Word: funke
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Corinne E. Funk's column appears on alternate Tuesdays...
...Jesus Seminar "was nothing new," says John Dominic Crossan, its co-chair, recalling the invitation he received from University of Montana professor Robert Funk to start the group. "I'd been working on the historical Jesus since 1969. What was new to me was his argument that there was an ethical necessity to let the public in on what [we] were doing." Crossan's voice still betrays the 62-year-old's origins in Tipperary, Ireland. He moved to America, joined the Servite order and was ordained in 1957. He left the priesthood to marry in 1968, but he admits...
...skeptical scholars had well-developed views on the four traditional Gospels hardly in need of corroboration by committee. Yet Funk made what many found to be a compelling argument. At a time when the airwaves were full of televangelists touting the New Testament as God-inspired, inerrant (correct in all ways) and supportive of right-wing views, here was a channel for another viewpoint. "Bob Funk's Jesus is quite different from my Jesus," Crossan says. But both longed to get beyond what they saw as the prevailing attitude toward historical questioning: "Don't say it out in public...
...provided one. With gusto. Over his book's 177 pages, he calls the Seminar "a 10-year exercise in academic self-promotion" and a "self-indulgent charade" and accuses Funk of "grandiosity and hucksterism." More substantively, not only does he find the Seminar wildly unrepresentative of scholarly consensus on the New Testament today; he thinks it "extraordinarily difficult" to avoid the impression that it is not hostile "to any traditional understanding of Jesus as defined by the historic creeds of Christianity...
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...