Journal

Wittgenstein on the Gospels and historical proof

Posted on April 28th, 2005, in the evening

I came across this quote from Wittgenstein's journals the other day:

Queer as it sounds: The historical accounts in the Gospels might, historically speaking, be demonstrably false and yet belief would lose nothing by this: not, however, because it concerns 'universal truths of reason'! Rather, because historical proof (the historical proof-game) is irrelevant to belief. This message (the Gospels) is seized on by men believingly (i.e. lovingly). That is the certainty characterizing this particular acceptance-as-true, not something else.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, emphasis orginal

The latter point (about believing acceptance) immediately rings true with my own experience. It wasn't by following a line of historical proof that I came to follow Christ, and it's certainly something more than historical confidence that sustains my faith. I particularly like Wittgenstein's bracketed identification of the believing attitude with love, which does go some way towards describing the "something beyond historical confidence".

The earlier point, that belief would lose nothing if the Gospels were proved false as historical accounts, seems more complicated.

I remember once being asked whether I would still follow Christ if human remains were discovered that could be incontrovertably proved to be those of Jesus (the fact that such a proof is almost unimaginable being beside the point), and that he therefore was not raised from the dead. Though it feels strange to type, I concluded that in an incontrovertable case I could only concede both that the Christian faith is false and that much of my life has been delerium.

My initial response to Wittgenstein's statement is therefore simply to suspect that I don't share his view of what Christianity is. Belief in the Gospels as history is not the same thing as Christianity, but the historical event of Jesus' resurrection has become the cornerstone of every belief I have about the world and informs all my actions. For me, belief would lose everything if the resurrection were demonstrably false.

So, as an initial response I couldn't disagree more with Wittenstein's opeining point, but on further reflection I don't think that's actually what he is saying. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but it would seem consistent with Wittgenstein's work overall to suggest that his point is at least as much about the contingency of "the historical proof-game" as about the truth of Christianity. Our culture may hold 'historical proof' in a privileged place, but the standards of historical proof are, in reality, just developments within an elaborate language game.

I may be straying from Wittgenstein's intention here, but it seems to me that his first point could be to do with a hypothetical failure of the grammar of the historical language-game to articulate the meaning of Christian faith. It would only be our false understanding of the nature of historical proof that would precipitate a crisis if the Gospels were found "historically speaking, [to] be demonstrably false".

If this is the case, the problem of historical proof of the Gospels (a task undertaken with considerable credibility by NT Wright as far as I can make out), or of any other intellectual standard in fact, is strongly analogous to the problem of translating the gospels into a new language.

It's conceivable that a language could be discovered or developed whose grammar and vocabulary make translation of the Gospel text very difficult, but that difficulty would have little or no bearing on the truth or falsehood of the Gospels.

Problems with historical proof of the Gospels pose no greater threat to the believer (who follows Christ on the basis of believing love) than problems with their translation in to a difficult language.