Word: testament
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...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...
...contrast, they shunned passages that they felt represented post-Jesus rationalizing by his disciples. That eliminated most language used to contextualize or connect; borrowings from the Old Testament (including most of what Jesus said on the Cross); and sayings expressed in explicitly Christian terms. Also taboo were monologues by Jesus to which there could have been no witness, verses expressing foreknowledge of events after his death and any claims on his part to be the Messiah. And one final admonition: "When in sufficient doubt, leave...
...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...
...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...
Wright, who until recently taught New Testament at Oxford University, talks at his office in Lichfield, England, where he is dean of the 700-year-old Anglican cathedral. His is an influential voice in the debate; not only is his 600-page Jesus and the Victory of God eagerly anticipated by participants on both sides of the Atlantic, but he did an 18-city American lecture tour in 1995, and has similar plans this year...