Quotes About Historicity

Imagine a society entirely absorbed in its own historicity. It would be incapable of producing historians. Living entirely under the sign of the future, it would satisfy itself with automatic self-recording processes and auto-inventory machines, postponing indefinitely the task of understanding itself

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah...and died to give his work its final consecration never existed. ["Modern Christian Thought: The twentieth century, Volume 2" by James C. Livingston, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, p.13]

The community of masses of human beings has produced an order of life in regulated channels which connects individuals in a technically functioning organisation, but not inwardly from the historicity of their souls.

Yes, the revolution was coming for them, too. How many revolutions would they have to live through during the never-ending historicity of their goddamned lives?

Almost certainly the divine self-claims in John are not historical.

these sources were not intending to present what we think of as historically accurate information; that's a modern imposition on these Gospels that they can't bear.

the criterion of dissimilarity. It states that if a tradition about Jesus is dissimilar to what the early Christians would have wanted to say about him, then it more likely is historically accurate.

the dissolution of reality in interpretation is also an (act of) interpretation, which puts the historicity of the interpreter into play, and is not a discovery or a shedding of light onto a past error that would be uncovered on the basis of an objective awareness of the facts.

To sum up: 1) There is no external historical confirmation for the Jesus story outside of the New Testament. 2) The New Testament accounts are internally contradictory. 3) There are many other plausible explanations for the origin of the myth that do not require us to distort or destroy the natural worldview. 4) The miracle reports make the story highly suspect.

That significance is not founded in their historicity but in their theology; not in what happened (or even that something did happen) but in why it happened. What was God doing? That is where the significance is to be found.

The erosion of accurate historicity is disconcerting: One scholar casts Washington in a Deistic mold. The next goes further and states—without citing evidence—that he didn't even go to church. What will the next generation of scholars claim? This ignorance of the facts is what requires us to pursue our question concerning Washington's religion by constant interaction with his own written words and the unquestionable records of his actions.