Figural Realism

There is, of course, no such thing as uninterpreted historical narrative; Crossan knows that as well as anyone. But if the sign of interpretative activity is the give-away clue that the history has been invented, how then can there ever be any history at all?

One of the things for which Schweitzer has become most famous is now increasingly questioned: ‘apocalyptic’ was for him, and for the ninety years since he wrote, almost synonymous with the end of the space-time universe, but it is now clear that this is a bizarre literalistic reading of what the first century knew to be thoroughly metaphorical.

Finally, it is similarly unlikely that all modern interpreters are totally wrong; we cannot simply discount serious debates and go back to the sources as though nothing of value had been said in the last hundred years or so.

This will be a theme of my book: modern theologies of the New Testament were failures from a Christian point of view precisely because what they ended up offering was bad history, bad theology, or both.