Plus ça change… “The Jesus Seminar” and “The Jesus Project”On the Jesus Seminar:
Jesus’ cultural setting had clearly been misjudged in much of Seminar’s deliberations during the ’eighties, and today its findings are widely recognized as being idiosyncratic.
By Bruce Chilton
Bernard Iddings Bell Professor of Religion
Bard College
January 2009
“The Jesus Project,” convened in 2007 by R. Joseph Hoffman for the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, aims to pursue the task of “The Jesus Seminar,” but in a more critical vein. In a clever turn of phrase, Dr. Hoffman has written that “The Jesus of the [Jesus Seminar] is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor.”
Two serious criticisms lie behind this characterization. First, Hoffman charges the Seminar with leading its presuppositions into just the anti-Fundamentalist, liberal Jesus that the majority of its members wanted to find in the first place. Second, he calls attention to the assumption of the Seminar that the sources at our disposal directly provide historical evidence concerning Jesus.
I was a Fellow of “The Jesus Seminar,” and I have been involved with “The Jesus Project” since its formal inception. By understanding where the Seminar lapsed, the Project might indeed offer the prospect of progress. So where did the Seminar fall down, and how is the Project doing in comparison?
[...]
In various presentations at meetings of the Seminar and in its journal, I called attention to signs of Aramaic antecedents in the language of the Gospels and to indications of sources behind the Gospels, both written and oral. On the whole, however, my Judaic approach did not find much resonance within the majority.On the Jesus Project:
Two factors played into that response. The first has to do with the sociology of graduate education in the field of New Testament and early Christianity, which has notoriously skimped on the study of Semitic languages, although Aramaic and Syriac, as well as Hebrew, were clearly major languages of Christianity alongside Coptic, Greek, and Latin until at least the time of the rise of Islam. The second factor was more specific to the Seminar: a pronounced preference for a Greek Jesus over an Aramaic Jesus. That preference was reinforced by fashion within the Seminar and a few other circles, which has since been contradicted directly by archaeological work, to describe Galilee as an urban and Hellenistic environment, where Greek was mostly spoken.
The challenge for “The Jesus Project” is to learn from the mistakes of “The Jesus Seminar.” I have contributed work to the Project, but I cannot so far report any great signs of progress.He has lots more to say about both, so read it all. For background on the Jesus Project, go here.
To a large extent, immediate progress should in any case not be anticipated. Critical enterprises always need time to evolve operating principles, and the Project has had to devote time and energy to issues of method in the study of the historical Jesus. Unfortunately, however, the Project has attempted to address questions of critical approach without a thorough grounding in academic study since the eighteenth century. The result is that some of the assertions made by contributors to the Project are not well informed and invoke quests for “objectivity” that seem more at home in nineteenth-century Europe than in twenty-first century America. What is more worrying, actual knowledge of primary sources (and of their languages) does not seem as great among participants in the Project as among Fellows of the Seminar. Discussion of “method” apart from specific evidence was precisely one of the failings of the Seminar and directly fed its liberal, anti-Fundamentalist agenda.
(Heads up, Mark Elliott of the Bible and Interpretation website, whom I originally misidentified. Sorry to both Marks.)