A MEMBER OF THE JESUS SEMINAR TELLS US ABOUT IT.

Robert J. Miller, THE JESUS SEMINAR AND THE PUBLIC (Bible and Interpretation News)

Miller describes the Seminar's methods and replies to its critics. Some excerpts:

There seems to be a widespread assumption that academics who speak publicly about religion should keep their views to themselves if they might be unsettling to the beliefs of mainstream Christians. For whatever reason, as a guild we biblical scholars have shirked our responsibility to participate in our culture as public intellectuals. That is why most Americans seem to regard the likes of Jerry Falwell as spokesmen for �the biblical perspective� on issues of public interest. As individuals, most scholars may well be content with being irrelevant to the larger culture, but the resulting impoverishment of public discourse on religion has real consequences. One example is that it is now a viable possibility that the teaching of evolution will disappear or be trivialized as �just a theory� in the public school curricula in certain places. Why have biblical scholars stayed out of this fight and left it up to scientists alone to battle creationism in the public forum? Shame on us.

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What the Seminar has done (and what every scholar who communicates with the public has the responsibility to do) is to inform its audience that certain of its positions are shared by most biblical scholars. While the Seminar does not claim that most scholars agree with its specific presuppositions or conclusions, not even members of the Seminar agree on those, its fundamental understanding that some of the words attributed to Jesus were not actually spoken by him and that the gospels are a complex blend of fact and fiction does represent the consensus of critical scholarship.

While this is not news to scholars, it is news to the American public. A huge number of Americans believe that inerrancy is the only legitimate approach to the Bible and that to take the Bible seriously is to take it literally. Critics are right to protest that many scholars disagree with the Seminar's results, but they do a disservice if they perpetuate the impression that doubts about the historical accuracy of significant portions of the gospels are confined to some radical �faction� with �idiosyncratic opinions.� To help us think concretely about this problem, let�s move beyond general views about the gospels and consider some specific conclusions about their historicity. A survey of the Seminar�s results comes up with the following partial list of negative findings:


� Jesus did not claim to be the messiah or to be divine.
� Jesus did not demand that people �believe in� him or worship him.
� Jesus did not intend to establish a church or found a new religion.
� Jesus did not believe that his death would be a sacrifice for sins.
� There is no historical evidence that Jesus had no human father.
� There is no historical evidence that Jesus� corpse came back to life.


Those findings would surprise, even shock, most churchgoers, would they not? Yet how many critical scholars, indeed how many critical scholars who are Christians, would argue the opposite position on any of those assertions? Most of the Seminar�s positions that are perceived by the public as controversial or objectionable are actually well within the broad consensus of mainstream critical scholarship.

An interesting supplement to my comments below on historical Jesus scholarship. (Sorry, it's interesting in itself too. I just happened to be thinking about my last post when I read it.)

I think a fair number of scholars would have reservations about the first item in the bulleted list. There were other guys running around at the time who were regarded to be the messiah and such, so I would not rule out Jesus making such a claim. And Enoch and Melchizedek were human beings regarded to be gods or divine, so the concept of apotheosis was there in the first century. Whether Jesus made those claims (as he is represented to have in the Gospels) would have to be established on the basis of arguments from the surviving evidence, but the Jesus Seminar has never persuaded me to rule out the possibility.

Read it all.