Ad Fontes.

One motto of Modernity was “ad fontes!”  That is a Latin phrase which means “back to the sources!”  In the 16th century it was a call to recover original texts, not filtered through tradition.  Tradition, in fact, was increasingly considered inherently corrupting.  

The Reformation was built on this sensibility.  Seeking to bypass and override the institutional church and its tradition, the Reformers went back to Scripture as the only source for faith and religion.  

Ad fontes has been the basis for much of biblical studies over the last 500 years, culminating perhaps in the successive “quests for the historical Jesus” of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Repeatedly, what these researchers came up with was a “historical Jesus” who looked and thought suspiciously like the ones doing the quest, who were almost invariably white, male, middle-class academics.  

Historical studies use criteria established by the researchers.  Since these people have rarely done any serious spiritual work, but have been laboring in academia for years, they remain unconsciously under the grip of their own ego-centricity.  This is revealed in the absurd hubris involved in what they are doing to begin with, imagining that they can unearth a pure, objective, original text at a distance of millennia.  And it is compounded by an academic environment featuring intense pressure to find and publish something new.  For Modernity is nothing if it is not a quest for novelty.  Which means that what gets marketed as a return to the original sources is actually just the latest new take on what the original sources are and say.  So there is this contradiction between “older is better” and “newer is better.” 

But: Who decided that the original sources were better than what has been passed to us through tradition?  Who decided that the original sources were available at all?  Who decided what methodologies to use in supposedly accessing them?  Where do those methodologies come from?  Who gains and who loses from this project?   

Can we step outside of tradition at all?  Is not the historical approach just another tradition, built not on faith but on a secular, skeptical (not to say cynical and nihilistic) methodology?  

What is true is not what some academics have deemed to be “earlier;” it is what is in tune with Jesus Christ, who is himself the Truth.  If later editors and redactors were more aware of the gospel than the writers of earlier drafts then we should go with the later, more developed and evolved view.  If a particular reading was considered and treated as inspired by many generations of faithful Christians, how does its inspiration get nullified by a decision of some academics, some of whom may not even attend church?  

       Whose book is it anyway?

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