The "New" New Testament Scholarship

Two facts about the Jesus Seminar stand out above all. The first is their almost insatiable desire for publicity. The founder, Robert Funk, has drawn criticism, even from those who support his position, as a publicity hound. Other members of the Seminar see it as their mission to bring their ideas out of academia and into the mainstream, to reach the average Bible reader and impact the lives of those who believe the Bible.

The second characteristic of the Seminar is its level of scholarship. At least, that is what they would have the public believe. In many ways, as a by-product of their first characteristic, the media has been a willing partner in promoting the second characteristic. Time magazine writes, "There are, after all, four Gospels, whose actual writing, most scholars have come to acknowledge, was done not by the Apostles but by their anonymous followers (or their followers' followers). Each presented a somewhat different picture of Jesus' life. The earliest appeared to have been written some 40 years after his Crucifixion."¹

Is that true? The fact is that there is a very large group of solidly credible scholars who are perfectly comfortable with stating that the gospels were written by the four men whose names are attached to them, including the three apostles and the John Mark spoken of in Acts. Beware of statements like "most scholars have come to acknowledge." They are very much like the statement, when dealing with evolution, that "most scientists acknowledge."

In fact, it is remarkable how similar the arguments of the Jesus Seminar and those of evolutionists are. There is, in this scholarship, a sense of circular reasoning and speculation unparalleled except by the purveyors of evolution. But to examine the scholarship of the Jesus Seminar requires some background about the scholarship on which it is built.

The quest for the historical Jesus is rooted in the late 18th century. Prior to that, the facts of the gospels, both of their historicity and of their authorship, were almost universally accepted. The quest for more scholarly evidence for them began over 200 years ago, influenced heavily by the rationalism and deism which influenced many of the early American political figures (i.e. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin) as well. Rationalists concluded that there was much myth-making involved in the writing of the accounts of the life of Jesus. Indeed, it is probably the miracles of Jesus which most troubled the rationalists, for they could not conceive the supernatural acting in the lives of men, so they sought ways to explain these acts away. This is a practice that has grown widely in the years since. I heard a prominent Methodist preacher explain the feeding of the 5,000 as the other people being shamed by the sharing of the young boy with the five loaves and two fish so that they brought out their own food to share with others. It was the sharing, he said, that was the true miracle. In similar fashion, one of the Jesus Seminar members describes the healing of a leper thusly, "I presume that Jesus, who did not and could not heal that disease or any other one, healed the man's illness by refusing to accept the disease's ritual uncleanness and social ostracization . . . By healing the illness without curing the disease, Jesus acted as an alternative boundary keeper in a way subversive to the established procedures of his society. Such a position may seem to destroy the miracle. But miracles are not changes in the physical world so much as changes in the social world."²

This view taxes even those who agree with him: "Can 'healing illness' without 'curing disease' make much sense in a peasant society? Are peasants (or anybody else, for that matter) likely to be impressed with the statement 'your illness is healed' while the physical condition of disease remains?"³

The historical quest for Jesus began in earnest though, with the introduction in 1838 of a hypothesis by philosopher C.H. Weisse, who argued that the gospels of Matthew and Luke, because of their similarities, were written by authors who were copying from the same source. To help with this theory, he then placed Mark's gospel as the earliest of the four, thus providing Luke and Matthew's authors with sufficient data to construct their narratives. What was missing from Mark, however, was a source for many of the "sayings" of Jesus (the sermon on the mount for instance). Therefore, he surmised, there must have been a collection of those "sayings" from which Matthew and Luke were supplied. In 1890, this "sayings source" was given the name "Q" by Johannes Weiss, who took it from the German word Quelle, meaning "source."

The document Q, which has never been proven to exist, plays an important role in all future scholarship on the historicity of Jesus. While first containing the idea that what was not found in Mark, but was in Matthew and Luke, had to be in Q, the work of John S. Kloppenborg in the 1980s is essential to the themes of the Jesus Seminar. Kloppenborg breaks down Q into three layers. The first (Q-1), contains only wisdom sayings. The second (Q-2), contains some of the prophetic and apocalyptic words of Jesus, and finally, Q-3 adds some narrative and biographical information (such as the temptation). This "triple-layered Q" becomes prominent in the Jesus Seminar's attempts to classify the statements of Jesus as authentic or inauthentic.

The circular nature of the Q hypothesis becomes clear when it is realized that, in determining the true words of Jesus, the Seminar's participants for the most part reject everything that is not found in Q-1. What is found in the first layer, they say, is only teaching about social issues and political statements, thus eliminating the use of any "claim" by Jesus to be divine, any recognition of His deity by others or any of the miracles which proved His deity. The early followers of Jesus then, who had access only to Q-1, knew nothing of Jesus as the Son of God, and indeed, saw nothing in Him which made Him uniquely qualified to start a movement other than some exceptional wisdom.

Clearly, if Q-1 can be constructed to say only what these "scholars" (and, considering that the Seminar is composed of a "self-appointed" group which includes filmmaker Paul Verhoeven4, the term scholar is applied loosely) want it to say, then a historical Jesus can be "discovered" to fit the preconceived ideas of the scholars.

It is reminiscent of the old Theophilus cartoon in which a scientist excitedly proclaims, "Look at this 10 million year old fossil!"

Theophilus asks, "How do you know it's 10 million years old?"

"It was in this 10 million year old rock strata."

"How do you know the age of the rock?"

"We found this 10 million year old fossil in it!"

The point is, this type of reasoning is circular at best, and deceptive and fraudulent at worst. Imagine presenting a radically new view of Julius Caesar based on a hypothesis framed around a document which doesn't exist! The presenter would be laughed out of every history department in the country. But this is what goes on as accepted, even lauded scholarship concerning Jesus.

This is not a knock against all scholarship done by historical Jesus researchers, but clearly it is difficult to accept this kind of shoddy research over and above the gospels, Acts and the letters of Paul, all of which paint a radically different view of Jesus than that proposed by the Jesus Seminar, and all of which have been subjected to intense scrutiny concerning their dating. The letters of Paul, in particular, stand up to the claim of very early dates in the history of the church, and Paul's view of Jesus as the Son of God and as the risen Savior (views which he regards in his writing as widely accepted) fly in the face of research which tries to place those ideas much later in history.

Be careful what you accept as "scholarship." Test it. See if it is rooted in the truth or if it attempts to discover something about Jesus which the scholar only wants to find. Circular reasoning, questionable dating methods and preconceived ideas only serve to tear down what has been tested by time and proven again and again by archaeological discoveries. The quest for the historical Jesus, however noble, will not be served by this kind of pseudo-scholarship.