Historical Jesus – Christ of faith: At the end of a methodological abstraction?

Abstract

The author starts his Essay by confirming that the abstraction, with which the historical critical method has proceeded in its research on Jesus of Nazareth, seems to be reaching its exhaustion. The coming dichotomy from the formula «Historical Jesus» - «Christ of faith» is demanding to be revisited in another different register: the Epistemology of History. So, we have learnt that History is not anything else than (re)construction from the historian, that the theory of the historian precedes the History. Hence the separation of the historical fact from its interpretation must to be regarded as something obsolete nowadays. It is being needed a Hermeneutics of narrative Representation in History in order to understand the variety of Historiographies which are proposed to us, far from opposing a History which were to be regarded as «true» to a History which were to be considered as «tendentious». Hence we should not identify anymore «Truth» with «nude facts». In this way it has been confirmed by the scholar research on each one of the canonical Gospels, in which the theological biography is never separated from the historical biography on Jesus. The Essay concludes that the thesis about an opposition between the «Historical Jesus» and the «Christ of faith» can not be supported in the example of the Gospel Narratives, because the theological biography in them does not suspend the awareness of a irreducibility of the historical past in the speech about Jesus.