, in 1995. The present edition is thus the fifth, and includes a new introduction by Paul Badham and three new chapters (one of which he has written himself) presented with his conviction that the book is ‘a religious classic’ and ‘its central argument of permanent validity’.
One of the added chapters, entitled ‘Current Trends in Historical Jesus Research’, by the New Testament scholar Kathy Ehrensperger (239–258) is of philosophical interest. She insists that it is now acknowledged that a historical account is ‘not an objective reconstruction of the past’ but ‘a narrative about it from the perspective of the present’ – a perspective informed by the historian's own ‘hermeneutical presuppositions’, who in consequence cannot ‘retrieve neutral facts from the past and thereby present an original, that is, “true” image of “how it really was”.’ This insight, she says, constitutes a ‘challenge to the notion of history as a discipline’. Scholars can do no more that provide ‘reconstructions … informed by the best available contextual information interpreted in a responsible way which is sensitive to the data’. But ‘because of the limitations of the discipline of history itself’, they cannot ‘excavate the real Jesus … as he really was’, and the present diversity of interpretations of him ‘should not be deplored’ but is ‘to be expected’, and is not ‘evidence for the failure of … research’.
However much we may rejoice in, or at any rate resign ourselves to what according to Ehrensperger is this only to be expected diversity, we need to keep in mind that, in so far as interpretations are mutually exclusive, they cannot all be true. ‘Truth is one’, says Leslie Badham in the Foreword to his book, and I agree that knowledge is all of a piece; we have to bring all our theories into direct relation with one another, contradictions and incoherence being ruled out. The historian Richard J. Evans has pressed the point in response to certain ‘postmodernist’ conceptions. An orientation hostile to capitalism might prompt the view that big business put the Nazis into power in 1933, whereas a different orientation could suggest that it did not. ‘Claiming that each is true according to the perspective … from which it is written’ is, says Evans, ‘a meaningless statement’. Historians have to do their utmost to ascertain the ‘probable truth’ of their interpretations ‘by following the usual rules of evidence’, and cannot rest content with two historical arguments which contradict one another.Footnote 1
Ehrensperger seems unaware that, in so far as the ‘limitations’ she stresses are real, they apply to all our ideas, not just to those concerning history, and that nevertheless we are able, ‘with the best available … information interpreted in a responsible way’, to ascertain a good deal of objective fact about all manner of things and events. I will argue the case as follows.
If I look out of the my window, my sensations include an area of green and patches of yellow. If I say that I am looking at my lawn and the daffodils bordering it, I will enable others to picture the scene better. In the one case I describe my sensations, and it is difficult to do so exhaustively, while in the other I describe my perceptions, my interpretation of my sensations, and this is easy. If I go into the garden I shall still perceive the grass and the flowers, but my sensations will change at every step – another reason why it is vain to attempt to define material things in terms devoid of interpretation of sensations. Even A. J. Ayer finally admitted as much.Footnote 2 In sum, I experience my sensations, but I perceive the facts to which they testify. The word ‘perception’ has long been used in psychology for the process by which sensations are compounded with associated memories in the brain to represent things, as opposed to their transient aspects.Footnote 3 Hence perception depends on pre-existing experiences and on the power of reviewing them and combining them in the imagination. If such experience is insufficient, sensations may be interpreted wrongly. An entomologist sees a zig-zagging speck of colour against a background of sky and trees, and infers that a butterfly has fluttered past. A layman might have taken it for a falling leaf. Perception is, then, an elementary form of reasoning. Inferences from the sensations to the realities have become so habitual and, in a familiar environment, so reliable, as to disguise how little we can know without the aid of inferences of some kind and to suggest to us that our perceptions are immediate and inference free.
Thus every interpretation of perceptual data is a hypothesis, whether what is involved is supplying in our minds the missing part of a supposed sequence, or the unperceived aspects of a thing. It is, for example, a hypothesis that certain sensations I have from day to day when I look at the sky can be attributed to a constant body, the sun, which reappears periodically, and not to a procession of similar bodies, as was supposed by Xenophanes in the sixth century BC.Footnote 4 Again, when I see the familiar face of the postman each morning, it is a hypothesis that these intermittent experiences are due to the continued existence of a being which only at intervals comes into my sight. We think of things as continuous, yet the evidence we have is interrupted and fragmentary. Although in many cases we make the relevant assumptions with such confidence that we are not conscious of making any hypothesis, viewed as a mental process it is the same, regardless of the degree of certainty we may feel.
The historian goes to work in the same way as any ordinary individual in deciding between fact and fiction, and his criterion is partly general: such and such things certainly happen, but it does not follow that a particular alleged instance of them happened. To establish that it did, it is necessary to show how it fits in with other events regarded as established. On the other hand, such and such things do not happen, and evidence that they do must be explained in some other way, unless it is so strong as to compel the abandonment of the premiss that they do not. As an example, a controversy long raged in archeological circles about certain broken flints in deposits of Pliocene age. Some held that they had been deliberately chipped by primitive men for use as tools, others that their shape owed nothing to human agency. It seems to be now agreed that flints of the same form can be produced by mere pressure in the ground. But if in these same deposits a cigarette lighter or a pair of nail scissors had been discovered, even if no theory could be found to account for their presence, they would not have been regarded as tools of Pliocene man; for the re-arrangement of all our ideas about the history of the earth and of mankind, as well as of our elementary conceptions of chemical change, would be too much to ask for the sake of these isolated documents.
To summarize, the limitations specified by Ehrensperger are not peculiar to history, but universal. In his new Introduction to his father's book, Paul Badham observes that her argument ‘does not mean that we cannot have confidence in what appears to us to be reasonable interpretations of the evidence available’. The New Testament scholar Heikki Räisänen justly notes that to claim objectivity is not to claim that one is in possession of ‘the Truth’, but that the relevant sources are analysed ‘independently of whether one approves or disapproves of the ideas found in them’.Footnote 5 In the course of his luminous account he repeatedly has occasion to complain of the way in which certain ideas, firmly rooted in the New Testament but inimical to modern outlooks, are played down or discarded in accounts of the texts. He instances eschatology, ‘more or less explained away in existing New Testament theologies’, because ‘history as the arena of God's action has become a problem for modernity’. He points too to the intolerance of Jesus' followers, who ‘generally regarded all those who did not accept their message as wicked sinners, cut off from God’. Hell also has been quietly dropped, even though ‘the wailing and gnashing of teeth of the damned is a favourite phrase of Matthew’. As for the atonement, ‘the idea of appeasing an angry God does lurk in the background’, but ‘is routinely denied by modern interpreters’.Footnote 6
As already Schweitzer noted, scholars have been all too ready to find in the New Testament what they themselves approve of; and the New Testament scholar E.P. Sanders could still say, in 1985, that it is ‘amazing’ that so many of his colleagues ‘write books about Jesus in which they discover that he agrees with their own version of Christianity’.Footnote 7
Paul Badham, in his new Introduction to his father's book, adds to his statement I have already quoted about ‘reasonable interpretations of the evidence available’, that Richard Bauckham, Professor of New Testament Studies at St. Andrews University, holds that ‘our knowledge of Jesus comes to us through oral traditions derived from people who were themselves eye-witnesses of Jesus ministry’. Badham adds: ‘Not all scholars are as confident as that’. Indeed they are not, and Bauckham himself avows that he runs counter to ‘almost all recent New Testament scholarship’ in arguing that the texts of all four gospels ‘are close to the eye-witness reports of the words and deeds of Jesus’.Footnote 8
Badham is particularly concerned to endorse his father's metaphysical claims about God. Elsewhere he has noted that, without such claims, Jesus cannot be regarded as the incarnation of a transcendent deity, but becomes merely someone whose ‘life and example is of importance’. This would ‘reduce Christianity wholly to a this-worldly dimension’, incompatible with the main stream of Christian tradition. Hence Badham pleads for ‘systematic or reasoned preaching about God in the Church of England today’, instead of sermons which are merely ‘little talks about the life and work of Jesus Christ in which God can be referred to’.Footnote 9 As a conclusion to the chapter he has himself added to his father's book, he refers to the book's observation of how opportune it was ‘both that the concept of the Logos existed in the first century as a widely understood idea and that there was an understanding that the Mind (or Logos) of God could find expression in human life’. Hence he strongly supports ‘the verdict of Christian orthodoxy on Jesus’, namely ‘that he really did incarnate the divine Logos in his life and teaching, so that in Jesus was seen the character of the mind behind the cosmos expressed in the language of his human life’.
