The Historical Jesus and His Seminar

I believe the Bible and take it at its word for all matters of theology, faith, and Christian religion. If the message of the Bible (and along with it the events the message is taken from) is not 100% inspired and true, then Christianity is of little value.).

That said, even though I will always rely on the New Testament itself (and an educated understanding of the culture it arises from) for information and explanation about Jesus' life, I still enjoy reading up on "historical Jesus" studies. It's fun to see what people think. It's not something a Christian should bother with unless they're curious, since the New Testament, not academic theories, is our authority on Jesus' life. But the historical Jesus world of academia can be fun for Christians who are interested in understanding the historical method.

A great introductory text on this topic is Jesus As a Figure in History, which I am currently re-reading and will review on this site sometime soon. In the meantime, though, I need to get some annoyances about the Jesus Seminar off my chest.

The Jesus Seminar is a group of about 75 Biblical scholars who, over the course of a few years, met together and systematically reviewed every one of Jesus' sayings and deeds and voted using degrees of certainty on whether or not the sayings/deeds were authentic. They have kept a high profile in the media and have begun to sketch out their take on Jesus' life. They accept about 20% of the Gospels as authentic and characterize Jesus as an irreverent hippie who throws out catchy sayings and had no interest in building followers, starting a revolution, or talking about religion or the end of the world.

The Seminar is not diverse in that it does not cover the range of scholarly views about the historical Jesus very evenly. Also, the entire idea of voting on who Jesus was is an intellectual disgrace. Do your scholarly work, develop a hypothesis, and dialogue; we don't need a majority vote to prove anything. Besides this, their system of voting is arbitrary and makes no use at all of sound statistical theory.

I have three huge gripes against the Jesus Seminar and anyone who studies the historical Jesus similarly:

(1) To propose without hard evidence that the authors of the synoptic gospels made stuff up is self-righteous and arrogant. These authors were much closer to the situation than us, had much more information than we have, and were part of a religion that held truth as a high value.

It is arrogant and self-righteous to contend that Mark and Luke were too affected by their subjectivity to tell the truth and that it is our job as modern scholars to discover the real truth. That is to claim the Gospel writers as subjective and ourselves as objective. But the Seminar's subjectivity is proven by the fact that their presentation of Jesus happens to be a fun-loving and harmless hippie who would fit right in in the modern Western world.

Some argue that it is anachronistic to say Mark or Luke would only want to write what really happened, but this is going too far. The Gospel writers DID care what really happened; they just understood that events needed to be selected and explained, and they didn't have the same sense of exactness and precision that we do. They did not fake objectivity, but did seek to communicate actual events. Note Luke's own claim to heavy research and his and John's assurances that their Gospels are true. Also note the careful way that Luke and Matthew use Mark and Q as sources, never changing the events in earnest; only tiny details are changed.

(2) The Jesus Seminar takes legitimate historical tools, such as dissimilarity (authenticity correlating with difference from its author's perspective), oral repeatability (authenticity correlating with how easily non-readers could have memorized it), and multiple attestation (more authentic material comes from more sources) and tears them away from true historical inquiry by using them like a divining rod, beating each saying/deed over the head with them individually to see if they stand, and then quickly forming a conclusion.

These historical tools must be used in a synthesizing manner, looking at the whole situation and connecting Jesus with the world of Christianity, Judaism, and Rome. This is real science, not crudely using the historical tools as a litmus test on each saying/deed. The very nature of their work, deciding on each deed/saying individually, is nonsense.

Historical tools such as dissimilarity are more useful from a "top-down" approach. That is, starting with the big picture and working down to the details. The tools should be investigating, in order, "How does early Christianity fit at the beginning of Christianity," "How was Christianity sparked in 1st-century Palestine," "How does Christianity fit among Judaism, Hellenization, and Rome," "How do the apostles and early church leaders make sense in the early church," and finally, then, how does Jesus help explain all of this? Each succeeding queston should rely heavily on the questions that come before. Instead, the Seminar looks at each saying/deed without regard with what must be explained, and thus bastardize the historical tools from serious historical inquiry.

(3) Despite their poor use of historical tools, the Seminar's work could still be very useful. Thanks to them, we know with great certainty that Jesus did say lots of counter-cultural things, that he did travel from town to town, that he did die on the cross, etc. This would be a great way to start a barebones framework of what any analysis of Jesus MUST include.

The key, though, is that this framework is INCOMPLETE. If you rely on sayings being easily remembered and being different from what the early church thought as criteria for what is authentic, then you are by default going to get a Jesus without mission or theology. That's fine IF YOU REALIZE THE PICTURE IS ONLY A VERY INCOMPLETE SKETCH AND THAT MUCH MORE ABOUT JESUS IS TO BE DISCOVERED. It leaves the historical Jesus as a shell of the real Jesus, and that is ok if you confirm that it is only a shell.

However, the Jesus Seminar's leaders and others like them regularly neglect to note that their Jesus is a shell of the true Jesus, and so they put forth an Zombie Jesus (i.e. a mumbling, oversimplified shell of the real thing). Zombie Jesus is by the very nature of their criteria oversimplified but they put him out there as the real thing anyway. Just because, because of the limits of their tools, they cannot verify Jesus' theology and mission DOES NOT MEAN HE DIDN'T HAVE THEOLOGY OR MISSION. This is a serious logical error and makes much of their work useless drivel.

I wrote this blog post because at 5 a.m. this morning I woke up and couldn't stop thinking about this stuff. And the very nature of my thoughts--that I would need a highly intellectual discussion to reassure my own faith--brought about doubt in my own faith, because it shouldn't need to be so academic. I fought through the doubt and made sense of the situation while lying there half-awake.

In the meantime, I realized that Western culture itself helped this doubt along... 99% of the world's cultures believed in gods almost universally, and a message like Christianity is powerful to them. Only our culture is so philosophically arrogant that we think we should stop believing in gods before carefully investigating and even "trying on" the other 99% of earth's worldviews.

Christianity, then, the vast majority of the time, is neither advanced nor believed by virtue of academia. Instead, it rests on the power of God, often in three ways: the power of the Christian worldview to explain life; the power of signs, wonders, and transformed lives and communities; and the power over sin and demons that Christ offers.

Christianity is the true God's revelation about himself. It is historical and is real, yes, but we get too entangled with untying a knot that we can't totally untie (ancient historical reconstruction). For faith purposes, all we need to see is that true Christianity is historically VIABLE, not that it is an academic certainty. I get lost in this tangle too often.

It makes me wonder: How can I make myself more available to the living God and to see his power at work in the world around me? Move to a different country? Simplify my life? Become a missionary? Just be more honest? Something small and subtle?

Thoughts?