Hayden White is a historian of some notoriety (or acclaim, depending on one’s point of view) in his field, generally acknowledged as the founder of postmodernist history. So some readers may be interested to note what he wrote a decade and a half ago with reference to both historical Jesus studies and the question of the existence of Jesus.
Here is where “historical research” enters: its aim is to establish whether the new event belongs to “history” or not, or whether it is some other kind of event. The event in question need not be new in the sense of having only recently arrived to historical consciousness. For the event may have already been registered as having happened in legend, folklore, or myth, and it is, therefore, a matter of identifying its historicity, narrativizing it, and showing its propriety to the structure or configuration of the context in which it appeared. An example and even a paradigm of this situation would be the well-known “search for the historical Jesus” or the establishment of the historicity (or ahistoricity) of the “Jesus” who was represented in the Gospels, not only as a worker of miracles but as Himself the supreme miracle of miracles, the Messiah or God Incarnate whose death and resurrection can redeem the world.
- White, Hayden. “The Historical Event.” Differences 19, no. 2 (September 1, 2008): 9–34. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-2008-002. p. 19