Nova et Vetera, English Edition, Vol. 10, No. 4 (2012): 985–91
History and Faith in Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth
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ON POPE Benedict’s understanding, history and faith ought not to be separated.As a result, he wants to keep together historical exegesis and spiritual understanding. In the first volume of Jesus of Nazareth, discussing events from Jesus’ baptism until the Transfiguration, he insisted that “the historical-critical method—specifically because of the intrinsic nature of theology and faith—is and remains an indispensable dimension of exegetical work.” The Pope wanted to “portray the Jesus of the Gospels as the real,‘historical’ Jesus in the strict sense of the word” (xxii). At the same time, he made quite clear that the historical-critical method has its limits: “[B]y its very nature it has to leave the biblical word in the past,” and since it looks at the human word of Scripture only as human, it is unable to recognize the unity of the various writings of the Bible (xvii). As a result, the Pope presented a plea for a Christological hermeneutic, which takes Christ as the key to the whole (xix), and he wanted to take seriously the traditional four senses of Scripture, which he maintained were “dimensions of the one word that reaches beyond the moment” (xx). In short, the Pope’s attempt was “to offer a properly theological interpretation of the Bible” (xxiii).
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