To the Editor

Richard Chessick's fine paper (1995) interested me greatly. Chessick provides a very scholarly and successful presentation of the facts of the life of Jesus, based on the very scarce available authentic documents. Though there have been numerous attempts to present to us the “historical Jesus,” most of these have suffered from lack of precision in the historical approach, from writers' religious or atheistic biases, from their need to argue about the seeming contradictions in the gospels, from the implied or open rejection of spiritual and symbolic meanings, or, finally, from the intermingling of historical data, poorly established events, and very speculative analytic interpretations.

Chessick manages to keep allusions to speculative psychodynamic interpretation separate from available facts. He thereby offers us a clear picture of the historical data. Even more important, he separates meanings, which are based on faith, from established historical data, and does so without derogating faith. He accepts that convictions based on faith and which have somehow developed in connection with the gospels must be appreciated in their own right and examined for their own truth. Such convictions are not weakened by the absence of historical confirmation. They belong to a different realm of human experience. Most of us sense this when we deal with poetry, myths and fairy tales. We do not get upset over the fact that the story of the mythic Siegfried stands on very shaky historical grounds, or with the idea that all things of the world are called into existence out of the mouth of the Finnish singer, Wainemolnen. All this may at first seem to have little to do with psychotherapy, but it does very much. Indeed, to assist people in gaining a deeper sense of meaningfulness along with, and often in opposition to, an objective appreciation of the concrete facts of human existence, would appear to be a central goal in restoring psychological health. To allow natural science and humani