Word: crossan
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...People have no idea how fraudulent people who claim to be scholars can be," says Johnson. Stocky, graying, slightly owl-like, he teaches New Testament at Atlanta's Emory. Like Crossan, Johnson took priestly orders as a young man but gave up the collar in order to marry. But Johnson never broke with the church, and as time went on, he became progressively more alarmed at the work of his fellow scholars...
...Crossan and other liberal Jesus scholars, he believed, were exploring avenues "subtly contemptuous of the convictions of faith." As long as the debate had been quarantined in the corridors of the academy, he had held his peace. The advent of the Jesus Seminar, however, marked a major outbreak of what Johnson considered a dangerous contagion. "Americans generally have an abysmal level of knowledge of the Bible," he says. "In this world of mass ignorance, to have headlines proclaim that this or that fact about [Jesus] has been declared untrue by supposedly scientific inquiry has the effect of gospel. There...
Pieces which the unscrupulous can then reassemble as they see fit. Although it is impossible to prove any of the Gospels false, so little of them can be historically proved to be true, Johnson suggests, that by emphasizing that fact, scholars like Crossan and Funk have put themselves in the position of "jigsaw-puzzle solvers who are presented with 27 pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle and find that only six or seven of the pieces even fit together." A reasonable person, he maintains, would "put those pieces together, make some guess about what that part of the puzzle might...
...face of it, he is Johnson's staunchest ally. Wright knows and likes Crossan--the two go drinking after their debates--but he calls his friend's latest book "radically wrong in almost every second thing it says." His own 40-page critique of the Jesus Seminar's work echoes Johnson's point regarding oral cultures and similarly questions the Seminar's snub of Jesus' apocalyptic, eschatological side. Most important, he concurs that it is a mistake to "carve up" the New Testament and analyze the pieces separately. Wright believes the Gospels are more supportive than subversive of one another...
...this context that Blomberg, given his position on the religious/political spectrum, makes a remarkably friendly assessment of the Jesus Seminar. "People like Crossan," he ventures, "see themselves, though we might disagree, as holding out one way of salvaging something of Christianity lest the whole thing deteriorate into pure unbelief...