ABSTRACT
This chapter shows that the problem under consideration is not just one for historians such as J. D. Crossan and E. P. Sanders who would write the history of Jesus in a purely secular way. Since the seventeenth century scholars have aspired to write objective histories of Jesus. Crossan assumes that there will always be divergent accounts of the historical Jesus and that there will always be divergent Christs built upon these accounts. Understandably, contemporary academic historians, such as Sanders, have wanted to distance themselves not only from such apologetics but from theology altogether. In a book that Sanders wrote with Margaret Davies on how to study the Synoptic Gospels, he stresses that secular historians study the New Testament not to proclaim or denounce the Christian faith, and not for purposes of worship, but objectively. Methodological naturalism is only one among a large number of possible ways for historians to generate appropriate rules for interpreting evidence.
