Note from Rowland (October 2010): I’m on a writing retreat, and ploughing/plowing through a folder of print-outs on the JS. Here’s a miscellany of ideas to get you thinking. Although the JS has been termed ‘the greatest academic hoax since he Piltdown man’ (Jacob Neusner, cited by Richard N. Ostling, “Jesus Christ, Plain and Simple,” Time (January 10, 1994), p. 39), I reckon the conversations generated by popular authors like John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg – about serious questions that go to the heart of our Faith – can only be healthy.

One of the challenges for us non-experts is to wonder why two equally competent scholars, looking at the same texts, can come up with divergent views. We have to believe that ‘presuppositionalism’ is at work: the liberal scholars begin with certain assumptions which seem to color their findings (like a hermeneutic of suspicion about miracles, for example). Who said ‘the conservatives sometimes believe anything, the liberals question everything’? And let’s never forget, that either way it’s possible to know the Bible and miss the point (Matthew 23:23).

Hopefully the following bits and pieces will help (and I’ll try to add some more up-to-date items in due course)…

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Luke Timothy Johnson:  ¢â‚¬ËœWhen historians try to push past the limits imposed by the sources ¢â‚¬ ¦ both the subject of enquiry and the methods of appropriate historiography become distorted. This is the case in particular when the search for a historical Jesus is not really so much about history as it is about theology. Since the Enlightenment, Christians uncomfortable with the witness and interpretation of the Gospels have sought a  ¢â‚¬Ëœhistorical Jesus ¢â‚¬â„¢ to serve as the measure of genuine Christianity. The main thing that such questers sought was a Jesus from whom any element of the supernatural or miraculous was removed. Only such a Jesus, they thought, could address a world measured by the severe standards of rationality’ More here…

N T Wright: The quest for the historical Jesus began as a protest against traditional Christian dogma, but when the supposedly  ¢â‚¬Ëœ ¢â‚¬Ëœneutral ¢â‚¬  historians peered into the well, all they saw was a featureless Jesus. Even when scholars decided that other biblical figures ¢â‚¬”John the Baptist, the evangelists, Paul, the  ¢â‚¬Å“Q ¢â‚¬  people, and so on ¢â‚¬”were at home in a richly-storied and symbolic world. Jesus himself was not allowed to act symbolically, to criticize his contemporaries, to think theologically, to reflect on his own vocation, or to evoke any of the various meta-narratives with which his Jewish world was replete. At this point objectivist historiography begins to eat its own tail; it has now decided that it dislikes the taste, which is hardly surprising. More here…

Ben Witherington III: N T Wright is skeptical of form criticism, which dices the Gospels up into bite-sized portions — a riddle here, a parable there — and then pronounces judgment on the authenticity of this or that piece of data. He is not at all convinced that the Gospels are like onions, from which one peels numerous outer layers to get at the core — and then discovers there is none. Instead of seeing in the Gospels numerous layers of literary strata, Wright sees traditions that have been passed along relatively intact, with some editing done by the transmitters and then by the Gospel writers. He believes that this model better fits what we know of the way early Jews handled revered or sacred traditions than does the Buitmannian one, which contends that the Gospel material was handled rather like ancient folklore such as Homer’s Odyssey or Iliad. The gestation period for the Gospel material is at most only a generation or so, a period of time in which there were still numerous eyewitnesses to corroborate or correct this or that form of a Jesus tradition. Thus, analogies with the handling of legendary material by writers far removed from any eyewitnesses simply will not work. (More here).

Edith Humphrey, Crux, September 1997: Tradition and the Bible are – according to the Jesus Seminar (hereafter JS) unhistorical until proven otherwise. This may describe the prejudice of many engaging in Jesus research, but it is certainly not established as a given among scholars… Two key presuppositions of the JS: (1) a radical disparity between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith is taken for granted, and (2) it is asserted that the Gospels should be considered non-historical until proven otherwise.

‘JS’: John P Meier, N T Wright, Ben Witherington et al: The impact of Jesus on the first and second centuries requires far more than a popular existential myth.

Paul Barnett (Essentials, 1999): Funk, Crossan and Borg are accomplished scholars… [but] the breadth of scholarship in the UK, Europe or North America has not endorsed the radical findings of the JS… Only one sentence in the entire Gospel of Mark is deemed worthy of ‘red letter’ treatment, ‘Pay the emperor what belongs to the emperor, and to God what belongs to God’. Astonishingly, no other sayings in the whole of Mark are considered authentic by the JS. The JS disregards the unanimous of the 2nd century church fathers that there were four authentic gospels… At a recent meeting in Sydney… it was clear that Funk approached the whole JS enterprise as a disillusioned Christian, one who had essentially given up on anything resembling orthodoxy… The feeble mystic of the JS could never launch the kind of movement earliest Christianity immediately became… The so-called Jesus of the JS is a religious wimp, who would never have been crucified as ‘king of the Jews’ nor be the catalyst for a movement that the zealot Saul attempted to destroy… My understanding is that Dr Funk and many of his colleagues are reacting against US protestant fundamentalism… [maybe] he reason some members of the JS are looking for a nonapocalyptic Jesus, an enigmatic sage rather than a doomsday preacher… Reacting to one fundamentalism [can produce] another fundamentalism, in this case the fundamentalism of the ‘new liberalism’ espoused by John Spong and others…

(A view more sympathetic to the JS, by William R G Loader: Unfinished puzzles drive some people to distraction. Forcing the pieces never really works because it creates other gaps. We can only visit and revisit the table, try new possibilities, sense the contours which emerge, and sometimes, maybe, take much of what we thought fitted together well apart and start all over again. For some, puzzles are a distraction, a wonderful time waster and historical Jesus research little different. For others, each puzzle is a challenge. But this is one which will not be conquered. I think there is enough of a pattern there on the table for me to recognise where my faith in the Jesus story connects to some reality. But I am not there desperately hoping for faith ¢â‚¬â„¢s validation. The story fascinates me. It belongs to a history which has given shape to who we are. In it we find again the fragility of knowing and not knowing and beyond it the lonely responsibility of decision and faith which creates community.

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More… See C FD Moule here.