Abstract

This work intends to show a possible reciprocity between theology and historical research. The essential reference to history for the Christian faith attested in the "Jesus of Nazareth" by J. Ratzinger configures a real need to expose faith and theology to the historical method. The delineation of the articulated relationship that theology has with its own object, the Christological event and its economy, clarifies this necessity as well as the possibility of tension with the research of the historian. The elucidation of the indirect relationship of historical research with the past leads to reaffirm the methodical independence of the historian’s work and the limits and legitimacy of his results. It also leads us to configure the usefulness, for the same historical research, of a close dialectical relationship between the two disciplines, precisely in clarifying the horizon and the act of faith which is the field of theology and which is functional to an authentic intersubjective objectivity.