DCHindley

Chris,

I presume you mean "treating the history of Christian origins the same way scholars treat the history of any other religion?"

Are you sure about that? You are correct that there is "a distinct LACK of theory or method in most biblical scholarship." However, HJ critics by necessity use the same approaches available to all historians. They are also subject to the same limitations.

Emphasis on social formation is not unique among historians. According to the philosopher of history Alun Munslow (_Deconstructing History_, Routledge, 1997), there are roughly three general approaches to historical investigation: Reconstruction, Construction and Deconstruction.

Reconstruction - Firmly rooted in the Modernist belief that truthful meaning can be directly inferred from the primary sources. The central methodology is empiricism, meaning that knowledge is gained through the use of the senses as we observe and experience life, or through statements or arguments demonstrated to be true. The more carefully it is done, with the practitioners working as experienced craftspersons, then the more accurate we become and the closer we get to knowing history as it actually happened. Historical narrative serves as a framework within which to explain series of individual events. Extremists reject any method that might taint the investigation or narration of history with ideology, bias or the historian's own ideology. However, most reconstructionists accept that the historian cannot avoid interjecting a certain amount of historical relativism into the explanation. (Alun Munslow, _Deconstructing History_, 1997, pp. 20-22).

Construction - A sub-species of reconstructionism engendered by Post-modern questioning of the empiricist claim that it is possible to build high order and well-justified historical explanations upon observable and singular evidence alone. While sharing the Modernist belief in the separate existence of factual knowledge derived from observable evidence, practitioners go beyond narrative single-event history and insist that history can only explain the past when the evidence is placed within a pre-existing explanatory framework (known as "covering laws") that allows for the calculation of general rules of human action. These general rules are revealed as patterns of behavior (which provide the basis for the historian to deduce covering laws from discreet pieces of evidence), and singular events are seen as part of a discernable pattern. Early advocates for such "covering laws" were Karl Marx, Auguste Compte and Herbert Spencer. They argue that these explanatory frameworks created by historians must to some greater or lesser extant be culturally provided. Presently, history is more and more constructed and written as a form of political commitment to marginalized groups (racial or ethnocultural, gendered, class, colonial, sexual and regional). (Munslow, pp. 22-25).

Deconstructionism - In the latter part of the 20th century, some historians have embraced the Structuralist emphasis on language as the conduit through which knowledge passes. To them, the written historical narrative is the formal *re-representation* of historical content. Since language constitutes and represents, rather than transparently corresponds to, reality, then there is no ultimate knowable historical truth, and our knowledge of the past is social and perspectival, and written history exists within culturally determined power structures. A historical narrative is a possible history, not "the" past. These historians maintains that evidence only signposts possible realities and possible interpretations because all contexts are inevitably textualized or narrativized or texts within texts. (Munslow, pp. 25-26). Deconstructionist history "accepts that language constitutes history's content as well as the concepts and categories deployed to order and explain historical evidence through our linguistic power of figuration." (Munslow, pg. 181).

Strict Reconstructionists, such as Geoffrey R. Elton, reject the use of covering laws used by Constructionists because they believe that "historical understanding requires understanding of the motivations, goals, values and information available to historical agents, all of which constitute their individual intentions and cannot be subsumed under universal explanations of behaviour." (ibid., 45). For instance Marxism, as the most well-known form of constructionism, in Elton's view, "chooses to view historical reality as being ordered by a bastard version of a so-called covering [social-economic] law" (ibid., 45). So, on one end of the spectrum are empiricists (e.g., Elton) and on the other are positivists (e.g., the Marxist historian Alex Callinicos).

The problem, though, is that answers to the questions of historical interpretation "tend to hinge on ideological preferences" (ibid., 46). I think history interpreted under the umbrella of faith statements could be attributed to a good many biblical critics, both conservative and liberal. And this is the heart of where I get my reservations, and wonder whether we should (or even can) more cautiously weigh the results of analysis based on covering laws in the construction of our overall theoretical systems.

An example is J D Crossan's use of what he calls "cross-cultural anthropology" as an interpretive tool in _Birth of Christianity_. When the Crosstalk2 list held a seminar with JDC I read through his book with a fine tooth comb, checked out as many of his sources as I could find in local academic libraries, and came to the conclusion that when Crossan, in BOC, created his own model (the Lenski-Kautsky Model) into which to fit evidence relating to the historical Jesus, I felt that he had arbitrarily cobbled it together from isolated statements mined from the works of Lenski and Kautski. To me, at least, his aim appeared to have been to "construct" (no pun intended) a set of social-historical circumstances that favored the concept of Jesus as a social-critical sage, while ignoring alternative models, such as that of de St. Croix, which would have weakened his case. Both the arbitrariness of the process and what I perceived as (un)intentional rigging of the model, I labeled "bias" and "spin" in a series of posts addressed to Crossan in the seminar.
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hjmate...lgy/message/37
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hjmate...lgy/message/62
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/hjmate...gy/message/138

Note, too, that I said "cynic-like," and used that term rather than plain old "Cynic" for a reason. True, Arnal is not a proponent of the Cynic-hypothesis, and makes the point that advocates of the so-called Cynic hypothesis such as Vaage, Cameron, and Mack do NOT claim that Jesus actually was a Cynic, nor do they posit direct influence from Cynicism properly so-called. Cynicism simply provides a useful social ANALOGUE to the Jesus movement. [I have paraphrased a statement made by Arnal in the link below to avoid directly quoting another person's post to another list]
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/crosstalk2/message/10044

DCH

Clivedurdle

I am quite eclectic in mixing and matching those historical methods, with extreme suspicion towards ideologial biases - like belief in gods that do create background frameworks to thinking that must always be made explicit.

Talking of primary stuff, what exactly is the Bible primary evidence of? Would not an alien conclude it was a series of stories? Any alleged history in these documents, if any, had political reasons to highlight the group doing the specific writing?

Zeichman

I meant theory more specifically, which I would stand by, largely with the exception of the Context Group and individuals dependent on their work. There, for whatever reason, seems to be some belief that biblical studies is above theories.

I read the rest of your stuff and that was helpful, especially the dialogue with Crossan. Thanks for that.