Word: jesus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Maureen Smith is puzzled. In February, HarperCollins, which publishes many of the competing visions, set up an Internet mailing list called Crosstalk. Although primarily for scholars wishing to continue the debate in cyberspace, it is turning more and more into a clearinghouse for the thoughts of troubled onlookers. "Clearly Jesus had to say more than we have on record," Smith, a seminary student, posted plaintively two weeks ago. "The very fact that there is a Sunday Jesus almost 2,000 years later ... argues that what he said and did must have been pretty impressive." (Actually, it is exactly...
...hundreds of years, most Christians would have found the idea of distinguishing between the Jesus one prays to and the Jesus of history a ludicrous one. Well into our half of the millennium, it was assumed (as it still is in America's expanding Fundamentalist and Evangelical congregations) that the Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles and Paul's Epistles were the best history of all: a Christian would no more consider asking whether Jesus had raised Lazarus from the dead than question his status as the risen Messiah. But Martin Luther, in pioneering Protestantism, stressed that every Christian could...
There are, after all, four Gospels, whose actual writing, most scholars have come to acknowledge, was done not by the Apostles but by their anonymous followers (or their followers' followers). Each presented a somewhat different picture of Jesus' life. The earliest appeared to have been written some 40 years after his Crucifixion. Which was most accurate? Even Luther had a favorite Gospel (John) and appeared to regard the rest as less essential. And starting with the 1835 critique The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, apostles of the new scientific method raised additional questions with increasing urgency: Might faith...
Depressingly few, the so-called higher critics found. There are only two or three references to Jesus in six pagan or Jewish sources, providing precious little corroborating data. Even if the standard for authenticity were agreement between the Gospels, there is less of that than one might imagine: the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are just two of several parables that appear in only one version. By 1926, Rudolf Bultmann of Germany's University of Marburg, the foremost Protestant scholar in the field, threw up his hands: he called for a halt to inquiries regarding the Jesus of history...
...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...