Paul, I would have thought that the reason why Wright felt the need to preface his historical work with some sort of explicit epistemology is to be found i) in the peculiar literary-historical character of the Gospels and ii) in the polemical context in which he started the work. We have to take into account both the novelty of the events described and the background of both scholarly and popular suspicion regarding the objective truthfulness of the narratives. I share some of your doubts about the practical usefulness of the approach taken, but I think I can see why he felt the need to offer a formal philosophical defence of his goal of giving an account of the career of Jesus that would do justice both to historical-critical and theological interests.

However epistemology seeks to explain how we come to know anything at all. It therefore begs the question to say that all our attempts at knowledge involve comparison of a model of reality with reality since this implies that we already have access to reality.

Doesn’t this rather assume that knowing and speaking about what we know are two distinct activities? It seems to me i) that any perception or datum is immediately assimilated into a conceptual framework or worldview or narrative that is the product of our particular cultural and intellectual history; and ii) that we very quickly find ways to articulate that perception or datum using the linguistic material that is most readily at hand. In other words, the ‘coming to know anything at all’ and the conceptualization and expression of what is known are in effect inseparable. But because conceptualization and expression are contingent upon and hampered by various social and personal factors (degree of education, experience of the world, ideological preferences, and so on), some sort of self-critical, self-questioning, testing process becomes inevitable. So I don’t really see why the hermeneutical spiral idea in itself is so incoherent.

The point is that according to Wright’s theory neither John Keegan nor David Irving are neutral or objective or detached - because nobody is. The interpretative spiral can go on forever but at any point in it none of us are neutral or objective or detached.

As has been pointed out, the interpretive spiral is a testing process that in principle should be progressive; over time it should approach a more truthful statement of how things are or were. Or to state it more pragmatically: there is a social process at work that shifts public confidence in one direction or the other, without necessarily ever coming to the point of ascribing absolute objectivity or truthfulness to the position reached.

Having said that, I think there is another preliminary question to address in this debate, having to do with the level of detail at which we seek historical coherence. The answer to this is determined by the nature and scope of the historically relevant material that we have access to. It is only to a very limited degree that we can verify or discount particular details of the Gospel narratives. Did Jesus feed a multitude with five loaves and two fishes? There’s no way of answering that - though Elisha did something similar (2 Kings 4:42-44), which is why we have to ask questions about the relation between theology and history. But there are larger questions of coherence that we can explore much more confidently: the coherence between the Gospel narratives and the Old Testament interpretation of history, first-century Jewish self-understanding, and the historical experience of Israel in the period presupposed and anticipated by the New Testament. It is my confidence in this broader, large-scale coherence that makes me unwilling to follow Danutz’s metaphorizing approach; but I would accept that we still have to take into account strong theological predispositions which make it very difficult to construe this sort of analysis as objective historiography.