Bob Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar, has recently visited Toowoomba.
There has been a lot of interest in this group of scholars and their public
statements on the historical value of the earliest traditions about Jesus.
The matters raised by the Jesus Seminar are significant for people of
Christian faith and deserve public debate and discussion. It might be helpful
for those wishing to engage with them to have some additional information
about the Seminar, its findings, and their implications for the future of
Christianity.
The Jesus Seminar is an independent group of scholars who have been meeting
a couple of times a year since 1985 under the leadership of Dr Robert W. Funk,
a leading international New Testament scholar.
The Fellows of the Seminar are all professional scholars with advanced
degrees in relevant disciplines.
More than 200 scholars have been involved in the Seminar over that time,
with around 80 Fellows currently active in its work.
They come from variety of faith traditions: Anglican, Catholic, Protestant,
Evangelical, Jewish and Muslim, as well as people with no personal religious
affiliation. Some of the Fellows have had to keep their membership secret
because of persecution by church authorities such as the Southern Baptist
Convention in the USA.
Certain basic principles have provided a basis for their work together:
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They are committed to historical truth rather than religious dogma.
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The Seminar works collaboratively rather than competitively, and always
comes to a conclusion one way or the other, rather than leaving things up
in the air.
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The project is totally self-funding so it can remain free of any vested
interests.
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Fellows make all their findings public rather than keeping them within
the confines of the academic cloisters.
Since 1985 the Jesus Seminar has identified and assessed all available
traditions about Jesus from the first 300 years of the common era. The
material is not limited to the 4 canonical gospels, but includes the other 18
gospels that have survived from antiquity. More than 1500 sayings attributed
to Jesus and 387 reports of events involving him have been painstakingly
examined.
Detailed public reports on the Seminars assumptions, methodology and
findings have been published: The Five Gospels (1993) and The Acts of Jesus
(1998). Both are readily available in local bookstores.
The Seminar found that just 18% of sayings attributed to Jesus appear to be
authentic, and only 16% of the stories told about him. That might seem a
fairly meagre result, but it was rather higher than many scholars would have
predicted as they had long suggested that almost nothing remained in the
tradition from the historical Jesus.
What kind of Jesus is emerging from this research?
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In answering such a question we move from the carefully gathered
authentic data about Jesus to interpretive conclusions about the kind of
person and the focus of his teachings. What follows is simply one way of
describing the Jesus found in the surviving authentic data.
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Jesus appears to have been an itinerant sage who delivered his parables
and aphorisms in public and private venues for both friends and opponents
in return for food and drink.
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He never claimed to be (nor allowed others to call him) the Messiah or a
divine being.
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Jesus taught a wisdom that emphasised a simple trust in God's unstinting
goodness and the generosity of others. Life was to be lived and celebrated
without boundaries and without thought for the future. He rejected
asceticism.
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Ritual ceremonies had no value. Purity taboos and social barriers were
never allowed to come between the people who responded to God and one
another in simple trust.
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There were no religious "brokers" in Jesus' vision of God's
domain. No priests, no prophets, no messiahs. Not even Jesus himself was
to be inserted between a person and God.
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To experience forgiveness one simply had to offer forgiveness to others.
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No theological beliefs served as a test for participation in God's
domain.
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Apocalyptic speculation with future punishments for the wicked and
rewards for the virtuous played no part in Jesus' teaching.
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Jesus was killed because he refused to compromise this radical vision of
life as God's festival banquet. Those defending the status quo with its
elaborate brokerage system for religious favours had to destroy him or
lose their hold over others.
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Following his death his closest friends (especially Mary Magdalene and
Peter the Fisherman) found that they continued to experience him as the
one who made God real to them. The resurrection stories express their
conviction that Jesus had been taken beyond death into God's own life.
In considering whether such findings from the Jesus Seminar matter, there
are some basic questions to answer:
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Should the historical (real) Jesus have some say in the religion that
claims his name?
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Should people know that there is a difference between the Jesus of
history and the Christ of faith presented by the churches?
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Can we learn more about being people of faith in our own day by
listening to both the original voice of Jesus and the voices of his first
followers?
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Is it not too easy to forget that the actual historical humanity of
Jesus is the locus of his divinity? Is it not in Jesus-as-human that we
see God incarnate?
