Conclusions Reached
by the Jesus Seminar
If one flips through
The Five
Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus the first thing that jumps out is what Jesus did not say. “Matthew 5:5
Congratulations to the gentle! They will inherit the earth”
is in black denoting that according to the Fellows this is not an authentic
saying of Jesus. “You are the salt of the earth” is also in black. Matthew 18:10, “See that you don’t disdain one of these
little ones”
is in black, as well as Luke 14:27, a verse many consider one of Jesus’ pivotal
teachings “Those who do not carry their own cross and come after me, cannot be
my disciples” did not make the cut. In
fact, as the book jacket states “only
20 percent of all the
sayings of Jesus are colored red or pink.”
Only 15 sayings of Jesus are colored red and
often the parallel passage is found not be spoken by Jesus. The red sayings are
all short, pithy "aphorisms" (unconventional proverb-like sayings)
such as, "turn the other cheek" (Matt. 5:39; Luke 6:29),
"congratulations, you poor" (Luke 6:20; Thomas 54), and "love
your enemies" (Luke 6:27; Matt. 5:44) -- or parables (particularly the
more subversive ones) such as the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35), the Shrewd
Manager (Luke 16:1-8a), and the Vineyard Laborers (Matt. 20:1-15). The only
saying that appears in more than two Gospels that was colored red each time
was, "Pay to the emperor what belongs to the emperor and God what belongs
to God" (Matt. 22:21; Mark 12:17; Luke 20:25; Thomas 100:2). This was also
the only saying in the entire Gospel of Mark to be colored red.
We see Jesus as a non-Jewish Cynic,
the very picture that we have if we read the earlier works of Robert Funk, and
John Dominic Crossan (The Co-Chair of the Jesus Seminar). A good description is
given by Crossan, The wandering Cynic philosophers
are in some way analogous to the earliest Christian wandering charismatics.
They too seem to have led a vagabond existence and also to have renounced home,
families, and possessions. The Cynics, it will be recalled, were itinerant
preachers of a philosophy of freedom from every constraint and a life lived
with minimal requirements "according to nature." Flouting social
convention, they derived their name (
kynikoi,"dog-like") from
an epithet applied to one of their founders, "the Dog" Diogenes (of
Sinope, 4th-cent. BCE), who went about Athens doing in public everything that a
dog might do, all the while hurling insults on his contemporaries.”
It seems that once we read what the Jesus
Seminars’ Jesus say’s then we find the Jesus that they started with – an
unmiraculous vagabond who challenges societal norms.
Evaluation
Now that we have looked at what the Jesus Seminar
concluded, some evaluations are in order.
We will first note the positive contributions.
First, the various quests for the “Historical
Jesus” and the Jesus Seminar in particular, force all Christians to focus on
Jesus.
Paul says emphatically to the
Corinthians “For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and
him crucified.”
But often in the American church today we
focus on everything except Christ.
The
Jesus Seminar helps correct the emphasis the church has placed on man, and his
self-image, and place the emphasis back on Jesus.
Secondly, the Jesus Seminar looks to an “Un-marbleized”
Jesus. Too often in churches today the
Jesus that is presented would seem quite out of place on the dusty streets of Nazareth. In an effort to protect a high view of Christ
we have inadvertently created a kind of practical Docetism that must be guarded
against.
And finally, the work of the Jesus Seminar forces
Christians to know “Why” they believe what they do. Once, a gentleman was visiting my
churches Sunday school for Easter. With
many allusions to “Biblical Scholars” and “Factual contradictions in the gospel
account of the resurrection” this man had many members of the class sputtering
and confused. The Jesus seminar and its
myriad press releases and talk show visitations have forced the twenty first
century Christian to know not only “What”, but “Why” we believe what we hold
about Jesus. As Christians we must search the scriptures and prepare a logical
response to these unorthodox pictures.
This study cannot help but have positive effects in the life of a
believer. And, as the media responds to
the Jesus Seminar’s press releases and spotlights Jesus, this opens
opportunities for evangelism and dialogue with folks who otherwise might be
closed to any religious discussion.
Charles Spurgeon said “When a man
wants to beat a dog, he can soon find a stick”
However, I think the shortcomings
with the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions are glaring, and we need a look at the
significant problems the Jesus Seminar presents to a modern believer is in
order.
First, I think it is fairly obvious that the presuppositions
of the scholars color the conclusions that they come to in their work. Birger A. Pearson brings this out when he points out that “some ninety years ago a man named
Albert Schweitzer addressed this very issue in an important book entitled
The Quest For the Historical Jesus. In
this book Schweitzer convincingly demonstrated that those who set out to
“discover” a historical Jesus “behind” the (supposedly) mythological Gospels of
the Bible invariably ended up creating a Jesus in their own image. In other
words, critical scholars tend to “discover” the Jesus they want to “discover.”
This same criticism, I maintain, can be levied against much of the liberal New
Testament scholarship being covered by the media today.”
This prejudice was highlighted by Crossan in a debate with William Lang Craig,
a contributor to
Jesus under Fire. Crossan made the following analogy :
“Let’s go to Aesop-Aesop’s fables-and imagine a
three-way argument. One person says,
“Did you know that animals could talk in ancient Greece?”
“A
second person says “No, no, no. They
couldn’t, but there was a stupid Greek who thought they could.”
“And
of course, the third person says, “Wait a minute. You’re both wrong. Aesop told a certain type of story- a genre
called fable. Animals are allowed to
talk to make a basic moral principle evident.”
“Now
how could I today prove that animals could or couldn’t speak in ancient
Greece? I’d hate to have Johnnie Cochran
coming after me in court on that one.”
“Were
you there, Dr. Crossan?”
“No,
I was not”
“Have
you checked out all the animals?
“Well,
no, I haven’t”
“Then
how dare you say what could or could not happen in ancient Greece!”
“Well,
animals don’t usually talk.”
“That’s
a prejudice, Dr. Crossan, that’s a presupposition.”
One can see that
since miraculous things do not occur now (In Dr. Crossan’s estimation) then
they could not have occurred then, and thus the stories that include elements
of the miraculous must be allegorical.
This presupposition colors every aspect of Jesus’ deeds and teachings. Thus, we can see that the fellows of the Jesus
Seminar do not start as neutral observers but rather with a broad philosophical
slant that must effect the conclusions that they reach.
Secondly, it
seems that the
The Five Gospels is out of touch even with mainline
scholarship. For example, two of the major contributors to “The Third Quest”
for the historical Jesus, James Charlesworth of Princeton and E. P. Sanders of
Duke, agree that "the dominant view today seems to be that we can know
pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what
he said, and that those two things make sense within the world of first-century
Judaism.”
Thirdly, after
reading The Five Gospels, one is left with the question, “Why Crucify this guy?”
Or as leading Catholic scholar John Meier
puts it in his recent work on the historical Jesus, "A tweedy poetaster
who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary
aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who
simply told people to look at the lilies of the field -- such a Jesus would
threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no
one.”
The crucifixion, which even the Jesus Seminar
Fellows agree occurred, just doesn’t make sense if Jesus is just a traveling
bard.
Conclusion
Time does not
allow one to speak to the problems one has with the removal of all of Jesus’
prophetic sayings, the Time/Date issues, the lack of scholarly ascent to the
voracity of the Gospel of Thomas, the Gnostic flavor of the Jesus Seminar’s
Jesus, or the idea that Jesus never spoke to the Law.
I do, however, wish to focus my final concern
on the denial of the resurrection.
Does the resurrection really matter? Well, Paul felt that it mattered more than
anything. “And if Christ has not been
raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain.” According to Strong’s Concordance the word
that is translated as “Raised” is the Greek word egeiro which can be
interpreted to mean. . . RAISED! . If
Jesus was tossed into a common grave to be eaten by dogs then our faith is in a
lie and worthless. Paul goes on to
suggest that if Christ be not raised then “let us eat and drink for tomorrow we
die” However, transformed lives throughout the
centuries speaks more loudly to an empty grave than scholarship ever
could. It is this faith in Jesus; it is
this transformation that I have known in my own life that makes the other
pieces of the puzzle fit for me. I know
this Jesus intimately. He is my
companion, savior and Lord. Or, in the words of Alfred H. Ackley “You ask me
how I know He lives: He Lives within my
heart.”
Paul Copan. Will
The Real Jesus Please Stand Up? (Grand
Rapids: Baker Books, 1998), 36.
Alfred Ackley Baptist Hymnal .ed
by Walter Sims (Nashville: Convention
Press, 1956), 279.
