An A–ZB – is for the Bible
There’s a tendency today to insist on the absolute historic-
ity of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. Unless the New
Testament is, at heart, a historical document, the Christian
faith is in vain. It’s stressed to also show that Christianity is not
fundamentally a moral philosophy, it’s an actual and already
realised change, an inauguration of the new creation which
Christians are in the business of continuing to bring about.
But does this not demonstrate so much of what is wrong with
the contemporary religious imagination? It is very much in
the spirit of the scientifi c age: to be true, something must be
empirically verifi able and historically determinable. Myth and
meaning, symbol and archetype, are for merely spiritual types!
Those arty sorts read the Bible as if it were Shakespeare, a kind
of life-enhancing entertainment; or perhaps like a bit of Plato,
some moral square-dancing! No. The truth of the gospel must
force itself upon you, as robust as a physical law that can smash
an atom: Jesus’ rising as macho-belief, for macho-Christians.
Only, it leads to all sorts of absurdities. Why four gospels, not
one, that differ in so many details? If you go down the histor-
icist’s line you spend a lifetime trying to justify the historical
inconsistencies and hiatuses. Or why only one Jesus, only one
resurrection? That just seems too arbitrary, and a rather clumsy
way of communicating with everyone who came, fi rst decades,
then centuries after the fi rst Sunday. Or why again, you have to
ask, are we still here 2000 years on, when the Jesus of the Bible
thought the new creation would come complete in a genera-
tion? If you demand historical literalism, you get eschatological
farce.
Paradoxically, if you make the Bible a book of evidence, you
wring it of its real power, the more subtle quality that has kept
it living for generations. If faith stands or falls on its provability,
it’s likely to fall. And you miss the main point. Of course, faith
must relate to what can be ascertained of historical events and
facts. But to be faith, it must be more expansive than textual