Orthodox_Freethinker

This is the most sober and reasonable assessment of the Jesus Seminar and its conclusions that I've seen in quite some time.

"The Corrected Jesus" by Richard B. Hays
Richard B. Hays is Associate Professor of New Testament at the Divinity School, Duke University.
http://www.firstthings.com/ftissues/.../revessay.html

"...Funk's concern for the appearance of utilitarian value perhaps explains the peculiar way in which The Five Gospels deploys the rhetoric of empiricism ("empirical, factual evidence," "independent, neutral observers"), despite Funk's own earlier avowal that "our fictions, though deliberately fictive, are nevertheless not subject to proof or falsification." If indeed, as Funk suggests, "we need a fiction that we recognize to be fictive," the present volume is an odd way of filling the prescription. The Five Gospels purports to offer precisely the opposite: a factual Jesus discovered by scientific methods and disentangled from the fictive Jesus rendered in the gospel narratives. Truth in advertising would be served if Funk's 1985 essay were published in place of the book's present introduction.

So, when I return my brother-in-law's phone call, here is what I shall say: No, the case argued by this book would not stand up in any court. The critical study of the historical Jesus is an important task-perhaps important for reasons theological as well as historical-but The Five Gospels does not advance that task significantly, nor does it represent a fair picture of the current state of research on this problem. Some of its purported revelations are old news, and many of its novel claims are at best dubious. No, I was not involved in the project, nor were any of my colleagues at Yale and Duke, all of whom share my view that the Jesus Seminar is methodologically misguided. Should you take it seriously? Only if you want to compare its findings to other scholarly reconstructions of Jesus of Nazareth. If you are interested in the problem, there are at least a dozen other books I would recommend in preference to this one. But their authors are less likely to be interviewed on the radio: no scandalous sound bites."

Peace.

Yuri Kuchinsky

I usually think about it as 'Jesus the Greek Seminar'...

Regards,

Yuri.

Rick Sumner

This is a rather odd standard to use. . .

And on this point I must emphatically beg to differ. To be sure, I disagree with the vast majority of the JSem's conclusions, and think that attempting to reconstruct a life based on the relatve certainty of given sayings is a laughably fruitless venture. That said, The Five Gospels (and, for that matter, The Acts of Jesus) is nonetheless a virtually requisite reference to have on hand. Even when one disagrees (which I usually do), it is nonetheless valuable to understand what you are disagreeing with.

I'm of the belief that the Jesus Seminar is wrong with great frequency. But they're wrong in incredibly fruitful ways. Few texts that are right can hope to "advance that task significantly" with the degree that The Five Gospels does.

It certainly represents one side of some of the most hotly debated topics in the field today. If one isn't going to read all views, there isn't much point in reading it at all.

Duke, which is right in ground zero for the "apocalyptic prophet" model (one which I share, incidentally), isn't exactly where you'd expect to find JSem Fellows coming from. Yale isn't really noted for it's Divinity School. The Fellows of the JSem boast more than enough academic credentials to overcome this thin slight, which is really quite empty.

And, while it includes no professor's from Yale or Duke, it does boast a large number of their alumni.

No serious investigation shouldn't compare other sides to the problem. But that's not the point, the point is that, to understand the side they take, which does indeed include a sizable number of the academy, and shares endorsement from many who are not in the Seminar, The Five Gospels is requisite.

The stated aim of the Jesus Seminar in The Five Gospels is to determine, by careful analysis of each saying, which sayings are authentic to Jesus. Not to reconstruct the historical Jesus. I'm not aware of "a dozen other books" that address that problem. I can think of two: Perrin's and Vermes'. I'm inclined to think you're conflating the aim of the Jesus Seminar with the larger aim of a reconstruction of the life of Jesus (which is something many Seminar members have done in other publications).

However, I'm certainly all ears if you can name a dozen other books that comb through all the sayings material and assess them for authenticity. If not, this is more bluster, analogous to your Duke and Yale reference above.

This thinly veiled insult has no place in what is presented as a critique of the academy.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

RUmike

Related interesting tidbit... Mahlon Smith, member of the translation panel and the one who wrote the commentary on all of the Q sayings for The Five Gospels, happens to be my New Testament professor.

But anyway, while I am in the process of going through that book still and deciding what I agree and don't agree with, I commend the group for two main reasons. One, they don't just debate, they decide. And the way they decide is by using a voting process just like the translators who need to decide which manuscript has the earliest form of a verse, or what annotations to write about it. And second, they make their results public. The public is so completely illiterate when it comes to the New Testament and to Jesus that it's embarassing. If all the Jesus Seminar does is to get more people to think critically about the New Testament, or realize that a fundamentalist view of it could not possibly be more misguided, then I'm happy.

It seems this second issue, the publicity, is what is getting people angry. Had the JS produced the exact same results but buried it in journals or academic circles, no one would complain.

Orthodox_Freethinker

The problem is that these men are fallible humans who are as much guided by presuppositions, if not more so, than those who adhere to the historical reliability of the Gospels. Imagine if you were Jesus and taught a message of salvation, would you want people who claim to be your followers attempting to erase your words from history 2,000 years later?

Peace.

LambdaCalculator

I only skimmed the article, but it seems to me that he's using the same blanket dismissals of the GoT as orthidox scholars do. My responses:

1. Regarding GoT of "literarily dependent on the canonical gospels" is fallacious. There are significant differences between them (the narrative template, for instance, is completely absent).

2. The GoT that we know of does not have to be the final word on it's origin. The canonical gospels were all compiled decades after Yeshua's death is dated, so positing their historical veracity relies on an appeal to earlier texts that were perhaps derived from oral tradition. The same can be said for the GoT.

3. That the GoT is dependent upon Gnostic teachings relies on circular reasoning. It is assumed that the GoT is of second-century origin and therefore must have been formed by Gnostic teaching, and such is assumed because it is assumed that the GoT is Gnostic.

4. That the GoT is Gnostic also relies on unsubstantiated assumptions. The GoT matches the teachings of no Gnostic sect that we know of from the second, third or fourth century. Justifying this assumption on the fact that the Gnostics used the GoT is also fallacious, as the Gnostics also made use of the canonical gospels (especially John).

5. The GoT could very well match the template of the gospels that are hinted at in the New Testament, specifically in Paul's letter to the Galatians. This could very well signify that a non-narrative gospel (free from the obvious Pagan influences exhibited by the canonical gospels), was used by some Christian sects. If this turns out to be true, it could very well have been a early version of the GoT.

6. That the GoT was rejected by early church fathers no more signifies that the GoT is apocryphal anymore than evolution being rejected by church fathers means that evolution is false. That the GoT was considered heretical by some church fathers (specifically Iraneus of Lion) can be attributed to the fact that he had an agenda in furthering the divinity of Yeshua, something which appears to be absent from the GoT.

7. And finally, stating that we only know of the GoT from the Nag Hammadi manuscripts is misleading. We know of an earlier greek version, and it's quite possible that there was an earlier Syriac version.

RUmike

If I were Jesus, I would want people to honestly investigate claims made about me and to determine using their God-given reason whether or not such claims were true. And I would prefer this to happen much sooner than "2,000 years later." If I were Jesus I would find it very unfortunate that it took around 1,800 years for people to start thinking critically about the message people claim that I had, since afterall, I didn't write any of the gospels myself.

SaintCog

There is an assumption behind this last comment that needs to be unpacked. You are assuming that the gospels as we have received them accurately record the words of Jesus. The Jesus Seminar does not assume this. Nor does it assume that the Gospels do not represent the words of Jesus. They are using their faculties of reason and scholarly techniques developed over the centuries to determine exactly what in the Gospels Jesus said and what he didn't say.

This kind of study is not unique to Historical Jesus studies. For example, classicists debate what of Plato's dialogues actually came from the historical Socrates and what was invented by Plato. The consensus is that most of Plato's works in which Socrates is the featured speaker are Plato's words and thoughts, not Socrates'. Do you think just because Plato knew Socrates personally that everything he attributes to him was actually uttered by the historical Socrates? After all, Plato is closer in time to Socrates than all of our modern scholars.

I was going to write more, but I don't want to waste my time doing so until we get past one detail. You have repeated time and again that the Gospels are historically reliable because people who are closer in time to him than us have said so. There have been a number of responses to this, none of which you have responded to. Since this is the crux of your argument, I think you at least owe us a response to the following:

1. Ancient biographies were not written as factually precise histories in the sense that modern standards demand. Ancient biographies were written for the purpose of praise, which often included exaggeration and fabrication in order to exalt the person in question.

2. There were other groups of Christians who were just as close in time to Jesus as the church fathers, many of whom did not accept some of the gospels. For example, the Ebionites accepted only a gospel of Matthew (whether it was our Matthew, we can't say); the Valentinians accepted only the gospel of John. The Marcionites accepted only a gospel of Luke that differed from our gospel of Luke; they simply called it "the Gospel."

3. If you're going to be consistent about this "closer in time" business, then you really have to be consistent. The earliest evidence we have for what the earliest Christians consider to be canonical texts omit some of the books that are commonly held to be canonical today. For example, the Muratonian canon, dated to the latter half of the 2nd century omits Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, and 3 John from its list. Origen in the mid-third century acknowledges that the authenticity of 2 Peter, 2 John and 3 John are disputed among "orthodox" circles. Furthermore, he himself does not endorse their authenticity. In the early fourth century Eusebius indicates that James, Jude, 2 Peter, 2 and 3 John, and Revelation are disputed books in "orthodox" circles. We don't get our full list of 27 until Athanasius writes in the latter half of the fourth century, a full three hundred years after many of these texts are alleged to have been written.

If you want to give serious weight to the earliest witness, and the earliest witnesses cast doubt on eight books of the New Testament, why would you accept these books as canonical? Or, for that matter, do you Mr. Freethinker?

Orthodox_Freethinker

They are using standards which are entirely unjustified, standards which one would not normally use for other documents of antiquity. The members of the Jesus Seminar presuppose that most of the words attributed to Christ in the Gospels were not ever spoken by Him. With the techniques they utilize, it would be nearly impossible to tell what any person of ancient history ever really said. They presuppose that any teaching which sounds either too Jewish or too Christian must not have been spoken by Christ. This is entirely absurd given that Jesus was a Jew and the founder of the Christian religion. In finding historical truth, the Jesus Seminar dooms itself from the very beginning. Only a minority of scholars would take such a method, of begging the question, seriously.

Peace.

SaintCog

Again, you are clearly not reading our posts in their entirety. Either that or you are deliberately ignoring parts that you are not able to respond to. I indicated in my previous post that the same kind of skepticism is applied when scholars try to uncover the historical Socrates. Scholars believe that most of the words put in his mouth by Plato were not uttered by the historical Socrates. Historians of antiquity as a general rule do not take ancient documents at face value.

And you still have not responded to the three points I laid out in the previous post. I would greatly appreciate it if you did so.