The Consciousness of the Historical Jesus: A Thomistic Study in Historiography, Theology, and Metaphysics

Abstract

In this thesis, I explore the relationship between historiography, theology, and metaphysics in the discipline of historical Jesus studies. Through close engagement with the thought of Thomas Aquinas (1225–1275), I develop a constructive proposal for how metaphysics informs the doctrine of Christ, and how this, in turn, impacts the task of thinking about Jesus as a historical figure. I outline the historiographical implications of classical Christology and the compatibility between traditional beliefs about Jesus and critical historical inquiry. By first considering human self- understanding as a historiographical question, I emphasize the determinative role played by the historian’s assumptions about the range of possibility available to the processes of human thought. Delineating the concerns that historians tend to connect to ‘docetism’ unearths latent theological and metaphysical assumptions. I submit these assumptions to critical engagement by contrasting them with Aquinas’s participatory metaphysic and philosophical anthropology. I advance Thomas’s Christological arguments for the substantial union of divine and human natures in the Incarnation, along with his argument for the four-fold knowledge of Christ, connecting his ontological arguments with the narrative depiction of Jesus’ identity in the gospels. My argument shows that the simple assertion that Jesus was fully human does nothing to establish that his knowledge must have been limited to those ways of knowing assumed within post-enlightenment naturalistic historiography. There is nothing ‘docetic’ or ahistorical about attributing to Jesus prophetic knowledge or an apocalyptic vision of God. Rather, these forms of knowing clash with the assumptions of metaphysical naturalism. By interrogating and challenging the normative philosophical and theological assumptions operative in Jesus scholarship, a range of possibility is opened up for approaches to Jesus that are genuinely historical, but not naturalistic.