E. Hoskyns

Origin of Gospel Traditions

"The final task of the historian is to gather up the evidence and to describe that event in such a manner that it is shown to lie within the structure of human life and to be intelligible in that context. Further, it must be described in such a manner that emergence of the primitive church is also intelligible on the basis of the life and death of Jesus of Nazareth. For any historical reconstruction which leaves an unbridgeable gulf between the faith of the primitive church and the historical Jesus must be both inadequate and uncritical: inadequate, because it leaves the origin of the church unexplained; and uncritical, because a critical sifting of the evidence of the New Testament points towards the life and death of Jesus as the ground of primitive Christian faith, and points in no other direction."