Conducting the Quest for the "Real Jesus"

One of my fears in writing about the Jesus Seminar is that Abundant life's readers will decide all Bible scholarship and writing are worthless and dangerous to faith. This is, of course, not true. However, it would be misleading for us to write about the Seminar as if some men get together, someone reads a passage from Matthew, and then they pass the bucket and all drop black beads in. The process is a bit more complex than that, and bears our consideration. This is particularly important, because if we are going to refute the Jesus Seminar's results we must know what tactics and means they used to arrive at their scandalous results.

What the Jesus Seminar does (or claims to do) is related to textual criticism. Textual criticism is the science of comparing the known copies of a document so that we can discover the original form of the document. Textual criticism is essential because the original New Testament documents have been lost. Therefore we must use some process to wade through the more than 5,400 Greek manuscripts and hundreds of copies of ancient translations to see what is and what is not part of the authentic scriptures. Language scholars who attempt this process use various rules. For example, usually they accept the more difficult reading as authentic, since a scribe may have "smoothed out" problems in the text as he recopied it. Many other similar kinds of rules are employed. Textual critics have, in the main, done a fine job of giving us accurate and complete text that we have great confidence in.

It is textual criticism's close companion, form criticism, that has resulted in problems. This is what the Seminar does. Form criticism assumes that the stories and sayings of Jesus were in oral form long before they were written down. During the period they were strictly oral tales people telling them shaped and reshaped the stories to fit their situations. Therefore, what was finally written down is not what Jesus actually said but what He was reported, years later, to have said. "We can't imagine the followers of Jesus remembering for decades a long, complicated sermon through oral memory," says Marcus Borg, member of the Seminar. Form critics claim by studying the differences in various traditions and historical situations they can strip away what was added and find the "real Jesus."

Form criticism has serious problems and flaws. First, its assumption that the stories of Jesus circulated for a long time in oral form before being committed to paper may not be valid. As little as twenty years passed between the events described and the written accounts of those events. Enemies of Christianity (and true Christians) could easily have refuted and discredited false claims of what Jesus said and did. Further, we know that the disciples of various rabbis kept written notes to remember their teacher's words. It is not unthinkable that the apostles did the very same kind of thing, especially since Jesus sent them to preach (see Luke 10:1-16). Even admitting that the stories were not committed to paper for several decades after Jesus' ascension would not doom them as "unhistorical." Several cultures are famous for meticulously keeping huge epics in incredible detail _ all memorized and done orally.

Secondly, form criticism is undergirded with the assumption that the Gospels are false unless they can be proven otherwise. Yet, there are many good reasons for believing the Gospels are historically reliable. The Jesus Seminar and Company seem to be willfully ignorant of the host of material that discusses this. They begin with a wave of the hand at all such apologetics material and go on with this assumption firmly entrenched. Is it not fair to say that burden of proof rests upon the Bible critic, not the Bible believer? One writer has said "Instead of utilizing criteria of authenticity, one ought to assume authenticity and then ask if there are good reasons for denying it."¹

Thirdly, the Jesus Seminar absolutely rules out the miraculous. They immediately dismiss the resurrection simply because the Seminar believes such things cannot happen. What kind of honest investigation begins with such a bias? There are excellent arguments made for the fact of the resurrection. How have the members of the Seminar reached the conclusion that this argumentation is fallacious? What rebuttals to that material will they make? In reality, they have said exactly nothing about the proofs and evidences for the resurrection. They simply dismiss it and go on to examine the Gospels. Is it any surprise that the Jesus they "find" is radically different from the Jesus of scripture when such arrogant prejudices are tolerated?

As space does not permit a complete review of every aspect of the Seminar's work let us briefly note several other severe problems that fatally flaw this group's contentions.

Several critical scholars have noted that the group is self-selected. Making it worse, those selections are not made based on scholarship but on agreement with the Seminar's overall goals and agenda. They did not ask many top-flight New Testament scholars to participate because they are conservative and believe in the Christ of scripture. So, a group of far-out critics and leftist theologians assembled with nary anyone to check their incredible ideas or question their outrageous conclusions. If a group of nothing but stamp collectors met to decide what the best hobby for all humanity is would we be surprised if stamp collecting was their result? Why then is it news when faithless professors, agnostic teachers, and liberal theologians who have no belief in the Bible or Jesus announce they cannot find Him?

The Seminar votes down any statement of Christ that sounds Jewish or cites the Old Testament. They do this based on the criteria of dissimilarity. The idea is that anything that Jesus says which distinguishes him from Judaism of His day and the early church may be accepted as authentic because no one would think to put such words in His mouth. Unfortunately, using dissimilarity assumes that Jesus cannot say anything rooted in the culture and times He lived in. If Jesus is a Jew living in a Jewish society can't we expect He will sound like a Jew? Shouldn't it be thought normal that He freely quotes the Old Testament scriptures? After all, Jewish boys learned the scriptures in synagogue schools at an early age and the Jewish people loved to quote and talk about the Old Testament. What would happen to speeches made by our leaders today if we artificially excised them of every reference to anything popular in our culture? What if the only sayings judged authentic were those that clashed directly with our day and age? Would anyone be able to say anything?

The Seminar also shows an amazing arbitrariness in their use of sources to find this "real" Jesus. Many form criticism scholars believe that Matthew, Mark, and Luke draw from an unnamed gospel record that they have named "Q." Deciding what is in "Q" (a document no one has ever seen or read) is very important to the Seminar, and they give much weight to any saying that they think is in "Q." Why? Because "Q" is supposedly closer in time to Jesus than the other Gospels. It is presumed to predate them all. Interestingly, even liberal scholars have believed "Q" contains some of Jesus statements about God's future judgment and intervention in history. These scholars have been forced to that conclusion because the statements are found in Matthew, Mark and Luke. One would think, therefore, that the Seminar would accept those statements as authentic, right? They are in their beloved "Q" and so must be correct, right? Wrong. The Seminar throws all those statements out because they do not believe Jesus talked about the coming kingdom. So, when they want to, they cite "Q" over the written gospel record. However, if "Q" agrees with the written record they can throw it out too. Convenient, yes? Scholarly? No.

If the Gospels are such legendary accounts, as the Seminar asserts, we might ask why they contain so much material embarrassing to the apostles. Why did the men who supposedly perpetrated the Jesus legends tell of their ignorance, spiritual insensitivity, and many, many failures? Why does Peter tell of His three failures the night Jesus was tried? Why do the Gospels tell us that the apostles slept when Jesus needed them most at Gethsemane? Is this really the work of men?

The Seminar claims the early church rewrote Jesus' story but such is manifestly not true. Further, saying the church rewrote their theology and thinking back into Jesus' teaching is unfair. "A comparison of the Epistles with the Gospels reveals that neither Paul's words nor those of other New Testament writers have been projected back onto the mouth of Jesus. No passage from Paul (or any of the other New Testament letters) can be found in the Gospels or on the lips of Jesus."2 No Pauline concept, like "body of Christ" or "righteousness by faith," are attributed to Jesus. In fact Paul is careful to distinguish his teaching and the teaching of the Lord (see 1 Cor. 7:10, 12, 25). What can the Seminar say to this?

The greatest problem the Jesus Seminar cannot and will not answer is why the early church fabricated what the Seminar claims they did. The Jewish Christians hated Gentiles, had grown up in a culture that encouraged that intolerance, and wanted nothing to do with them. Peter had to be fairly dragged off to preach to a Gentile, and then was "called on the carpet" for what he had done (see Acts 10-11). Even then Jewish-Gentile tensions simmered in the early church (see Acts 15; the book of Galatians). Given this state who can believe that Jewish followers of Christ fabricated a Jesus who claimed to be everyone's Messiah and commanded them to preach to "every creature" (Matthew 28:18-19). Which is easier to believe: the Jews completely contrived Jesus as the world's Messiah because they loved Gentiles so much or that the clear teaching of Jesus compelled them to follow His Great Commission? Is it not easy to see that if Jesus was a made up Messiah he would be a Jews-only Messiah who spoke heatedly of Rome's destruction (not Jerusalem's!) and promised that God's wrath would soon crush the idolatrous nations surrounding Judah?

In light of the Seminar's errors it is even worse to note they are doing nothing new. Their objections, ideas and agenda were all begun in the 1800's in Germany. There men like Wellhausen and Hegel worked to destroy faith in God's word just as the Seminar does today. Incredibly, they are using the same old arguments that the Germans used so long ago. Those arguments were discredited and answered. Nevertheless, the rationalists and agnostics persevered despite (and without) the truth. So the Seminar does today. They have no case, no evidence, and no logic. Yet they continue claiming to search for someone they have already decided they cannot find: Jesus. By arbitrarily throwing out the central pieces of evidence (the Gospels), adding accounts that are legendary (such as the Gospel of Thomas) they end with a mishmash of nothing they can hammer into any form they want. What they get is exactly what they look for, because their biases and prejudices determine what they see. May God bless us to withstand their wickedness and to bring light that dispels the darkness they offer.