Raymond Martin (1)

Martin reads the quest for the historical Jesus as a case study in the relationship between "the methods people use in investigating the world and what they take to be the results of their inquiry." Readers will learn a great deal about the quest, beginning before Reimarus and continuing through the most recent salvos in a field that continues to be passionately contested; but they will learn more about historical method and how to engage scholarly contributions to matters of popular controversy. Martin offers close readings of E.P. Sanders, John Meier, Elisabeth Sch¸ssler Fiorenza, John Dominic Crossan, Marcus Borg, and N.T. Wright in which he introduces virtually every major contemporary writer on the subject. While acknowledging Crossan's characterization of historical Jesus research as a "scholarly bad joke" in which competent scholars generate wildly varied interpretations, Martin points to substantial areas of agreement. There are, he writes, "only two divisions among secular historians of Jesus that really matter": first, between traditional historians who picture Jesus as an eschatological prophet and liberal historians who do not and, second, between scholars who presuppose methodological naturalism and those who do not. Martin's contribution is to locate tension between faith and reason at the heart of even the most dispassionate scholarly inquiry. If, as he insists, the relationship between the two is both/and rather than either/or, there is hope for civil discourse-and understanding-even on the most controversial of subjects.… (meer)