The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. - book reviews

The ostensible subject of this timely volume is the Jesus Seminar, a self-selected group of scholars who meet regularly to discuss the "historical" Jesus. But Johnson's real topic is the dire state of biblical scholarship within the academy, including seminaries and theological faculties, and its relation to the churches. Historical criticism, which once seemed to offer such promise for understanding the Scriptures, and hence Christian faith, seems more and more irrelevant to the church's life. As biblical scholarship has become captive to a reductionistic understanding of truth, it has proven itself a pliant instrument at the service of whatever new ideology is in fashion within our society. Lamentably, a venerable scholarly tradition, and, one might add, a rich theological heritage (for biblical scholarship was once a theological enterprise) is in disarray. The Jesus Seminar is only the most recent and visible sign of its capitulation to the cultural mood.

For readers who have not followed the Jesus Seminar (though its organizers have skillfully manipulated regular news stories in local newspapers), it is an association of some forty biblical scholars, convened twice a year by Robert Funk of the Westar Institute in Sonoma, California, and Dominic Crossan of DePaul University in Chicago. Its task is to analyze the Gospels and uncover the "real Jesus" who lies behind the texts. The seminar assumes, as do most biblical scholars today, that the Gospels are interpretive narratives constructed with various ideological and religious motives, not straightforward historical accounts. To pierce through these accounts to the "real Jesus" scholars must determine which material reported in the Gospels is authentic and what was added later. In principle this procedure is unobjectionable, though its results have been disappointing. It has been attempted many times in the last two centuries by scholars of different persuasions, always without success, that is, without winning consensus among other scholars. The hard fact is that the sources do not allow us to draw certain conclusions.

The Jesus Seminar, however, is interested in publicity, hence it needs results. To gain attention its organizers devised a clever system for supposedly deciding the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus and awakening curiosity about its work. After discussing particular sections of the Gospels its members vote with color-coded beads. Red: that's Jesus; pink: sure sounds like Jesus; gray: well, maybe; black, there's been some mistake. This procedure, as Luke Johnson observes, is biased against the authenticity of sayings attributed to Jesus. "It is in the very nature of scholars to vie with one another to be more critical, to be `harder graders.' The procedure forces sayings to prove their authenticity, rather than their authenticity being assumed and the burden of proof being placed on showing inauthenticity." The whole enterprise is designed for self-promotion, not historical understanding. Moving about from city to city, the Seminar flatters local reporters by inviting them in to sit in on its deliberations, thereby gaining front-page coverage of the "results." In one city a headline on Easter Saturday announced that the Lord's prayer did not come from Jesus.

Not only are the scholarly claims of the Jesus Seminar fraudulent, but its leaders also have a religious and cultural agenda directed against the churches. In the words of Funk: "The religious establishment has not allowed the intelligence of high scholarship to pass through pastors and priests to a hungry laity." More conventional scholars, it is claimed, failed to report their results to a larger public. Again: "It isn't Jesus bashing...we want to liberate Jesus. The only Jesus most people want is the mythic one. They don't want the real Jesus. They want the one they can worship. The cultic Jesus."

Like other critics of orthodox Christianity, the members of the Jesus Seminar fashion a Jesus of their own making, a teacher who is freed of Christian tradition and devotion. One is reminded of Thomas Jefferson, no friend of Christianity, who spent winter evenings going through the Gospels deleting those sections he found unpalatable. "We must reduce our volume to the simple Evangelists; select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus, paring off the amphibologisms into which they have been led, by forgetting often, or not understanding, what had fallen from Him....There will be found remaining the most sublime and benevolent code of morals which has ever been offered to man. I have performed this operation for my own use, by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book, and arranging the material which is evidently his and which is as easily distinguished as diamonds in a dung hill." Parallels to the Jesus Seminar are striking: Jefferson wished to liberate Jesus from "priestly" and "Platonic" (Trinitarian) religion of Catholic Christianity, the Jesus Seminar wants to replace the cultic Jesus by the "real" Jesus of history, that is, the Jesus before the Apostles.

Yet it is not enough simply to criticize the hucksterism and religious prejudices of the Jesus Seminar. In its arrogant dismissal of the Christian theological tradition, and its contempt for the beliefs and practices of orthodox Christians, it reflects assumptions that are widespread in the guild. And it is to Johnson's credit that his book addresses these issues, not simply the silliness of the Jesus Seminar. The larger problem is that in its effort to be thoroughly historical, biblical scholarship has become radically unhistorical. For it presumes to interpret the New Testament without reference to a larger world of meaning provided by the ancient texts and early Christian tradition. By giving up the framework of the canonical Gospels, and conceiving of the sayings and deeds of Jesus as free-floating bits of historical data, the figure of Jesus becomes infinitely malleable. Without the narrative provided by the Gospels, the various "traditions" of words or deeds of Jesus lack context and can be arranged at will according to whatever principle or logic is deemed reasonable by the scholar.

The New Testament is a book that grew out of the early Christian community, a community that was brought together by the Resurrection of Jesus. "The Resurrection is the necessary and sufficient cause of the religious movement," writes Johnson, "as well as the literature that it generated...." If the Resurrection of Jesus is excluded there can be no satisfying interpretation of the books that make up the New Testament and of the person of Jesus. The real Jesus is the "resurrected Lord whose transforming Spirit is active in the community."

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By focusing on the Resurrection of Jesus, Johnson challenges biblical scholarship to rethink its understanding of history. Yet, though his instincts are sound, his language in this section, for example, his qualifications about the term "historical" for the Resurrection of Jesus, is less certain and precise. In places he seems to set up the same kind of dichotomy between the "historical figure of Jesus" and "the living Lord Jesus" that led biblical scholars into difficulty in the first place. And his discussion about history's way of knowing would have profited from a consideration of Augustine's discussion of faith in On the Usefulness of Believing.

But Johnson knows the issues and deals with them thoughtfully and intelligently, and with theological insight. His book is an invitation to biblical scholars, and all Christian thinkers, to discover anew the interpretation of the Bible as a theological enterprise in service of the church's faith and life. And, he reminds us, the primary task of theology is not "the reform of the world's social structure, nor the ideological critique of the church as institution, nor the discovery of what is false or distorting in religious behavior, but the discernment and articulation of the work of the living God." To do that, biblical scholars must learn "to take less seriously the judgment of our academic colleagues and more seriously the judgment of God, `before whose judgment seat we all shall stand.' "

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