of Judaism in order to make him legitimate as a Messiah, for example, or Davidic, they have inadvertently limited Jesus to a prophetic pre-understanding; such a “protective shelter,” unfortunately, is also a covering and a limitation. He may have been given authority by virtue of his relation to Jewish tradition, but the past (all of past human history) is precisely what Jesus’ advent and enduring presence has confronted as inadequate and no longer binding. Girard makes explicit the need for a reflective hermeneutics. One obligation will be to interpret the “pre-judgments” of the gospel writers and argue that such a relation provided only one understanding of his life, giving him a context that, ultimately, may be have been misleading; it certainly cannot be complete and in their determination made both omissions and impositions. “The earliest Christians made most significant use of the OT in their theologizing. They developed major aspects of their beliefs and expectations from OT texts.”30 But in so doing Jesus has been given titles he never chose or identified with – none more alien to him than “King.”
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Pre-judgments, according to Gadamer, may well be “conditions of understanding,”31 but in the case of the gospel writers, their interpretation of the meaning of Jesus’ life, as it relates to the past, may limit what he has revealed that can in no way be anticipated. The past prior to him did not reveal Jesus; and only the future, our own, can realize him. It is the task of reflection, as Habermas tells us, to recognize these initial conditions of understanding. “It is the peculiar achievement of hermeneutic understanding that – in relation to the successful appropriation of traditions – the prejudices that are attached to the initial situation of the interpreter are also rendered transparent in their emergence from tradition, and thus absorbed into reflection.”32 Ricoeur makes the same argument.33 To absorb into reflection, a hermeneutic interpretation of the gospels will recognize Jesus as a deliberate confrontation with the limits of tradition and its continuity; only by encountering tradition and its representatives does it then eventually become possible to see how the “concealments” have become permanent and unrecognized. “This hardened tradition must be loosened up, and the concealments which it has brought about must be dissolved.”34 Revelation and tradition are incommensurable. Revelation shatters all history so as to recollect what has remained, as Paul tells us, the mystery now to be understood.
The patriarchal, prophetic, and monarchical associations are imposed on Jesus by the gospel writers since they cannot understand him from out of himself, uniquely, in the fullness of his presence (his parousia) that can in no way be anticipated by already existing expectations, most especially in some world-ending eschatology initiated from out of a metaphysical source. To elude Jesus’ history, and therefore to refuse to understand him within the limits of his time and place, allows the reader to interpret the consciousness Jesus has of himself. Hermeneutics will involve what Vattimo calls “a reflection on what remains to be recollected and undertaken of the mysterious event that took place two ←18 | 19→thousand years ago,”35 with “recollection” being a necessary re-examination of all the experiences and memories preserved about Jesus the man and how they have been handed down to us, as writing, in the four gospels. Finally, recollection cannot be limited by the memories of everyone who provided a testimony of Jesus and the writings of the gospels; “what remains to be recollected” becomes an interpretive task undertaken again and again between the text and the reader and without relying on anything but the decisive encounter in language – with the inter-relation of Jesus’ sayings and the description of events.
A hermeneutics of the gospel narratives will simultaneously be concerned with the act of interpretation and understanding as well as, perhaps more importantly, as Ricoeur tells us, “with apprehending a possibility of being.” We will make a demand on ourselves in the act of reading and thereby attempt to fulfill the obligations of a hermeneutics that will “uncover” not only meanings, “but to unfold the possibility of being indicated by the text.”36 Jesus’ revelations are ontological; they are an uncovering and illumination of a mode of being previously concealed. Jesus’ presence in the gospels, however, cannot simply be one possibility of being amongst others. A hermeneutics of the gospels will turn to the narrative and there assume the obligation of disclosing a possibility of being now, from out of the presence of Jesus the individual, so as to render him (as always, from the very beginning) as effectual, dynamic. “Christ’s word brings out the meaning not only of our personal existence but also the meaning of all human existence. Thenceforth there is not the correcting in detail of our view of the world but of re-orienting all being.”37 Hermeneutics will only succeed when it has also adopted the very attitude evident, again and again, by Jesus himself when confronting the traditions of the past; and that is one of the symptoms of the gospel writers as they attempt to represent Jesus. Too often, they are unable to resist – in part because they have no other alternative they can see – relying on the very past Jesus has extricated himself from; and that means becoming independent of three simultaneous and inter-related traditions of Judaism: the ←19 | 20→patriarchal, the prophetic, and the monarchical. Jesus will necessarily place himself between the entire history of the Jewish people, thereby creating what Moltmann has called a “discontinuity,”38 the possibility of another history so momentous nothing in the past could have prepared it. The introduction to the primacy of hermeneutics – first, as the recognition of the “pre-judgments” of the gospels, the task of reflection and recollection and, finally and most importantly, disclosing a possibility of being such that understanding leads to an ontological transformation – must now contend with the quest for the historical Jesus and the limits of historicism or what Nietzsche has called “the idolatry of the factual.”39 The “dehistoricizing tendency”40 of hermeneutics is here fully accepted.
Historians turn to Jesus and attempt to understand him within the context of 1st century Palestine and Judaism. Jesus is surrounded by a world, born and raised there; he becomes a historical figure, like everyone else. Horsley believes that the gospels can only be understood “against the historical background of its origin and reference,”41 a task neglecting how our interpretation, now, cannot be determined by a long-lost origin and reference. More specifically, and in a now well-known affirmation made by many, Jesus “must be understood as a Jewish figure teaching and acting within Judaism, or we will misunderstand what he was about.”42 Jesus was a “first-century AD Galilean Jew, a man firmly situated in time and space.”43 “Jesus was a man of his time.”44 Collins writes: “Jesus was fully conditioned by the culture and thought-world of his time.”45 “Jesus belongs ←20 | 21→firmly in the world of first-century Judaism”46 Aslan, even more absolute and ignoring many aspects of the gospels and how he ministered to Jews and Greeks, Romans and Samaritans, and many others still, believes that “Jesus was a Jew preaching Judaism to other Jews. His was a Jewish mission, one concerned exclusively with the fate of his fellow Jews. Israel was all that mattered to Jesus.”47