The Jesus Seminar: Bad Philosophy Makes Bad Christianity

"Evangelicals have reacted strongly against the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar. Yet their methodologies in studying the gospels fit the pattern of methods employed by that Seminar, particularly the assumption that the composition of the gospels involved some form of literary dependence."

"The Jesus Seminar begins all of its debates with a shared, yet concealed, presupposition – that anything outside the realm of natural explanation can never be backed by historical evidence."

"The Jesus Seminar portrayal of Jesus simply cannot explain the explosion of Christianity in the first and second centuries. With their view of Christ, they cannot create a cause monumental enough to explain the documented, historical effects that even they must accept."

"But the most basic part of the Seminar's motivation is a desire to produce a Jesus who is less threatening, one who does not claim to be King of King and Lord of Lords, who will not make claims on their personal lives or (worse yet) return one day in fiery judgment."

"The conclusions of the Jesus Seminar don't represent facts. Rather, their point of view and research methods are deeply flawed because of their prior commitment to a philosophic position that is already hostile to the events described in the text of the Gospels."

"We have noted above numerous ways in which the JS reflects the 'radical fringe' of critical scholarship and generally does not include the most established scholars of a more moderate perspective."

"[The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar] seek to find a merely human Jesus behind the New Testament records, and then try to explain how this ordinary human got "supernaturalized" in the mind of his followers. But the all important question of whether or not the Gospel story is mythological in the first place is rarely seriously discussed. That matter was settled before the research ever got off the ground, and before their conclusions ever reached the newspaper."

"[The Jesus of the Jesus Seminar] is more Gnostic — concerned primarily to impart true knowledge — than anything orthodox Christianity has ever accepted. Today we might call it 'New Age.' But given the JS’s stated goal of discrediting orthodox Christianity and going beyond mainstream scholarship (despite their repeated claims that they represent a consensus), this conclusion should not be surprising."

"The fabrication of a non-Jewish Jesus is one particularly pernicious side effect of the Jesus Seminar's methodology. One would have thought that the tragic events of our century might have warned us to be wary of biblical scholars who deny the Jewishness of Jesus."

"What tools did the Jesus Seminar scholars employ? Ultimately only one—the test of "political correctness." Taking a cue from secular academia, the fellows of the Jesus seminar simply dismissed every statement containing a hint of some truth or point of view that is rejected by the political liberals in our culture."

"Christians need to be aware that there is a definite ideological agenda that lies behind the new evangelistic zeal of certain liberal scholars to bolster the 'religious literacy' of Americans."

"The desire to have a politically correct religion and in particular a politically correct Jesus skews the historical judgement of the Jesus Seminar. They dismiss as unhistorical any aspect of Jesus which they find to be politically incorrect. Historical judgments are thus being made, not on the basis of the evidence, but on the basis of political correctness."

"Scholars who are less committed to orthodoxy or positively opposed to historic Christian faith, such as Mack and Crossan, often produce portraits of Jesus that are quite remote from church teachings. The latter type of scholar often speaks disparagingly of the former, implying that the more traditional scholar is less than fully committed to 'calling them as they see them' and 'letting the chips falls where they may.' From my layperson’s perspective, it seems evident that the prior commitments of the people like Mack may be pervasive in shaping the way they interpret the evidence."

"The Seminar has a rather minimal Jesus that many critics do not see as a genuine reflection of the historical Jesus. This is why the Seminar did not catch on with many scholars in historical Jesus studies."

NEW Supernaturalism and Historical Study: An Account of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the Dead by Franz S. Klein

"I think that one of the reasons it was so useless an enterprise for Bultmann was the fact that he recognized the true fact that man’s fulfillment is not of the natural order. Because he felt that the natural order was closed, it became fatuous to look back at a man who lived two-thousand years ago. Our ultimate fulfillment was to be found within, in that timeless statement of Jesus Christ, not in a man who lived two thousand years ago. I also think that once the supernatural is accepted into the natural order, only then does the God-man who lived two thousand years ago become important. I think that the New Quest only has its value in overcoming Bultmann, recognizing elements of the supernatural into history, and from thence deriving value in the historical Jesus."

Books on the Jesus Seminar:

The Historical Reliability of the Gospels by Craig L. Blomberg

Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus by Craig L. Blomberg, J.P. Moreland and Michael J. Wilkins

THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

What do we know about the Gospel of Thomas? Well, I would defer to J.P. Holding, for example, who examines the Gospel of Thomas in depth in his article Thomas Gospel Tizzy: An Examination of Arguments Favoring the Gospel of Thomas. After his usual thorough examination of the evidence, Holding's article concludes: