Jesus was a Liberal

Someone wrote to me:

I will take only a few presuppositions of the Jesus Seminar because a posting going through every presupposition would be much too large for this or any newsgroup; The Jesus Seminar based its examination on the presupposition, “The evangelists frequently attribute their own statements to Jesus.” How do they know this? Do they give evidence from an independent eyewitness source that challenges the contents of the Gospels. Their presupposition has no support. It would only have support were they able to quite some ancient author who heard Jesus preach and stated that Jesus did not say something attributed to Him by the Evangelists.

OK, that’s a fair objection. I’m going to comment on it, but not as a historian, because that is not my discipline. As you know, there are no independent witnesses to Jesus beyond the Gospels (and perhaps the apocryphal Gospels–but I don’t think we have much quality there). As a result, any attempt to discern what “Jesus really said” must be based, as I see it, on three things: the Gospels, what is known about the transmission of oral traditions in general and the literary form of Greek and Roman biography in particular, and what is known about the historical context, both of Jesus and of the Christian community from which the Gospel texts came. [The Jesus Seminar sometimes mentions that a saying attributed to Jesus is an aphorism which appears in other independent contemporary sources.] Continue reading →

In the context of criticism of the Jesus Seminar, it has been claimed that the actual Gospel accounts are of high reliability, and further that no Christian who reveres Christ would dare “make anything up”.

Such a view is a faith view, not the view of a historian.

First, we know that Christian scribes frequently amended the texts of the canonical gospels. We know this beyond all doubt from the literally thousands of variant Greek manuscripts which exist to this day [1]. It is not a matter of speculation, but of observation that some Christians made stuff up.

One might argue that such glosses and “corrections” and emendations were minor. However, it appears that the story in John’s Gospel of the woman caught in adultery is, from manuscript evidence, not an original part of John’s Gospel. But perhaps it was a independent tradition that found a home there.

Fine, what about Christians making up whole books? There are several collections of these in the book stores now. Christians wrote Gospels by the scores! I would just mention two of them which are probably earlier than the rest of their fellows: The Infancy Gospel of James and the Gospel of Thomas. These are either real history or they are made up–which is it? There is the possibly early fragment from the Gospel of Peter. whose account of the resurrection cannot be reconciled with that of the canonical gospels. How about pseudo-Matthew in the 6th century who added details to the birth narrative in canonical Matthew based on his reading of Isaiah. Continue reading →

I’m a practicing Christian, and that means that I go to church and I participate in ritual actions and I speak ritual phrases. We have a canon of scripture and a body of doctrine. The Bible which we hold sacred was written by the faithful — that is, the story is told through the viewpoint of other Christians who also had their ritual and doctrine.

On the other hand there is historical research in to the life and times of Jesus. While there are no contemporary accounts of Jesus outside Christian Scripture (and someone like Schweitzer in The Quest of the Historical Jesus concludes that the historical Jesus must remain unknown), there is material about the times: about the culture, society and government; and there also those who try to uncover the layers in the Christian texts themselves to learn what lays behind them (for example as is done in The Historical Jesus by John Dominic Crossan or E. P. Sanders in his Historical Figure of Jesus).

The picture of Jesus which emerges from Historical Jesus research is wonderful and compelling — but it doesn’t look much like the Christ of Christian doctrine.

I’d like for it to all fit together and make sense and maybe it really does. Continue reading →