The Catechism trusts the biblical word. It considers the Christ of the Gospels as the real Jesus. And it is convinced also that all of the Gospels speak to us of this same Jesus, that all of them, each one in its specific way, help us to know the true Jesus of history, who is the Christ of faith. This has invited furious attacks upon it: the Catechism--they say--has forgotten an entire century of exegesis; it knows nothing of literary genres, history of forms and history of redactions; it has remained in the "fundamentalist" interpretation of the Bible. It is enough to read the chapters on the Bible and its interpretation to see that these claims lack sense (nos. 101-141). The Catechism gathers, without making a show of a critical tool, the truly sure results of modern exegesis. I propose for that the chapter on the name of Jesus and the three principle christological titles Christ, Kyrios (lord) and Son, [nos. 430-455] which I consider one of the richest and profoundest texts of our book.
But the multi-layered and plastic nature of the image of Jesus of the Gospels, which we know from the new scientific investigation, does not obligate us to reconstruct another Jesus, leaving the texts aside and starting from a combination of presumed sources, who it is claimed would be purely historical, thereby erasing the image of Jesus of the Gospels as a product of the faith of the community. Furthermore there would have existed according to the communities a plurality of Christs, which cannot be mixed. However, it is not clear how from this minimum of historical reality and of these conflicting community creations the common christological faith which has transformed the world could suddenly arise.
Recently, the great Jewish intellectual Jacob Neusner has energetically opposed these reconstructions and the cheapening of the Gospels which they assume. I do not have space here to examine his arguments one by one; I cite only his statement of purpose, in which he summarizes his well founded decision: "I write for believing Christians and believing Jews; they know Jesus by way of the Gospels". That is exactly the position of the Catechism; a book which transmits the faith of the Church and does not want to canonize private theories cannot take another starting point. This has nothing to do with fundamentalism, because a fundamentalist reading excludes every type of ecclesial mediation and only gives value to the letter in itself. When, in his book on Jesus, Neusner says that he cannot enter into discussion with historical Jesus, product of the imagination of the erudite, because such fabricated historical figures would be many and quite varied, he thereby calls attention to a problem more and more clearly noticed by the scientific exegesis itself. The current of canonical exegesis which is gaining traction in America firmly insists that the first duty of all interpretation is to understand the given text as such. It cannot free itself from this duty undoing the text into its supposed sources and ultimately occupy itself only with them. Naturally, exegesis can and must also investigate the internal history of the texts and from there study its development. But its true fundamental duty cannot disappear because of that, that is, to delve into the text itself, as it now exists, as a whole and for what it wants properly to affirm.
He who, from faith, reads the Scripture as Bible, must take a further step. By its very nature, the historical interpretation, will never be able to go any further than mere hypothesis. In reality, none of us was present then: only the natural sciences realize the reproduction of phenomena in the laboratory. The faith gives us contemporaneity with Jesus. Faith can and must embrace all of the historical knowledges (conocimientos), being enriched thereby. But the faith makes us know something which is more than an hypothesis; it gives us the right to put ourselves into the hands of the revealed word as such...
When I ask myself what is the cause that our churches are emptying, that the faith is silently extinguishing, I would like to reply that the central motive is the process of emptying of the figure of Jesus, along with the deist formulation of the concept of God. The substitute for Jesus which is offered, more or less romanticized, is not enough. It lacks reality and closeness. The Jesus of the Gospels, whom we come know again in the Catechism, is contemporary, because He is the Son, and is accessible because he is human. His human history is never purely past; all of it is taken up in him and in the community of his disciples as present and it touches me.
Cf. The Term "Fundamentalism" Confuses Religious Contents, "Biblical Interpretation in Crisis", 1988 Erasmus Lecture.
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