Jesus and the Jesus Seminar:
**NOTE: If you would prefer something shorter and less involved, read my letter to the editor of the Battle Creek Enquirer on this subject here.**
I grew up in a Mormon home, and some of my earliest memories are of that Jesus that my parents and my Sunday School teachers taught me about. As a child, my foremost impression of the man was that he was gentle and that he loved children. I always had a warm feeling when I thought about him because, to me, he was someone who would step in to protect those who could not protect themselves as he once did when a group of overly judgmental men attempted to stone a woman who they deemed as fallen. My own father is such a person and, to my mind, there are far too few of such people in the world.
Later, as a teenager, I came to respect the man I understood Jesus to be as a rebel and a nonconformist. This was during the 1970s when the spirit of the Sixties as expressed in the brilliant music and art of the time was still prevalent in popular culture. I thought of Jesus as the consumate good guy, so it was easier for me to identify with those long-haired and bearded hippies singing about love and peace than it was the establishment types with their suits and short haircuts and their obsession with money and material goods. "Take no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself" (Matthew 6:34) seemed to me to be saying that the hippies were on the right track.
As I progressed into adulthood, it became abundantly clear to me that whoever this Jesus was, he would very likely not support much of what has gone on in his name over the centuries since he lived upon the earth. It has, of course, been much worse than it is now at times, but even today many church organizations work harder to protect the power and influence they enjoy than to see that the poor are fed and the sick healed which, one feels certain, would be the primary concern of Jesus himself. It's difficult for me to understand how spirituality can be attained to and Christian love learned in such a setting.
This isn't just a problem with Christianity, though. I believe it is common for human beings to misunderstand the basic message that prophets and other wise men bequeath to the world. The violence which some fundamentalist Christians and Muslims preach and which is practiced on a daily basis by many a radical Jewish-American settler in the West Bank and Gaza is a testament to this. But more often than not, we fail to understand in much more innocent ways. We go to church or to temple as if to satisfy an obligation when, in reality, we should be seeking to become attuned to those spiritual things which, in our hectic daily lives, we fail to take adequate time for. I observed some of the same behavior at several Buddhist temples I visited on a recent trip to Thailand, although I have to say that, in general, Buddhist worship seems somewhat less vulnerable to this phenomenon since it is (or seems to me to be) more of a personal process than a social one and, thus, less prone to judgementalism on the part of its adherents toward other believers.
In any case, it has frustrated me over the years to observe how Christian pastors and preachers take advantage of the fact that we know so little about the man Jesus both in terms of who he really was and what he really said and did. I view the Bible in its present form as the result of many centuries of powerful men twisting existing writings about Jesus to their own ends and supressing those (like the Gnostic gospels) which did not aid them in their quest for power and influence. I see the same thing going on today when I hear preachers interpreting obscure verses of the Bible in their own unique way.
With all that in mind, I have become very interested lately in the writings of a group of scholars calling themselves the Jesus Seminar led by a Robert W. Funk who has authored several books based on the group's research. These seventy-and-some-odd scholars, who specialize in ancient languages, archaeology, and many other fields relevant to the study of the New Testament, have spent countless hours studying ancient texts and what is known of the society and times Jesus lived in and have come up with a system for determining the likelihood that Jesus actually said the things attributed to him and did what the gospel records claim he did.
The book entitled The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus
contains the entire texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as well as the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. Sayings in red are those which the Jesus Seminar, through voting, has determined are very likely Jesus' actual words while sayings printed in pink are less certain but in the general spirit of what Jesus did teach. Gray passages (I think they look more blue, but Funk calls them gray) are those that were probably not uttered by Jesus while black sayings are almost certainly not. The book contains a listing of the membership of the Jesus Seminar along with degrees and university affiliations. It also contains several interesting articles discussing what the Jesus Seminar took into account in making the decisions they made.
Less interesting but still worth a look is The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus which treats the deeds of Jesus in a similar way to how the previously mentioned book treats Jesus' words. What made the book less interesting for me is the severe lack of red passages. While there is relatively little we can be sure Jesus said, there is evidently much, much less that we can be sure he did.
Another book by the Jesus Seminar which I have not yet had an opportunity to read but which sounds like it could be very good is The Gospel of Jesus According to the Jesus Seminar. In explanation of the title, Funk relates how, traditionally, the gospels of the past built upon other earlier sources and that he and his colleagues have assembled their gospel in the same manner. Here's a blip from the publisher to explain this in more detail:
Composing a gospel like The Gospel of Jesus is nothing new. As the editor points out, creating a work like this is simply following the practices of the first evangelists: "The authors of the ancient gospels freely plundered the work of their predecessors in composing their own texts...New compositions were written out by hand and often presented as solely the product of the new authors. The composers of the New Testament gospels created their gospels in the same way."
In my opinion, the members of the Jesus Seminar have taken great pains to present an objective view of Christianity and its teachings. Obviously, no one does a perfect job of this, but many folks don't even try. So I feel more sure of their work than I do of many others out there, particularly the many "faith-promoting" books which, to my mind, could more accurately be classified as brainwashing materials except in very rare instances. Many of these scholars originally taught at Christian schools and universities where their historical research was strictly monitored by the administration in order to keep it in check. I see the same thing happening at my alma mater, Brigham Young University, today. It seems that those in authority in the Mormon church are as afraid of historical truth relating to the Church as many Christian authorities are. I don't understand why this is so, but it is, and there don't seem to be any indications that they will be relaxing their stance anytime soon.
Of course, as many of these authorities point out, we can try to reconstruct the words and deeds of Jesus all we want, but in the end we'll never be able to know for sure if what we end up with is completely correct. In fact, we will undoubtedly get many things wrong since there's no way to know anything for sure without going back twenty centuries and speaking with Jesus and his contemporaries ourselves. Still, I admire the Jesus Seminar's attempts. And I feel that we do know more (much more, in fact) by their and others' having undertaken such a work than we would if we had to rely on the existing Bible and those in positions of ecclesiastical authority for our information.
As you might expect, research like this brings up as many questions as it answers so that, in some ways, you really feel like you know a lot less than you thought you did after you've studied the matter in any depth. One thing I feel certain of, though, is that he was a good and very wise man who deserves the right to speak for himself insofar as it is possible for us to reconstruct, in our times, what his message was and what he really stood for. Many cultures place taboos on what can be said about the dead. For example, there's an old quote from a Roman called Chilon (who I know nothing about other than that he is allegedly the originator of the quote): "De mortuis nihil nisi bonum" which basically means that we should speak only good of the dead. Such taboos take on an almost religious significance over time, but I believe that the real purpose behind such a practice is simply to protect those who cannot protect themselves. We owe it to the dead to represent the truth about them accurately, eg. to protect their names from slander and not misrepresent them or their ideas, just as we owe it to helpless children to protect them from physical and emotional harm. Why? Because we were all once children and will all someday be dead. If we expect this simple consideration from others who will remain on earth after our deaths, we are obligated to provide it to those who have preceded us in death. In that light, I view the Jesus Seminar as a rescue mission reaching out to one poor man of antiquity whose memory has long been a tool for those promoting their own agendas, both good and bad, both selfish and altruistic.
If you have a comment on what I've written above, please e-mail me: forgetfuljones@oocities.com
David Harris, Sometime in the year 2000
PS Read my letter to the editor of the Battle Creek Enquirer on this subject here.
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