After William Wrede (1901) equated literary bias with falsification, the guild of NT scholars stopped reading narrative texts holistically. So-called "historical critics" atomized the Gospels and Acts, based on the idea that facts could be sifted out from an interpretative matrix, thereby crafting new interpretations from whatever material could escape judgment. After Hans Frei's (1974) defense of cognitive dissonance (a la theologian Karl Barth), a new sub-guild of "narrative critics" decried critical atomism but set aside questions of historical truth and reference. There was brief hope for a third option when the recent “memory approach” (Dunn, Kirk, LeDonne, Keith) argued bias could indicate distortion rather than falsification, while emphasizing historical inquiry and hypothesis. Unfortunately, that third option took no position on narrative issues. (Neither did Dale Allison, whose unique analytical strategies deserve a separate analysis.) Thus, NT scholarship remains largely atomistic and piecemeal while the holism of narrative critics remains isolated within an indefinite suspension of critical judgment. This bifurcated guild generates segregated scholarship, as historical arguments are not affected by literary conclusions, and narrative studies continue to ignore representational issues.
A study of the Gospels as "historical fiction" could shed a great deal of light on these problems.
My own view, following F.R. Ankersmit (2012) and Steve Mason (1989, 1991, 2003), is that narrative analysis must precede and inform historical inquiry. Although we should absolutely apply skepticism to narrative claims, one cannot assess accuracy before determining meaning. More precisely, we cannot claim to understand atomized portions of text while ignoring the larger representation in which we find them embedded. Although the authorial representation is never precisely identical to whatever really occurred in the actual past, one should demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of the authorial vision before finalizing judgments about any one part in that whole.
In other words, the suspension of critical judgment must be temporary rather than permanent. Historical studies should utilize literary findings and narrative studies should approach the texts as purported non-fiction, or as "historical fiction" at least. The narrative text must be seen as an attempt to represent past events so that our narratological reconstruction of the authorial vision (and/or the authorial audience's received understanding) may better inform initial historical inquiry and judgment. Ideally, those preliminary stages of research may also lead to one or more hypotheses about the real past. My personal preference involves constructing multiple hypotheses for comparative purposes.
When I began blogging here, I could not have written these paragraphs, above. While I struggled to communicate with NT scholars, I correctly observed that their thinking was unlike scholars of either history or literature but I could not explain what exactly was wrong. I felt certain that some things were being done poorly, but I could not explain why in those years. The posts collected below are snapshots in the history of my struggle, indicating some key points at which I began asking the most helpful questions, consulting the most helpful sources, and improving my efforts to say what I needed to say.
For a more complete view of how my thinking developed, see also my page on Chronology in Memory.
Titles of works referenced above:
Ankersmit (2012): Meaning, Truth, and Reference in Historical Representation
Mason (2003): "Contradiction or Counterpoint? Josephus and Historical Method"
Mason (1991): Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees: A Composition-Critical Study
Mason (1989): "Was Josephus a Pharisee? A Re-Examination of Life 10-12"
Frei (1974): The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study of Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Hermeneutics
Wrede (1901): The Messianic Secret
See also:
Allison (2010): Constructing Jesus: Memory, Imagination, and History
Allison (2009): The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus