№ 6 - 2001
Alker H.R.-Jr., Lehnert W.J., Schneider D.K.
Toynbee’s Jesus (Computational Hermeneutics and Continuing Presence of Mediterranean Civilization)

An article incorporated in Alker, H.R. 1996. Rediscoveries and Reformulations. Humanistic Methodologies for International Studies. Cambridge, contained a synthetic rationale for the author’s approach to the inquiry into the issue of the motivating power or charisma of the Jesus story, when the researcher’s endeavour concentrates on the discovery of analytically reproducible, motivationally suggestive plot structures implicit in the texts of the Jesus story as they are read or heard by different individuals. Now, two analyses accomplished on these lines, both independently coded, computer-assisted, are presented in a critical hermeneutic way in the article published here. Lehnert’s coding of the Jesus story derives from A.Toynbee’s schematic outline contained in an Appendix to one of the volumes of his Study of History; as for the more extensive Alker-Schneider coding, it relies, moreover, on the Biblical verses cited by Toynbee. The authors’ conclusions stress continuities between their own computer-assisted form of humanistic hermeneutic inquiry and the more traditional forms of social-scientific textual analysis, in the application of which Toynbee was a pioneer. With necessary improvements, but, for that matter, with the characteristic mix of human and machine inputs infallibly retained, the authors believe, the approach they apply, describe and substantiate may well prove to be a methodological contribution to a constructive empirical and critical discussion of the many ways in which classical Mediterranean civilization maintains its continuing presence in human life.