ABSTRACT
The quality of historical writing is bound up with the quality of the questions historians ask of historical data. The critical realist historian’s primary concern is to produce the best possible retroductive explanation of past events. This requires her to attend closely to the available data and ask appropriate questions of it, thereby prioritising exegeses and diminishing the dangers of forms of eisegeses that force the data to conform to a set of preconceived expectations. Both positivist and idealist historiography tend to fall into the trap of eisegesis. Positivists tend to foreground the question ‘Could this event have happened?’ Idealists tend to foreground the question ‘Do the historical data fit with my own particular value system?’ Both ultimately ask if the data conform to the prior commitments of the historian – whether to a naturalistic worldview in which miracles are deemed impossible or to a set of preconceived idealistic values — and in doing so tend to block out what the data are actually saying. Ultimately, both sets of questions fail to respect the integrity of two interrelated hermeneuti-cal circles. (1) The hermeneutical circle linking the whole and the parts of the historical data. By seeking to interpret the parts in terms of the whole and the whole in terms of the parts, in an ongoing hermeneutical dialectic, the critical realist historian attempts to make retroductive sense of the historical data as it stands. A retroductive explanation that takes account of all of the available data is likely to be simpler and more coherent than one which seeks, from the start and on a priori grounds, to expunge specific testimonial evidence. The strategy of rejecting parts of the data as inauthentic is not the first port of call for the his torian, but rather a last resort, turned to only when it proves impossible to make sense of the data as they stand. (2) The hermeneutical circle linking the horizons of meaning of the historical data and the historian. By recognising and acknowledging her own prior commitments, the critical realist historian opens up the possibility of allowing the horizons of meaning integral to the data to assert themselves against her presuppositions and prejudices. An uncritical emplotment of the data within the historian’s own pre established meta narrative or values framework can only undermine a deep understanding of past events. The twin strategy, of first seeking to expunge inauthentic data and then seeking to locate the remaining data within a preconceived idealistic scheme, flows directly from asking questions of the text that are inadequate to the task of retroductive historical explanation. Wright’s critically realistic exegesis of the historical data surrounding the life of Jesus proceeds by asking a very different set of questions, designed to allow a deep retroductive explanation of the events surrounding the life of Jesus to emerge: What did Jesus set out to achieve? Why did Jesus die? Who did Jesus think he was? How and why did the early Church begin? These questions force the historian to penetrate beneath the surface appearance of the data and attend to the hermeneutic circles between the parts and whole of the data and the horizons of meaning of text and interpreter. The primary task of the critical realist historian to seek to explain the whole of the data as it stands, both by taking into account the relationship between parts and wholes, and by acknowledging her own prior commitments in order to maximise the possibility of the data speaking for itself on its own terms. Before considering Wright’s answers to his four questions, we will attend to a further question thrown up by previous discussions in the present book: How would Jesus’ contemporaries have understood his miracles?
