Continuing our summary/review of Tom Wright and Marcus Borg's discussion... For other articles in this series visit http://jmm.aaa.net.au/catalog/section/jc1.htm.

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More from Tom Wright:

'[My approach] opens itself to the full hermeneutical fury of the modernist, who says that I have renounced objectivity, and the postmodernist, who says it's all wish fulfilment. Equally important, I open myself to the comment that plenty of people have used the word 'Jesus' to denote figures so different from one another that the possibility of self-delusion is strong. All this I acknowledge. Yet at precisely this point history comes to the help of faith. The Jesus I know in prayer, in the sacraments, in the faces of those in need, is the Jesus I meet in the historical evidence - including the New Testament, of course, but the New Testament read not so much as the church has told me to read it but as I read it with my historical consciousness fully operative. The Jesus whose love seems to go deeper and reach more of me than the deepest human loves I know... converges remarkably with the Jesus whom I have tried to describe historically... the Jesus, that is, who found himself possessed of a very first-century Jewish vocation, to go to the place where the world was in pain and to take that pain upon himself...

'I see why some people find themselves driven to distinguish the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith, but I do not think the early Christians made such a distinction, and I do not find the need to do so myself. This Jesus of whom I speak still comes to meet us, sometimes hidden, sometimes not, sometimes despite the locked doors of a closed epistemology, always recognizable by the mark of the nails...

'History, then, prevents faith becoming fantasy. Faith prevents history becoming mere antiquarianism. Historical research, being always provisional, cannot ultimately veto faith, though it can pose hard questions that faith, in order to retain its integrity precisely as *Christian* faith, must struggle to answer, and may well grow strong through answering' (pp. 26,27)...

Note from Rowland: You won't find sentiments quite like these in the writings of the Jesus Seminar scholars... and therein lies an important clue...

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Shalom! Rowland Croucher