methodology."
22
While not historical, Jesus is historic. This is not to deny his historicity; it is to affirm
His significance within the course of human history. Robert Louis Wilken, professor of History
of Christianity at the University of Virginia, recently wrote "For it was not only that Jesus was a
wise teacher or a compassionate human being who reached out to the sick and needy or even that
he patiently suffered abuse and died a cruel death, but that after his death God had raised him
from the dead to a new life. He who once was dead now lives."
23
In the successive years from
the second century to the fifth century and beyond that, the developing christian liturgy
celebrated a living present Christ. "It is not a memorial meal commemorating something that
happened in the past."
24
In the prayer of thanksgiving, the anaphora in Orthodox worship, there
is a phrase which reads "And we sinners make remembrance of his life-giving sufferings, his
death, and resurrection on the third day . . . ." The Greek word translated as "make
remembrance" is not the word that means "recollection" as of a past event. The term is
anamnesis and rendered as "recall" in the sense of "ever before you." This is Kecks "history in
perfect tense.
In the letter to the Hebrews, this use of past and present is very much apparent: "For
Christ has entered, not into a sanctuary made with hands . . . but into heaven itself, now to
appear in the presence of God on our behalf" (Hebrews 9:24). In a sermon preached in the fifth
century, Leo the Great, bishop of Rome, remarked: "Everything that the Son of God did and
taught for the reconciliation of the world, we know not only as an historical account of things
now past, but we also experience them in the power of the works that are present."
25
In a sermon
preached by Gregory of Nyssa at the Vigil of the Paschal Celebration of the Resurrection, he
22
Gregory A. Boyd, Cynic Sage or Son of God?: Recovering the Real Jesus in an Age of
Revisionist Replies. BridgePoint Book (Wheaton, IL: Victor Books/SP Publcations, 1995),p. 293.
23
Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought: Seeking the Face of God (New
Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. xv.
24
Ibid.
25
Sermons 63 (Patrologia Latina 54:356). Quoted by Wilkin, Op.Cit., p. 36.