THE HISTORICAL JESUS Robert W Funk challenged thirty five New Testament scholars to vote on the authenticity of the acts and words of Jesus - and through radical scholarhsip found a Jesus for the twenty-first century. In preparation for Jesus conference on April |, he has written this special article on the work of the Jesus Seminar.
It’s time to be to Honest to Jesus omentous changes have taken place since the end of World War II in society generally and in the Christian community specifically.
The symbolic universe that had been in place for more than two millennia weakened and collapsed.
We reached the end of the Christian era - the end of the hegemony of the christianized, industrialized West. In its place, a new chaotic global society is emerging, in which a world-wide economy, a universal technology, mass consumption, and instant communication between all parts of the globe have altered perceptions forever.
The end of the Christian era also marks the decline of religious literacy in the Christian tradition.
The churches have abandoned their traditional educational roles. The mainline churches have become the sideline churches,while new reality authorities have emerged. Physicists and astronomers have displaced Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther.
Scholars of religion are exiting Christian precincts; they prefer to work in a wholly profane, secular setting. An acute historical consciousness, another legacy of the Enlightenment, has intensified. The “official” interpretation of ancient texts, such as the Bible, has lost its hold on scholars and lay people alike. The texts themselves are increasingly treated as secular artifacts without intrinsic merit. As a consequence, a radical ecumenism among scholars has displaced old The apocalyptic tradition is relentlessly literal and humorless but Jesus seems to have been a comic, perhaps the first standup Jewish comic. denominational loyalties. In addition, scholars are increasingly skeptical of ecclesiastical leadership, which has sponsored causes that no one wants any longer to endorse. All theology is now post-Auschwitz theology.
These developments have sponsored the loss of objectivity, the dissolution of the self, and the rise of relativism in historical investigation. The researcher interferes to some extent with the data being investigated, and the identification and organization of data impinges upon the perspective of the researcher. Self and world, it turns out, are co-constitutive.
In this context, biblical scholarship became increasingly sterile. It had become the handmaiden of an archaic theological program. Neoorthodoxy began to lose its hold.
When the Jesus Seminar was organized, we decided to quit the church, quit the seminary, and even formed the Seminar outside the boundaries of. professional guilds, which often attempt to impose an orthodoxy of their own on scholarship. We needed to free ourselves from the protocols of academic scholarship and establish Robert Funk new modes of work.
We agreed to form agendas and come to decisions, no matter how provisional. We adopted collaboration as our group process rather than perpetuate an adversarial style. We made our work cumulative, which meant that we identified and then attempted to enlarge on a consensus. We agreed to conduct our work in full public view and to report the results of our deliberations in non-technical prose.
The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar recognized very early on that a paradigm shift had taken place, first Continued on page 8 Honest to Jesus!
From page 8 of all in our individual research prior to the formation of the Seminar, and then more radically in our collective endeavors. We saw almost at once that the old view proposed by Johannes Weiss and made popular by Albert Schweitzer, that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet, had crumbled. The shift in perspective permitted us to see that Jesus was probably a distinctive Galilean Jew; he did not merely endorse the views of his mentor, John the Baptist, or adopt the prevailing common apocalyptic outlook. Our quest became a discovery adventure. Our critics, meanwhile, countered with a quest as an apology for the conventional view.
We took the view that the words of Jesus in both form and content were sufficiently distinctive to survive oral transmission for several decades.
The forms we recognized as distinctive were the parable and the aphorism, the latter often embedded in a chreia, the customary form of the hellenistic anecdote. We discovered that the words of Jesus were transmitted with greater fidelity than accounts of his deeds.
The words of Jesus could be repeated, performed, as it were, in variations that permitted us often to identify the underlying structure and content. The deeds, on the An honest portrayal? Christ on the Cold Stone at the National Gallery THE HISTORICAL JESUS He celebrated life as though he had just discovered a cache of coins or been invited to a banquet. Jesus advocated and practised an unbrokered relationship with God: for him temple and priests were redundant.. other hand, were reported by third parties in language less stable. The words became the backbone of our database (reported in The Five Gospels, 1993).
From his words we began to explore how Jesus of Nazareth infringed his received world in the name of a new vision of reality created out of insights into everyday life in his time and place. How he infringed that world has to be reconstructed out of an array of insights deposited in his parables and aphorisms. That constitutes the basic difference between the Seminar and its critics: They want to keep Jesus firmly ensconced in the received world of Galilean Jewry in the first century, while we think we have stumbled upon evidence that he was a social and conceptual deviant-a rebel-without formal training.
We found that the parables and aphorisms were often comprised of non-literal or metaphoric language.
That they indulged in hyperbole, caricature, parody, and paradox, and regularly do not constitute straightforward answers to questions posed to Jesus. Furthermore, Jesus seems to have been a comic, perhaps the first standup Jewish comic. The apocalyptic tradition, in contrast, is relentlessly literal and humorless. It is inappropriate to crack a joke if you think the wrath of God is about to descend upon the world. The contrast between these two strands in the gospels is stark.
Jesus apparently thought it was sage to function with a trust ethicthat anxiety about food and drink reflected a lack of trust. He celebrated life as though he had just discovered a cache of coins or been invited to a banquet. He was subversive of kinship codes: he advised his followers to love their enemies, thus transcending the tribal boundaries in force in his day, but he admonished those same disciples to hate father and mother, wife and children, in order to break up the patriarchal system that held the family captive. He ate openly with toll collectors and prostitutes in defiance of purity codes. Jesus advocated and practised an unbrokered relationship with God: for him temple and priests were redundant. Jesus reportedly saw Satan fall from the sky, which means that for him the heavens were being cleared of demonic beings, a view far in advance of his time.
In the body of authentic lore that originated with Jesus, he asked not one thing for himself and advised his disciples to ask nothing for themselves, except bread for one day at a time. It seems that Jesus went to the cross because he was unwilling to compromise his vision and his practice. He was not merely a victim; he was the victim of his own vision.
The cross for Jesus and the hemlock for Socrates are symbols of absolute integrity.
We do not claim that our profile is anything other than provisional, the product of our discovery adventure.
Just as we have adopted and corrected the conclusions of our mentors, others will revise what we have done and with equal justification.
The accumulated results of our historical work over fifteen years of close work together has prompted us to see that the perpetuation of the orthodox myth would be a mistake in a modern and postmodern world when that old world has collapsed.
So we began the second phase of our task by asking whether the old canon required revision and whether a new Nicea might project a course for a credible faith in the twenty-first century. We are also asking what new reality-sense might emerge from the demise of the old. We are far from agreed on what new story we want to emerge, but I have come to summarize it under three heads:
Honesty regarding the truth.
Care for each other.
Respect for the planet that is our home.
Nothing else much matters.
Robert W Funk founded the Jesus Seminar and is principal speaker al SoF’s Manchester Cathedral conference, “Honest to Jesus”, on Ist April.