2) We have little record of life in ancient Israel. For the reason of continuous subjugation, noted above, Israel never had much control over the telling of its own story. In fact, by the time of Jesus, the principal record-keepers were the highly rational and exceptionally linear Romans. And Romans had no regard for what Jewish peasants did or did not think about time.

3) Nandy's comments may be valid irrespective of cultural context. The lesson we learn from Nandy is that our own linear conception of time is as culturally conditioned as any other and it offers little assurance about our grasp of reality.

Perhaps, then, what it means to do history need have little to do with an accurate presentation of events as they "really" unfolded. Instead, it may have more to do with story–telling, the transmission of culture, and the affirmation of personal and collective identity.

This leads to my second question. Is it possible to ignore Jesus as an historical figure and still find valuable meaning in the Jesus story? While Borg claims to be involved in the quest for the historical Jesus — certainly the quest for the historical sayings of Jesus — nevertheless, he does enough hedging that I begin to suspect he holds far more in common with Nandy than with Schweitzer. For example, he draws a distinction between taking documents literally and taking them factually. It is a commonplace among liberals to accuse fundamentalists of reading things literally. And yet, as Borg points out, that is the only way we can read many texts such as parables. Instead, we should be concerned with people who read factually, for they are implicitly making historical claims that are baseless.

More telling is how Borg applies his history to the Jesus sayings. For example, he considers the parable of the generous landlord: day laborers start work in a vineyard at different times during the day, yet at the end of the day, the owner pays them all the same wage. Traditionally, the landlord has been understood as representing God, and his treatment of the laborers is supposed to tell us something about the nature of God. But Borg invites us to listen with the ears of a peasant in 1st-century Palestine. Here, doing history in a meaningful way does not require us to ask whether certain events did or did not happen, but rather, to ask how people lived and how they responded to their conditions. In this instance, perhaps the audience would have understood things differently. Perhaps this story was a reproach of wealthy landowners:

Article Author: David Barker

Theoblogger - a forty-something ex-lawyer theologian from Toronto dedicated to finding the nuggets beneath the mountains of crap that some try to pass off as belief.

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