作者：斐林丰 年份：1977
First, I found it necessary to clarify a few things regarding the meaning of history and historicity.(1)
The Concise Oxford Dictionary defines historicity as " historical character, genuiness of alleged events". This definition throws us back on the question: what is genuine history?
Common sense readily distinguishes two meanings of the word "history". History may mean, in the first place, the event or sum of events itself (lived history). Or, secondly, it may mean the narration of the event or sum of events (recounted history).(2) This distinction is plain enough. But as soon as we proceed further we get into trouble. If we ask: "what is the relationship of history in the second sense to history in the first sense?", then the answer is not so easy. It is the problem of the nature of historical knowledge. This problem in modern times has received two widely different solutions.
1. The first solution is that of positivist historiography. This solution reached the apex of popularity and acceptance in the last century, but it is still nowadays very widespread and unconsciously admitted also by many of those who seem to reject it.
According to this view, the historian (that is, the practitioner of history in the second sense) sees history (in the first sense) as an object of investigation and scientific enquiry, which is open to empirical testing and to which the principles and method of the positive empirical sciences should be applied. Historical facts are the object of historical science. These facts must be "observed" and scrutinized carefully so that one may obtain a description of them that is as exact as possible. The best kind of historical science is the one that gives the most exact description of the facts, the one that succeeds in giving, as it were, a photographic-stereophonic literary rendering of the facts as they really happened. In order to achieve this the historian must be totally impartial, must refrain from letting his subjectivity intrude in his examination of the facts, must avoid passing value judgments on the facts. His only job is just like that of the physicist, or the chemist, or the biologist: it is to analyze the facts and describe them as accurately as possible. In this way history can become an exact science, as exact as the natural sciences.
Historicity in this context, then, is the perfect correspondence between the historical event and its historical account. It is a quality of the event insofar as it has happened exactly as described by the historical account, and a quality of the account insofar as it exactly describes the event as it happened.
Now a word or two of criticism. The positivism of this view is evident. Its concern is to assure the reliability of historical science and this is praise-worthy. But its positivist bias makes it do so by assimilating historical science to the natural sciences. However, the belief that this assimilation is possible at all is an illusion. In fact, while the natural sciences have a deterministic object, history has as its object human reality which is, even if limitedly, free. (Of course, we are all well acquainted with what the proponents of 19th century positivism thought about human freedom!). Moreover, while the object of the natural sciences is empirically observable now, the object of history is past human experience: man is still with us, true, but his experience is gone and the only link with it is through human testimony, which, again, involves an element of freedom, of non-determinism.
Not only is history's assimilation to the natural sciences an illusion, but also the belief in the possibility of exact representation of past events. There simply can't be a photo-like or stereo-like reproduction of past reality by means of language. Language is necessarily conceptual and concepts comprehend living experience only imperfectly, because living experience is not made up of abstract essences but of concrete singular details. Even if optimum conditions of evidence and testimony were given, still the literary outcome would be but an approximation to the real thing. Concepts simply cannot grasp the infinite variety of details involved in real life. The human mind is incapable of keeping track of all possible circumstances involved in any one happening.
Finally, the ideal of perfect objectivity is as illusory as the first two points we have already mentioned. The subjectivity of the historian inescapably conditions his historical work and this from two fronts: on the one hand, the object itself of the historian's study is value-charged, insofar as it is a human event: the value is part of the historical fact itself and must be taken into consideration: refusal to consider it is itself already a value judgment; on the other hand, the work itself of the historian is necessarily subjective in the choice of significant material: in fact the historian does not deal with each and all of past events alike, but only with those that he judges significant, but evidently this judgment of significance will be determined by his subjectivity.
The consequences of such a positivist view of history when applied to the NT recounting of the history of Jesus and the early Church were disastrous. According to this view inexactness of detail (there is plenty of it in the NT) amounts to falsification or at least carelessness on the part of the historian with regard to the real facts. Also according to this view, the presence of value judgments in a narrative (again, there is plenty of them in the NT) jeopardizes its objectivity and throws doubt on the historical reliability of the whole narrative.
These conclusions of positivist historiography, however, rather than weaken the historical value of the narratives in question, show how unsound are the premises from which the reconclusions derive. Inexactness of detail and the inevitability of value judgments are hard facts that will always be part and parcel of all historical work by men. Rejection of them would practically mean rejection of all past history. The fact to be realized is that these features of historical work are the consequence of our real humanity and as such they can jeopardize the reliability of historical research only if they are tendentious. As for scientific exactness and absolute objectivity, these are dreams realized only in the minds intoxicated with positivistic scientism.(3)
2. The second solution to the problem of the relationship between history-science and history-reality, is that of existentialist philosophy. It should be noticed that here not only is the solution different, but also the approach to the whole problem is completely different. This is not so strange, since the positivistic approach to history is from the scientific point of view, while existentialism approaches it from the point of view of philosophy.
To come a little closer to our specific topic even while dealing with this general question, I will choose as representative of this second point of view Rudolf Bultmann, who draws his existentialist understanding of history mainly from the philosophy of Heidegger.
Bultmann, like Heidegger, refuses to look at history as if it were an object. On the contrary, he affirms history as a constituent element of the human subject: man is essentially "temporal being", "being-in-history": temporality and history are simply the human reality of not-being-all-at-once-and-once-for-all, the fact that man does not possess his being fully in any particular moment, but in every particular moment has to create it anew by projecting himself into the future by a free decision. History is the reality of man-in-the-making, of man's openness to the future, of man's capacity to escape from being determined by his past, of man not as actual but as possible being, open to a whole variety of possibilities. History therefore is simply man's potentiality for being and not the real cycle of past-present-future, it is existential temporality, not chronological time.
In this perspective, what becomes of historical knowledge, of the study of history? The present we are living it, the future is not-yet, the past then is the proper object of historical knowledge. The existential approach to the past will be that of looking for human events as examples of the actualization of human potentialities, as possibilities of being. Historical events by definition are products of human freedom. History is essentially, the history of human freedom, each event revealing one particular realization of man's potentialities.
It is clear then that if the student of history is to perceive events as possibilities of being, he has to get involved in these events, exposing himself to the challenge emitted by these events. By turning existentially to the past, the historian learns how to create his own future. The understanding of the past is thus inextricably bound up with the understanding of oneself, of one's own potentialities for being, of one's own openness to the future. This understanding of self stimulated by existential confrontation with the past, this is the essence of genuine historical knowledge. The past event itself is past only insofar as it has already happened, but it may be said to be future insofar as its meaning endures and has not exhausted its capacity to challenge human freedom to new realizations of itself.
This kind of existentially interpreted history is the only "proper" historical knowledge. Proper historical knowledge is concerned with the "that" of the past event, not with the "what" of the past event, for if the attention turns to the "what" then the event loses all its challenging dynamism, becomes objectified, it is no longer a human event, but a dead piece of scientific material. To know a past event as objectified is "improper" historical knowledge.(4)
However, Bultmann does not totally exclude from his philosophical construction "improper" historical knowledge, that is, scientific historical knowledge in the sense of the positivists. This improper historical knowledge is concerned with the "what" of events, it analyzes them, it describes them etc. Bultmann sees this objective consideration of the past as an essential, integrating part of total historical knowledge. This objective knowledge, in fact, is the starting point for the attainment of proper subjective existential knowledge. The important thing to notice, however, is that true objectivity resides only in the second kind of knowledge. The first kind claims to be objective, but in reality it is not, because by objectifying the historical event it treats an essentially human event in the same way as it would treat a natural phenomenon, and insofar scientific knowledge of history is unauthentic knowledge. The only knowledge, instead, that does justice to the uniqueness of human historical events is existential knowledge, for it treats the event for what it really is, a manifestation of human existence, an epiphany of freedom, and insofar only existential knowledge is authentic historical knowledge. Man-in-history will fully realize himself only by passing from unauthentic, self-styled "objective", scientific knowledge, to the authentic, really objective even though apparently very subjective, existential knowledge.
Historicity in this context, then, is neither a quality of the event, or a quality of the historical account, but a quality of man himself. Hence for Bultmann it is quite beside the point to ask: Did this really happen? the proper question being: Does this fact help me to authentically create my own existence by challenging me to a free and responsible choice?
How does Bultmann apply this philosophical scheme to the Christian reality (for Bultmann is not an existentialist for the sake of philosophy, but for the sake of theology and the Christian faith)?.
Firstly, the awareness of one's historicity, of one's openness to the future, of one's being-not-yet-fully-realized, but having-to-fully-realize-oneself by free decisions: this awareness is the necessary pre-understanding that makes faith and the response to the divine revelation possible. That is, consciousness of one's historicity is ultimately openness to the revealing God.
Secondly, revelation takes place as an event in history. As such it can be grasped by historical knowledge, both proper and improper. That is to say, revelation presents itself both as a fact verifiable by scientific history (such a fact is the Jesus of history, the fact of the Cross) and as a salvific event (this event is the Christ of faith, the event of the Resurrection). The former aspect is the object of improper, unauthentic, scientific historical knowledge, and has no salvific significance. The latter aspect is grasped only by proper, authentic, existential historical knowledge, and only this has salvific significance: if the response to the challenge perceived is positive, then this proper knowledge becomes faith.
Thirdly, it is the kerygmatic event that makes the passage from the first kind of knowledge to the second possible. In fact the kerygma is just this: the presentation of the Jesus of history, of the Cross, as the Christ of faith, as the Resurrection. That is, the kerygma is the presentation of an objective fact as challenging my freedom, as questioning my existence. The kerygmatic event sets in motion a process by which the man conscious of his historicity is confronted by the Biblical past and by faith recognizes in it the most authentic possibility of human existence. The kerygmatic event is itself a pure gift of God, for there is an unbridgeable gap between the first and the second step, between improper and proper knowledge. The first step is open to natural historical knowledge. The second is not subject to verification by historical science but is perceivable only by faith. In faith the second step (the Christ of faith, the Resurrection) becomes the true significance of the first step (the Jesus of History, the Cross). The two are indissolubly united as the signifying and the signified. But only the first step is an objective historical event. The second is not an historical event: it is the transcendent significance of the historical event denoted by the first step.
Fourthly and lastly, Bultmann sees as a highly regrettable development the early Church's retrogression from the second step into the first step achieved by the "historicization" of the significance of the events of the Jesus of history. What was originally the existentially perceived significance of the event (namely, the Resurrection as the belief in the saving efficacy of the Cross), was objectified into an historical fact (namely, the Resurrection as an objectively verifiable historical fact). Now this is precisely the essence of myth: the translation of the transcendent and the divine into the historical and the human. Hence the necessity of a program of de-mythologization: the re-discovery of the original eschatological transcendent significance that has successively become historicised and so hidden behind the veil of legend (this is not only the case with the Resurrection, but also with the other Gospel legends: the virgin birth, the temptations in the desert, the Transfiguration, the Ascension etc.). In this way the historicizing process of the primitive Church is reversed and modern man can still find meaning and challenge in the de-mythologized Gospel kerygma. The perception of God's challenge, of God's voice calling me today to the full stature of my authentic existence, to hear this voice and to respond to it, this is faith.
And now some comments, first on Bultmann's philosophical understanding of history, then on his theological application of this understanding.
Firstly, Bultmann's dichotomy between objective or chronological history and existential history reduces history-reality to the historicity of man, to man's being-in-time. How legitimate is this radical reduction? This seems to me to be simply the consequence of existentialist anti-essentialism: man's essence is nothing but self-createdness by means of free decisions in atomic moments of time; man creates himself anew in each moment; to exist is to choose one's existence; there is not any continuum of time-space or of consciousness. But then anyone who has not been mystified by existentialism will admit that this continuum, this non-atomism is a primary datum and on it is based the very possibility of the atomic choice acts. History, therefore, is not identifiable with the individual's temporality. On the contrary, the individual's temporality is situated in history which is a kind of supra-individual temporality. History as commonly understood is the platform of man's historicity as existentialism understands it.
Secondly, by labelling ordinary time and history as unauthentic, Bultmann leaves his so-called authentic existential history prey to absolute subjectivism, for in that case true history would be only that which is meaningful for me. However, this attribution of unauthenticity to objective ordinary history (whose subject matter is ordinary, chronological time and the events that take place in it) is also a consequence of another philosophical presupposition, namely, the phenomenological disaffection with every kind of objectification, with every question asking what is it?. Again, this is an unacceptable contradiction of an intellectual tendency natural to man and unauthentic only when it is misdirected (as, for example, in positivist philosophy).
At this point it is worth noticing how Bultmann, while rejecting the positivist view of history as natural science, does not really criticize it or attack it. He rather subsumes it in his system as the dialectical negative overcome by the dialectical positive of existential knowledge. As far as I am aware, he did not challenge the validity of the positivist view of history insofar as scientific, objective, non-existentialist history is concerned. Bultmann's failure to criticise positivist historicism on its own ground may psychologically explain his attitude to objective scientific history: Bultmann is a believer but he is convinced that the historicity of the Gospels cannot be defended since their historical value has been demolished by positivist historical criticism. But what about the Christian faith, then? Bultmann is determined to save faith. He does so by making faith absolutely independent from any historical ground. The unreliability of the latter (Bultmann takes for granted the conclusions of positivist historians!) in this way will be irrelevant to faith. Objectivity is thus not only not required by faith, but is definitively an obstacle on the road to faith. A desperate solution indeed! This despair about historicity of the Gospels shows that insofar as human knowledge is concerned Bultmann is at heart a thoroughgoing positivist. He is an existentialist only insofar as this philosophy enables him to salvage the faith. This latent positivism is also probably at the root of neo-orthodox Bultmann's liberal negation of miracles! Positive science was confident that it had succeeded in explaining away miracles. Bultmann seems to have taken this for granted. Was it this crypto-positivism that led him to draw the distinction between "miracle" (the brute fact, empirically verifiable) and "wonder" (the faith-perceived aspect of human happenings), damning the miracle and saving the wonder?(5)
The second point on which I would like to make some comments is Bultmann's application of his existentialist understanding of history to the Christian reality.
Firstly, the radical separation made between ordinary history and existential history introduces an unbridgeable cleavage between the world divine and the world human, between time and eternity. His intention in introducing this dichotomy is to safeguard the transcendence of the world divine and of faith. But he fails to realize that this excessive concern for transcendence jeopardizes the very reality of the Incarnation, which by definition is the bridging of the gap between God and man, the penetration of eternity in time in the one person of the Son of God Jesus Christ. But this identification of Jesus Christ with God Bultmann will reject as unauthentic mythical objectification and historicization! Anyhow, the fact remains that the onesidedeness of Bultmann's position is too narrow to embrace the comprehensiveness of the following statement of the Christian faith: "Christ, in time, is the Being who transcends time, but who expresses himself really through and by means of time" (Mourouz)(6).
Secondly, Bultmann unjustifiably sees all historical ground as threatening and even destroying the very essence of faith. According to him, if faith is based on scientifically ascertained historical facts, then faith is no longer faith (characterized by absolute certainty), but mere human knowledge (only probable at best). But this opinion of his is due to a misunderstanding of the nature both of historical signs and of faith.
In fact, an historical fact can only be a "sign" of the supernatural. In no way can it amount to a demonstration of the supernatural. A sign is not a proof and one needs faith to understand the significant import of a sign. The first and ultimate sign is the historical Christ himself. Its import (the Christ of faith, the Emmanuel, God-with-us) is appreciated by faith alone. True. Here we can agree with Bultmann. But to say that the historical Christ is "not of interest to the Christian belief in the Resurrection" (these are Bultmann's own words)(7), that is, to say that faith can do without historical signs, this is false. "If Christianity were no more than a philosophy of life, then matters of objective history would not be crucial to it. So long as we knew that someone had lived roughly the sort of life Jesus allegedly lived, we could at least take the 'imitation of Christ' as an ideal for human living . . . But if we want to go beyond that (as Bultmann certainly does) and claim that God was actually imparting himself in a quite distinctive and decisive way in the events of Jesus' life, then it is a matter of immense seriousness to learn what these events were".(8)
Moreover, Bultmann's understanding of faith is also defective in that he exclusively conceives faith as a decision of the will (which, of course, it is), and rejects faith as a kind of knowledge (which it is too, and if Bultmann does not agree with us in this it is because of his philosophical presuppositions).
The influence of Bultmann's system on the problem of the historicity of the Gospels is evident: he introduced a certain light-heartedness in the dismissal of the Gospels as unhistorical. Previous exegetes might have done so with a heavy conscience. Not so Bultmann: faith can, and indeed must, do without historical confirmation. So why so much trouble in trying to substantiate the Gospel's claims to historicity? (Whether they do make such claims we shall see later). That not only Bultmann's disciples but also some Catholic exegetes have been blessed with this light-heartedness will be clear from the survey of opinions that I am going to undertake in a moment. But before proceeding to that I would like to attempt a sketch of a more balanced view of history and historicity, which integrates the best insights of the two preceding positions, while overcoming their serious limitations.
A synthesis: the integral understanding of historiography and historicity. The nature of history in the second sense we distinguished at the beginning of our enquiry (recounted history) necessarily depends on the nature of history in the first sense (lived history). What is then lived history? It is a human reality, it is events significant for man. But every human event necessarily entails a twofold element of subjectivity and objectivity, of personal experience and external observable facts.
It was the illusion of 19th century positivist historiography that history, like natural sciences, was made up only of objectively verifiable phenomena, so that all accounts of past events had to be stripped of all subjective elements, if they wanted to win recognition as reliable history.
It is the danger of today's existentialist historiography to nourish the illusion that it can attain a true understanding of historical events by personal confrontation with their deep significance, dispensing with objectivity altogether.
The integral understanding of history contends that both the objective and the subjective elements are constitutive parts of history, recognizes with existential historiography that the formal constitutive element of history is the event's significance for the men who lived the event and, dependently on them, for all men throughout history, but also stresses that the way to the attainment of the true significance necessarily passes through the signs of objectively investigable data, the validity of the significance depending on the genuinity of these signs.
It is clear then that an invented event has no historical significance at all. An event the basic details of which are accurately (though not necessarily "exactly") related can yield the correct historical significance and be considered truly historical. That is to say, inaccuracy in minor details (like exact date, minor and secondary circumstances etc.) need not jeopardize the historical value of the whole narrative, even though the latter has to be carefully examined and evaluated. Inaccuracy in major details seriously undermines the historical value of the whole event. If it be asked what is the standard for distinguishing major from minor details, I would say that a major detail is the one that carries more of the burden of the significance of the event.
The consequences of this integral understanding of history for historicity are momentous.
Firstly, on the one hand the event's significance and observable data are put in the right place, to the effect that the equation "true history == exact history" is no longer valid. It is realized that the matter at hand being a human event (and a past event at that) the perfect recovery of all details would be impossible, and even if it were possible it would be irrelevant: there is indeed an "empirical residue" in history (to use a phrase of Bernard Lonergan) : the colour of Caesar's socks when passing over the Rubicon river makes no difference to the significance of that event and to its historicity (even if the account said that they were green while instead they were red!).
"It is obvious, therefore, that in the account of a witness, just as in that of a professional historian, not all details have the same weight; they do not stand out with the same degree of affirmation. (History) can be true by accommodating itself to the inexactness of details, if the details in question are not central to the event; absolute exactness, for the rest, surpasses human possibility".(9) When Chesterton remarked that it is enough to hear the report of the same car-accident by two eyewitnesses to start doubting about the whole of history, he was not denying that historical truth is attainable, but rather was saying that the criterion of historical truth set up by his positivist contemporaries was an impossible one!
So the divergences in detail of the evangelists should not be a reason for distrusting their historical truth as long as the crucial details and their meaningful import are not opposed to each other. For example, to take scandal at the divergences of the three Lucan accounts of the conversion of St. Paul is to subscribe to the positivist view of history as true only if exact. Evidently Luke did not share this view: if he had, he would have harmonized the three accounts! But he didn't, even though he had certainly noticed their minor discrepancies. For him the historical truth of the event he was relating lay in the real event of Paul's encounter with Christ on the way to Damascus, which encounter converted him.
Secondly, the fact that the historian was or is deeply interested and involved in the events described is no longer seen as necessarily an obstacle on the way to the attainment of historical truth. On the contrary "evidence is more interesting in the measure that its author was more involved in the events he reports. It is, of course, necessary to be careful to interpert it correctly, by taking into account the witness's point of view, by marking its limitations if necessary, and especially by comparing it with that left by other participants".(10)
Applied to the NT evangelists this point shows that we need not distrust them as historians for being deeply interested in, and totally committed to, those events as believers. It is precisely their faith that makes them penetrate the total significance of the event. This evidently does not dispense us from checking their version of the facts with other available evidence.
Thirdly, the event's significance being the formal element of history, it is clear that historical truth is not the same as scientific truth, and does not have the same kind of objectivity. "It is truth or conformity with being, but the demonstration of which can never be finished (it involves an infinite): it has objectivity, but a peculiar sort of objectivity, in the attainment of which all the thinking subject as an intellectual agent is engaged."(11)
The recognition of the historian's own presuppositions shows that an essential part of the process of reaching historical truth is the critical examination of these same presuppositions. The good historian will try to assess the correctness of his presuppositions and throughout his work he will be aware of them.(12) "Such a position implies no subjectivism. There is truth in history . . . But the truth of history is factual, not rational truth; it can therefore be substantiated only through signs, after the fashion in which any individual and existential datum is checked; and though in many respects it can be known not only in a conjectural manner but with certainty, it is neither knowable by way of demonstration properly speaking, nor communicable in a perfectly cogent manner, because, in the last analysis, the very truth of the historical work involves the whole truth which the historian happens to possess; it presupposes true human wisdom in him; it is 'a dependent variable of the truth of the philosophy which the historian has brought into play'.(13)
With reference to the NT this means that our certainty of the correctness of the evangelists' faith and philosophy becomes certainty of the correctness of their historical accounts insofar as the formal constituent of historical truth is concerned, namely, the event's significance for man. The certainty of faith for believers redounds into certainty of historical truth also with regard to the reliability of the signs that disengage this significance. But while the correctness of the former (significance of event) is finally guaranteed only by faith, the reliability of the latter (empirical phenomena of the event) is open to the investigation and confirmation by the science of history. I said "confirmation"; the non-believer will inevitably also take into the account the possibility of the biblical account being disproved by independent investigation.
*An extract from the Annual Research Paper "The Historicity of The Infancy Narratives"
(1) These are the main sources from which I have got my information about the problem of historicity: 1. H. Marshall, Luke: Historian and Theologian, The Paternoster Press, 1970, esp. ch.II; Pierre Grelot, The Bible Word of God, Desclee, 1968, esp. pp. 115-124; Idem, "La naissance d'lsaac et celle de Jesus", Nouvelle Revue Theologique, 94, Mai-Juin 1972, pp.462-487, 561-585; Claude Geffre, "Bultmann on Kerygma and History", in Rudolf Bultmann in Catholic Thought, Thomas O'Meara and Donald Weisser eds., Herder and Herder, 1968, pp. 167-195; Jacques Maritain, On the Philosophy of History, Geoffrey Bles, 1959, esp. pp. 5-7, 129-132; W. H. Dray, "Philosophy of History", The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Paul Edwards ed., Vol. 4, Taiwan edition, 1968, pp. 26-30;
Georg G. lggers, "Historicism", in Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Philip Wiener ed. Vol. II, Charles Scribner's Sons, 1973;
John McHugh, The Mother of Jesus in the New Testament, Darton Longman and Todd, 1975, esp. pp. 126-27.
(2) These two meanings have been distinguished linguistically as "cursus rerum" and "historia" in classical and medieval Latin; as "Geschichte" and "Historic" in modern German; as the "historial" and the "historique" (Jean Guitton) or as "histoire-realite" and "histoire-science" (Blondel) in modern French. In English there is no such linguistic doublet for history, unless one adopts some such neologism as "historiality" and opposes it to "historicity".
(3) It is possible that, for altogether different reasons, these are also dreams still lingering in the minds of most of us who are dedicated to ecclesiastical studies. For, in these studies, we concentrate especially on metaphysical and dogmatic questions and thus learn to get a keen appreciation of the criteria of metaphysical and dogmatic truth. Because of this, however, it is also easy for us to make the mistake of simply transposing the same truth criteria to historical problems. Historical truth is only analogically the same with metaphysical and dogmatic truth. Historical truth has its own criteria which perhaps we are not trained to appreciate to the full. If we identify the historical approach with the metaphysial-dogmatic, then we are committing more or less the same mistake of the positivists who identify it with the scientific approach. For this observation, cf. Pierre Grelot, The Bible etc., p. 123, note 134.
(4) This terminology is Bultmann's own. Elsewhere he uses also the words "Geschichte" and "Historic" to bring out the same distinction. Evidently there is some overlapping here with the distinction made at the beginning of his section. This second distinction seems to be a sub-distinction of the second member of our first distinction, namely: Historic as scientific knowledge (Historic) and Historic as existential knowledge (Geschichte).
(5) In a different way, the same latent positivism is at least negatively present in all those apologists of the historicity of the Gospels of the past and the present who share with the positivists their understanding of history as exact scientific history. Fighting on the very same ground of their opponents, their position has become more and more difficult to defend. But one need not concede to the attackers of the historicity of the Gospel the choice of the ground!
(6) Quoted by Claude Geffre, art.cit., p. 192.
(7) Quoted by Claude Geffre, Ibidem, p. 183.
(8) Ronald W. Haepburn, "Bultmann, Rudolf", The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, etc. p.425.
(9) Grelot, op.cit., p.118-119
(10) Ibidem, p.117.
(11) Jacques Maritain, op.cit., p.5
(12) That each historian has presuppositions, is generally admitted today. It was the 19th century histiorians that believed in the possibility of absolute objectivity without presuppositions. In this very belief they showed their own positivist presuppositions!
(13) Jacques Maritain, Ibidem, p.6-7. The quotation in the last sentence is from Henri Marrou, De la Connaissance Historique, Paris, Du Seuil, 1954.