Word: jesus
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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RELIGION: The Incredible Shrinking Jesus...
...Jesus amounts to only his words in The Lost Gospel, he barely holds on to them in The Five Gospels. The book is the product of the 74 biblical scholars (including Crossan) who belong to the Jesus Seminar. Meeting twice a year, the group votes with purposeful theatricality on the authenticity of each gospel saying, casting colored-coded beads into a box to indicate which lines of Christ were holier than others. The latest round appears in The Five Gospels, which, parodying the red-letter Bibles that display the words of Jesus in red type, prints the supposedly authentic words...
Mack agrees with most of Crossan's reconception of Jesus' life. But the main purpose of The Lost Gospel is to propagate The Book of Q, a back-to-basics teaching of the original Christians that was teased out of ancient texts by scholars who believe that it predates the Gospels. (Q stands for the German Quelle, which means "source.") The Book of Q has no narrative; rather it is a collection of sayings and aphorisms. Mack says the "Jesus people" were attracted to his teachings because he preached the holiness of the simple life. Thus verses like "Turn...
...what is the fifth gospel? It is the Gospel of Thomas, which church fathers deemed unacceptable because it contained ideas of the heretical Gnostic sects. Indeed, the book ends with Jesus rebuking Peter for trying to oust a woman named Mary from the company of disciples. "Females are not worthy of life," says Peter. Jesus replies, "Look, I shall guide her to make her a male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven's kingdom." Three sentences in Thomas survive the seminar's judgment...
...surprisingly, the new books are controversial. Jacob Neusner, professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, calls the Jesus Seminar "either the greatest scholarly hoax since the Piltdown Man or the utter bankruptcy of New Testament studies -- I hope the former." Other scholars question the use of the Thomas and the hypothetical Q. The effect is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope at a vanishing Jesus. In his forthcoming The Gospel of Jesus (Westminster), William R. Farmer, professor emeritus of the New Testament at Southern Methodist University, decries the latest Q theory because it leads...