said in particular to have revealed God’s self through those events, in a way in which this is not true of all other events or periods in history. Above all they believe that that must be said of Christ which is to be said of no other human being. However they may express his uniqueness, they must say of Jesus of Nazareth that there was a revelation of God through him in a way in which this is not true of you or me. God is bound up with peculiar events, a particular people, above all with the person Jesus of Nazareth. Therefore reference must needs always be made to this history and to this person.19
It is, of course, possible to admit the truth of that observation and still to see that there are profound problems. Who exactly is the Jesus of Nazareth to whom reference is necessarily made? What do we mean by “historical”? And how can we be certain that we have grasped and comprehended the import of the “historical moment”? These are not quibbles. If the aim of the Church is to base itself on the will, purpose, and intention of Jesus of Nazareth, it must have confidence in its means of discerning what that will and intention is.
What is usually called “the quest for the historical Jesus” began with Hermann Samuel Reimarus, a professor at the University of Hamburg in the mid-eighteenth century, whose thesis was so explosive that it was not published in full until 1972. For almost two hundred years the project remained a largely German undertaking, though from the late nineteenth century onwards, a few British, French, and American academics made their contributions. The aim was to identify a “human” Jesus, distinct from the divine “Christ of faith” exhibited in the Gospels and Epistles. The notion that there might be no useful distinction was not entertained. Recently when Joseph Ratzinger wrote as though they were one and the same, Geza Vermes dismissed the resulting volumes with something approaching scorn.20 In the 1970s the action moved from Germany to England, and then, predominantly, America. It concentrated—after the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls—on the Jewishness of Jesus and located him in the ethos of inter-testamental and post-biblical Judaism. Two things are clear from this protracted exercise: the first, that its conclusions are tentative and precarious; the second, that it makes assumptions about the supernatural which put it at variance with the scriptural witness and with Christian belief.
At the end of the first stage of the quest, in 1906, Albert Schweitzer famously called the whole operation into question. It was, he claimed, hopelessly subjective. Each scholar, he said, merely paraded before us a Jesus of his own invention, made in his own image and likeness.21 Equally famously, twenty years later, the great Rudolf Bultmann, the originator of Formgeschichte, came to an even more devastating conclusion: “We can know almost nothing about the life and personality of Jesus,” he wrote, “since the early Christian sources show no interest in either.”22
Reimarus, the originator of the Quest, was a Deist, and in many respects the inspiration of Lessing, who published fragments of his work. Both played their part in the general Enlightenment project for the reinterpretation of Christianity as a religion of humanitarian morality independent of all divine intervention or revelation. Integral to the Quest, from the very beginning, was the premise that an “historical,” a purely “human,” Jesus could not have had and could not have supposed himself to have had, a divine origin. In short, the questers ruled out the miraculous, the providential, and the supernatural—the main burden of the biblical texts—and saw those texts as merely a rich vein (alas, almost the only vein) to be mined for more mundane information. The result was to undermine the concept of canonicity, and the very authority of the texts. But that, of course, was the intention. Jesus is a fascinating character—but not obviously more so than, for example, Alexander the Great or Julius Caesar. Apart, that is, from the great prize of demolishing the pretentions of the Christian Church in the process of “rediscovery.”
All this inevitably relates to the question of the ordination of women. Because of the historical nature of Christianity, reference must necessarily be made, in commending such an innovation, to the teaching of Jesus. The question on the campus t-shirts becomes the sixty-four thousand dollar question: “What would Jesus do?” But how to answer it on a subject—the social and cultic status of women—which Jesus never directly addresses? If Schweitzer was right the answers will have no more authority than the opinions of the inquirer. If Bultmann was right no conclusions will be possible at all. The feminist theologian Judith Ochshorn bravely applied to Jesus what Bultmann took to be axiomatic for the New Testament writers as a whole. “Jesus was neither a misogynist nor a feminist,” she writes, “his interests simply lay elsewhere.”23 Because the question of women’s ordination is necessarily being put in the context of a wider historical quest that rejects the divine origin and supernatural claims of the Jesus it strives to reveal, we need to ask what authority could its conclusions possibly have. Why should the attitudes to women of one peripatetic first century rabbi be more significant than those of another, and why should either be conclusive for us now? It would surely be absurd to seek to resolve twenty-first century issues by reference to a first century figure about whom so little can be known.
The most profound difficulty for a Christianity which seeks to be faithful to an historical moment is this problem of the miraculous. Christianity is not simply a religion which necessarily relates to past events (or to a privileged account of them); it is also a religion deeply committed to a belief in miracles. By that is meant, not merely a fascination with the remarkable and inexplicable (such as the miracles of Jesus—which, as has often been noted, are comparable with those of other contemporary wonder workers, and subject to the same criteria of credibility), but a commitment to a notion of divine action and intervention, determining both the course and significance of events. Christianity is essentially teleological: “the book of life begins with a man and woman in a garden, and ends with Revelations.” The dogmatic structure of the religion is crucially dependent upon the miraculous nature of the events surrounding the birth and death of Jesus. But, as anyone can see, belief in such divine interventions has been largely absent from the post-Enlightenment world and from the historiography that has developed within it. It has also markedly diminished in the mainstream Protestant churches. Churchmen of distinction have, sometimes scrupulously, sometimes flippantly, dissociated themselves from it. “I wouldn’t put it past God to arrange for a virgin birth if he wanted to,” said David Jenkins when he was Bishop-designate of Durham, “but I very much doubt that he would.” Later, in the same television appearance, he described the Resurrection as “a series of experiences” rather than an event. These statements, of course, prove nothing about how widely such views are held. What they do show, however, is that the opinions of Voltaire and Diderot are no longer any impediment to ecclesiastical preferment.
When did the age of miracle cease? For English speakers, at least, we can be fairly accurate. It was in 1758 when the publication of David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding finally included the essay “Of Miracles,” which Henry Home had advised against publishing some years before. Hume defines miracle as “a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent.” He develops a notion that had originated in disputes with the learned Jesuits of the college at La Fleche in Anjou during a stay in 1735:
. . . No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of a kind that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish; and even in that case there is a mutual destruction of arguments and the superior only gives us an assurance suitable to that degree of force which remains after deducting the inferior.24
The Jesuits of La Fleche pointed out to Hume that his arguments (which had been principally directed against claims of recent miracles in their own community) were in fact arguments against the whole nature and tenor of Christianity itself. Hume tactfully moved away from the subject; but his interlocutors
