[I]f one speaks in terms of “reference” to a subject matter described—a complex, perhaps confused, perhaps indispensable way of speaking—then there is not a split reference to the described subject matter. The text means what it says, and so the reader’s redescription is just that, a redescription and not the discovery of the text as symbolic representation of something else more profound. (44)

But now if you go on from there and say, ‘What about the historical facts here?’ – what facts? Do we know what the facts are outside of the description? Remember what facts were for the empiricists: facts for the empiricist were always those separate occurrences, quite apart from the description, quite apart from the story itself – those separate historical, empirical occurrences which could be confirmed or disconfirmed by independent evidence. What are the facts that are being referred to here? They are facts that we cannot have apart from the story. That is precisely one of the most important things about a realistic interpretation of the Gospels. I’ll put it in the words of a modern English philosopher who said, ‘We have reality only under a description.’ We have this reality only as it is rendered under the description, only as it is rendered by this narrative. It is as though the Bible, especially the Gospel story… were a genuine narrative, the reality of which is not rendered by anything other than the description itself – the reality of which is indeed rightly called I think, for Christians, true fact, but rightly called true fact in a way which, although it may bear a family resemblance to that set of empirical facts we call history, is not identical with it. (from an unpublished speech entitled, "On Interpreting the Christian Story," 50-1)