Letter to a friend about Christian belief and the Bible: Revisiting the Jesus Seminar

It has to be said that the Jesus Seminar is a well-deserved reaction to the state of mainline churches in North America. I understand your attraction to an informed study of scripture and the deconstruction of many uncritical assumptions, even superstitions, about Christian faith. For the most part, the average congregation, Catholic as well as Protestant, is dull and joyless much of the time, indifferent to Christian unity, and disinclined to sacrifice for justice or educate for peace. (It remains to be seen what will have been the effect on religious practice since September/October 2001.)

But it is the prevailing biblical illiteracy and indifference, on one hand, or "the Bible says" fundamentalism, on the other, that are specific targets of the Jesus Seminar. The attraction of intelligent people to their promotional sessions shows the need for intellectual candor with the Bible and curiosity for religious knowledge. I respect that. I think it is also a sign of spiritual ennui.

However, with all their faults the historic churches show sufficient diversity, signs of devotion and vitality, and sometimes exciting leadership, and they deserve a closer examination of what they offer at the beginning of a new millennium. They are more than they are represented to be by adherents of the Jesus Seminar. And since the publication of Luke Timothy Johnson's The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels1 and Philip Jenkins' Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way,2 there is no need to describe errors of interpretation and method. My concern is theological and mystical, if you will. I wrote an article for Encounter, published in the spring of 2001, with the subtitle "Recognizing Alternative Religions with Christian Roots."3 Here I would say, "Recognizing Different Theologies as Alternative Religions." Some theological orientations are thought-provoking and inspiring but do not represent the confession of faith embodied in baptism and the Lord's Supper and further make light of the love with which God is to be loved above all else. There is an existential factor in this process that makes it more than an objective clarification of the data. The truth one deals with is one's own commitment. A sense of God's purpose through mission and evangelism is totally strange to this attitude, although individual commitment to justice and the moral teaching of Jesus can be outstanding and exemplary for the churches.

A book recently published in France is called Jesus contre Jesus,4 in which the approach of the Jesus Seminar is duplicated in the attempt to intrigue and scandalize a nominally Catholic society. But the authors clearly separate their expose from any pretense of religious concern. Some American scholars tend to be naive about their ideological secularism and presume to be teachers of religion. To become a member of most churches is to acknowledge in words attributed to Peter and Martha that Jesus is Son of the living God. In the writings of Hermann Hesse, who did not claim to be a Christian, Jesus is referred to as der Heiland - "the Savior" - rather than by name. This is who Jesus Christ is understood to be for Christians.

As I see it, the Jesus Seminar is based on three assumptions:

1. Myth: that the divinity of Jesus Christ is contrary to contemporary reason and therefore a myth constructed by the dominant religious institution and perpetuated in the doctrine of the Trinity. The myth was generated by a primitive belief in the resurrection of Jesus and consists of signs and miracles because of the way the New Testament was composed. The myth assumes a theistic belief based on a three-tiered universe, a personal God, patriarchal culture, a theology of guilt and salvation, and eternal life in heaven.

2. Sayings: that the Jesus of history has religious significance as a prophet and teacher some of whose sayings are preserved in the gospels, which can be known by scholarly research, consensus, and technique. The sayings consist of the hypothetical "Q" document, long known to have served as a resource for the synoptic narratives but examined in the last few years along with non-canonical writings by a group of academics who vote four ways on which sayings are likely to be from Jesus. The degrees of probability are likely, possibly, unlikely, and not at all. The procedure is unimpaired by theological considerations or the liturgical tradition of the Christian community.

3. Spirit: that spiritual significance is not relevant to this reading of the scriptures and that personal awareness of grace and the revelation of God's love are absent from any assessment of texts concerning Jesus Christ. The rational criteria alone determine what is our relation to the mystery of who Jesus was and who he is for people today. The worship of the church and the eucharistic ritual can only be a psychological or social experience. In effect, there can be useful religions but not faith revealing the covenant God of Israel and our hope of immortality.

I would say that these assumptions are inadequate to deal with the place of Jesus Christ in history or in the flesh and blood lives of men and women. His story is not a "myth" in an exact sense, like Neptune in the sea or the hero of Wagner's Siegfried, but a theological legacy of the mind and spirit. He is part of a religious culture that creates him but is also created by him. He does not come to us through belief in miracles or searching for the words that might have been preserved in oral tradition and then recorded and copied by hand. He is met as a powerful idea that gives meaning to life through familiarity and mystical bonding. It cannot be cherished intellectually without opening the inner life to its influence.

Paul is the first to admit in 2 Cor 5:16 that Jesus has been known by "what he seemed to be outwardly" (Goodspeed) but now is seen according to a new state of things. In fact , he says that no one is known any longer in only the historical way! What the Jesus Seminar calls "myth" Paul calls "a new creation." It is not myth but message of reconciliation.

I am willing to grant that the sayings and probably much of the narrative are not historical in the literal sense. This whole Jesus Seminar process doesn't even matter, in my opinion, except to liberate people who are trussed up in fundamentalism and welcome the freeing of their minds. Maybe they can find a new appreciation of the Bible. But it is the old question of the letter and the spirit. In declaring that "not all the sayings are from Jesus, but some of them are and we can find them," there is still the same biblical literalism in a higher key. The assumptions of what needs to be there to be believed and why it is important as "facts" are the same.

But what we have in the Bible is a work of literature. The gospel writers are not recording the facts of history as chroniclers; they are expressing the meaning of history as artists. They write as evangelists, but they achieve a work of moral and spiritual beauty. They portray a particular moment of redemptive suffering in the history of the Jews not as religious mystery but as faithful providence of the God of Israel. They are gifted exceptions in the genre. They remind me of Mozart at the tip of a cultural mountain of predecessors, forgotten rivals and lost imitators.

The gospels have captured their place in history to such an extent as to come down to our time and to be read every day by somebody worldwide and by countless worshipping communities every first day of the week. They seize on history, transform it and thereby transform the world. They represent the power of the written word to produce meaning, knowledge, fresh understanding, faith, doubt, symbolism, and coherence. They sound like eyewitness accounts although they were written more than fifty years after the events they relate. To bring the reader to a totally new kind of spiritual engagement, they fashion a biographical account! What the Jesus Seminar calls "myth" is the discourse they make possible with the Christ of faith.

The New Testament is the work of many who succeed in portraying a personality so exceptional that divine light is seen in him, to touch him is to be renewed, to be grasped by the power of his spirit is to be saved - saved from our egotism, saved from our materialism, saved from our exclusion of the poor and the different, saved from our fear of fate and our neurotic worship of death. The gamble of the New Testament and the sponsoring communities was to turn an historic defeat into the proclamation of victory. It is a rereading of the whole Jewish catastrophe under the Romans. It is not a "myth" but an exegesis of prophetic and eschatological literature in the light of political event.

And this is not words found in a mechanical fashion, quantified and counted like beads, but the Word majestic and noble in the devotion and intelligence of these marvelous writers. Look at John's mystical commentary, the synoptics' gracious storytelling, Paul's Jewish vision of cosmic fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets.

Friedrich Engels wrote that primitive Christianity was a movement of the oppressed, and like all mass movements, its beginnings were a time of confusion. It was marked by contradictions and variations, because of the lack of clarity or coherence. The voices of different prophets were heard and parties formed. The diversity of apostolic witness became the strength of the New Testament, because it has a liturgical and not an ideological center. Gospels and letters written for that early generation turn out to be not only punctual but also durational, because their Good News is still fascinating. They have a missionary bias, but their truth is attractive and redemptive: liberating!

You can speak of a "myth," but only for want of something that really says what is the heritage of this literature - a relation to Jesus that is living and enriching. We filter the pictures and the chain of events in Jesus' world through our own sensibilities as readers and hearers of readers, not as people who are duped into thinking that something unreasonable is true. It is the text that is historical, and that is the only access to Jesus we have. Then we realize it is also Jesus' access to us. The apostolic church tradition gives him a people and us a Lord. God's love and command cease being abstractions. What is historical is that all our lives are affected and sometimes changed, one at a time and in relation to a vast community, a mental and spiritual culture that is incredibly multicultural.

These books teach us what a reader is to be: a seedbed of impressions, a body which germinates what it has received from a text, a mirror of excellence, of love, of suffering, of expanded horizons, of a universe where heaven is real even if it is not "up." Each reader and hearer is addressed by a story whose power is felt as a living Savior. In a profound sense, this text is the Word of God, not because it is inerrant but because it is an experience of hope and glory. And it is convincing where it discloses faith, which cannot be measured or denied for someone else.

My fear is not that trust in scripture will be undermined or that the origins of faith and the church will prove embarrassing. I detect a radical separation of Jesus of Nazareth from the Jewish people. To reduce the Jesus of history to logia is to create an abstraction, even alleged by some to be the invention of Marcion. The participation of Jesus in synagogue and temple worship, his reading of the Torah and the Psalms, his originality of apocalyptic ethics and eschatological hope, his betrayal and death are not arbitrary details. His "sayings" of love and justice cannot be separated from the prophets. Theologically, the incarnation is derived from God's grace to Israel and the nations of the earth, not the other way around.

And for the Trinity, don't fit it into a metaphysical history that triumphs with empiricism or even quantum physics. It is the end product of Greek philosophy. The so-called church fathers were the cream of the crop, and they brought Greek intelligence into the service of the Jesus phenomenon. They demythologized the ascension and "seated at the right hand of God" with formulations of divine being. The seeds of trinitarian thinking are in the Greek Testament, from "icon of God" in the epistles to "Son of God, glory of the Father" and "in the beginning was the Word" of the gospels.

Humanistic culture was joined to the Jesus event, which was being passed on by churches celebrating the Eucharist and civilizing what was left of the Roman Empire and what was becoming European civilization. The Trinity is not a concept we must defend rationally, but a spiritual cosmology that is endlessly expanding like the universe itself. It is a combination of mysticism and the need to think things through. Our minds and spirits are liberated from the limitations of rationalism, and that is the hope for our Reason.

We have to deal with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, because this is how the New Testament understands the divine and accounts for the resurrection. This is the story we are privileged to hear and take to heart. It becomes the sacramental prayer of the people. It is the literary invention - a grasp of Truth eternal - that stimulates our imagination. Something historical and definite is behind it, but we don't know it exactly. To suppose mere fiction is unseemly and less than credible by any standard. There is a relation between the divine and the human that is not fully grasped by our modern way of thinking, and it will last and be pondered despite our critical impatience.

The Trinity will always serve as a frame of reference for every theological question, not as a test of fellowship among Christians or with other ways of believing but as an elan of freedom to go beyond ourselves. God cannot be reduced to what anyone has as yet thought God to be, even to a dogmatic formulation of the Trinity. But the historic presence of the Jews and the death and resurrection of Jesus are with us as a universal brooding on the love of God poured out for every creature. Creator, Christ, and Holy Spirit are together as the unique God of love and community and the hope of redemption of what life always becomes in tears and death.

The Trinity works to reshape how we perceive ourselves, our encounter with the others necessary to us, and the discovery within of the resurrected life. We see the trinitarian personifications in the power of love and justice, the inwardness of divine consciousness and obedience, and the boundless grace that exceeds our notion of monotheism. The Trinity enables us to say not that there is one God but that God is One. This is beyond our discomfort with nominal "theism," because theism does not define it! It is the divine Spirit whom we can know only in ways that are incarnations of blessing.

1Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997).

2Philip Jenkins, Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2001).

3William J. Nottingham, "Modem Protestantism as the Legitimization of Heresy: Recognizing Alternative Religions with Christian Roots," Encounter 62, no. 2 (Spring 2001): 155-163.

4Gerard Mordillat and Jerome Prieur, Jesus contre Jesus (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1999).

William J. Nottingham

Affiliate Professor of Mission

Christian Theological Seminary

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