SOURCE: Wright, Terence R. “The Letter and the Spirit: Deconstructing Renan's Life of Jesus and the Assumption of Modernity.” Religion and Literature 26, no. 2 (summer 1994): 55-71.

In the following essay, Wright examines The Life of Jesus in postmodern terms, concluding that part of what makes the work timeless is Renan's own awareness that all evaluation of Jesus' life and teaching, including his own, is conditioned by the age in which it is written.

To rewrite the life of Jesus from a rational historical perspective is clearly central to the project of modernity, which is normally portrayed as sweeping away all superstition and replacing it with an alternative scientific and emancipatory narrative. Postmodernity, initially defined (by Lyotard at least) as the abandonment of such metanarratives, is now seen rather as “a weakening of the metaphysical and rationalist pretensions of modernity” which does not so much abandon as probe, modify and...