The Hunter-Gatherer of History and the Indian of Faith

I attended an N.T. Wright conference this weekend. I've been reading the works of Calvin Luther Martin, a historian of White-Indian relations. It strikes me that there are closely parallel issues in Life of Jesus studies and histories of Indians: 1) Most generally: History comes to the subject matter with a philosophy of history and a set of methods that constitute its epistemology. However, in spite of its self-assurances, there are signs that the real subject matter escapes. This failure eventually rebounds onto the practice of history itself as inadequate to the subject matter. More specifically: 2) Both Jesus and the American Indian seem to operate within a radically different experience of time than that assumed by an Enlightened philosophy of history. 3) Both Jesus and the American Indian operate out of motives that remain opaque to the assumptions of rational, economic behavior. And 4) the sources by which we know these things are themselves puzzling and must be reinterpreted out of their own world and into our if we hope to make any headway.