Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up
When I was teaching Sunday school, I did a series of classes using Lee Strobel's works. The following is from The Case for Christ, chapter 6. While there may be the stray original item from me, I deserve no credit for what is written in this particular article. It is properly attributed to Lee Strobel in its entirety.
The Jesus Seminar is a self-appointed group that represents a tiny fraction of New Testament scholars but that generates coverage greatly out of proportion to their influence.
They once attracted the press by voting with colored beads on whether they thought Jesus said what the gospels quote Him as saying:
Red - undoubtedly said it or something like it
Pink - probably said it
Gray - he didn’t say it but the ideas are similar to his own
Black - he didn’t utter the words at all
In the end they concluded Jesus didn’t say 82% of what the gospels attribute to him. Most of the remaining 18% was considered doubtful. Only 2% was confidently determined to be authentic.
Then they published The Five Gospels - the four plus the quest-ionable Gospel of Thomas. Jesus’ words were color coded to match their findings; there was very, very little in red. For instance, the only words in the Lord’s Prayer they are convinced Jesus said are “Our Father.”
Because the press devoted fountains of ink to them, the Jesus Seminar is perceived by many to be the mainstream of New Testament scholarship, when in fact it represents an extremely small number of radical-fringe scholars who are on the far, far left wing of New Testament thinking.
In fact, The Seminar calls its translation of the Bible “The Scholars Version.” Naturally, the unspoken implication is that other versions aren’t scholarly. They say they want to rescue the Bible from fundamentalism and to free Americans from the “naïve” belief that the Jesus of the Bible is the “real” Jesus. They say they want a Jesus who’s relevant for today. One of them said the traditional Jesus did not speak to the needs of the ecological crisis, the nuclear crisis, the feminist crisis, so we need a new picture of Jesus. As another one said, we need a “new fiction.”
So what is this new Jesus like? Basically they’ve discovered what they set out to find. Some think he was a political revolutionary, some a religious fanatic, some a wonder worker, some a feminist, some an egalitarian, some a subversive - there’s a lot of diversity.
But one thing he is NOT is supernatural; they all agree Jesus must first of all be a naturalistic Jesus. He was a man like you or me. Maybe he was an extraordinary man, maybe he tapped into our inherent potential like no else ever has, but he was not supernatural.
So they say Jesus and his early followers didn’t see him as God or the Messiah, and they didn’t see his death as having any special significance. His crucifixion was unfortunate and untimely, and stories of his resurrection came later as a way of trying to deal with that sad reality.
While they try to paint themselves as unbiased, the Seminar brings a whole set of assumptions to their scholarship. Their major assumption - which is NOT the product of unbiased scholarly research - is that the gospels are not even generally reliable. They conclude this because the gospels include things that seem historically unlikely, such as miracles - these things just don’t happen.
Well that’s naturalism, which says that for every effect in the natural or physical world, there is a natural cause. Of course we shouldn’t appeal to the supernatural until we have to, but we shouldn’t rule out the possibility of the supernatural at the outset. We should be humble enough to say, “You know what? It’s just possible Christ rose from the dead. It’s just possible his disciples saw what they said they saw.” And if there’s no other way of accounting adequately for the evidence, let’s investigate the possibility of the supernatural.
In concluding Jesus never said most of what he is credited with saying, they used their own set of assumptions and criteria. But were they reasonable and appropriate? Or were they loaded from the outset to get the desired result? Well, there were multiple problems with their assumptions and criteria. For instance, they assume the later church put these sayings into the mouth of Jesus unless they have good evidence to think otherwise. That assumption is rooted in their suspicion of the gospels, and that comes from their assumption the supernatural can’t occur.
Historians usually operate with the burden of proof on the historian to prove falsity or unreliability, since people are not generally compulsive liars - without that assumption we’d know very little about ancient history. The Jesus Seminar turns it upside down and says you have to affirmatively prove the saying came from Jesus.
They subject Jesus' words to a criterion they call double dissimilarity - we can believe he said the them only if it doesn’t look like something a rabbi or the later church would say. For crying out loud, Jesus was Jewish and founded the Christian church, so it shouldn’t be surprising if he sounds Jewish and Christian!
The Seminar also considered Jesus' words valid if there was multiple attestation; his words were not valid if found in only one source. Most of ancient history is based on single sources! If a source is considered reliable it should be considered credible, even if it can’t be corroborated by other sources (and we have plenty of reasons to believe the gospels are credible, as we’ve seen).
They said there were rabbis who did exorcisms or prayed for rain and it came, so Jesus was merely another Jewish wonder worker. First, the utter centrality of the supernatural in Jesus’ life has no parallel whatsoever in Jewish history. Second, He is distinguished by the radical nature of his miracles - blindness, deafness, leprosy and scoliosis healed, storms being stopped, bread and fish multiplied, sons and daughters raised from the dead - this is beyond any parallels. Third, the biggest distinctive, is how he did miracles on his own authority:
“If I, by the finger of God, cast out demons…”
“I have been anointed to set the captives free”
He does give God the Father credit for what He does, but you never find him asking God the Father to do it - He does it in the power of God the Father, and for that there is just no parallel.
This goes right along with the way Jesus talked about Himself - “all authority has been given to me,” “honor me even as you honor the father,” “heaven and earth shall pass away but my word will not pass away.” You don’t find rabbis talking like this anywhere.
Apollonius is a figure from the 1st century said to have healed people and exorcised demons; who may have raised a young girl from the dead; and who appeared to some of his followers after he died. If you’re going to admit Apollonius’ story is legendary, why not say the same thing about the Jesus story?
First, his biographer, Philostratus, was writing a century and a half after Apollonius lived. Second, the four gospels, corrobo-rated with Paul, can be crosschecked to some degree with non-biblical authors, like Josephus and others. With Apollonius, we have a single source. Plus the gospels pass the standard tests used to assess historical reliability, but we can’t say that about the stories of Apollonius. Third, Philostratus was commissioned by an empress to write a biography in order to dedicate a temple to Apollonius. Philostratus would have had a financial motive to embellish the story and give the empress what she wanted. On the other hand, the gospel writers had nothing to gain and much to lose, and they didn’t have ulterior motives such as financial gain. Fourth, the way Philostratus writes is very different than the gospels. The gospels have a very confident eyewitness perspective. But Philostratus includes a lot of tentative statements, like “It is reported that…” or “Some say this young girl had died; others say she was just ill.” To his credit, Philostratus backs off and treats stories like stories. Fifth, Philostratus was writing in the early 3rd century in Cappadocia, where Christianity had already been present for quite a while. Any borrowing would have been done by him, not by Christians. Sixth, even if we grant Apollonius did some amazing things (or at least tricked people into thinking he did), that doesn’t in any way compromise the evidence for Jesus. Even if you grant the evidence for Apollonius, you’re still left with having to deal with the evidence for Christ.
A lot of college students are taught that many of the themes seen in the life of Jesus are merely echoes of ancient “mystery religions,” in which there are stories about gods dying and rising, and rituals of baptism and communion. This was popular at the beginning of the 20th century, but died off because it was so discredited. However, like most bad ideas, it finds its way back into popular thought periodically.
For one thing, given the timing involved, if you’re going to argue for borrowing, it should be from the direction of Christianity to the mystery religions, not vice versa.
Also, the mystery religions were do-your-own-thing religions that freely borrowed ideas from various places (not unlike today’s buffet of beliefs). But the Jews carefully guarded their beliefs from outside influences. They saw themselves as a separate people and strongly resisted pagan ideas and rituals.
While it’s true some mystery religions had stories of gods dying and rising, these stories always revolved around the natural life cycle of death and rebirth. Crops die in the fall and come to life in the spring - people express the wonder of this ongoing phenomena through mythological stories about gods dying and rising. These stories were always cast in legendary form - they depicted events that happened “one upon a time.”
Contrast that with the depiction of Jesus in the gospels. They talk about someone who actually lived and they name names - crucified under Pontius Pilate, when Caiaphas was high priest, and the father of Alexander and Rufus carried His cross. That’s concrete historical stuff. It has nothing in common with stories abut what supposedly happened “once upon a time.”
And Christianity has nothing to do with cycles or the harvest. It has to do with a very Jewish belief - absent from the mystery religions - about the resurrection of the dead and about life eternal and reconciliation with God.
As for any suggestions that baptism or communion come from the mystery religions, that’s just nonsense. For one thing, the evidence for these supposed parallels comes after the 2nd century, so any borrowing would have been from Christianity. And when you look carefully, the similarities vanish. For instance, to get to a higher level in the Mithra cult, followers had to stand under a bull while it was slain, so they could be bathed in its blood and guts. Then they’d join the others in eating the bull.
To suggest Jews would find anything attractive about this and want to model baptism and communion after it is extremely implausible, which is why most scholars don’t go for it.
The Jesus Seminar gives the Gospel of Thomas an extremely high status, placing it alongside the four traditional gospels. But everyone concedes this gospel has been significantly influenced by Gnosticism, which was a religious movement in the 2nd, 3rd and 4th centuries that supposedly had secret insights, know-ledge or revelations that would allow people to know the key to the universe. Salvation was by what you knew - gnosis is Greek for “know.” So most scholars date Thomas to the mid-2nd century, in which it fits well into the cultural setting.
But the Jesus Seminar has latched onto certain passages, none of which include Jesus making exalted claims for himself or performing supernatural feats, to argue they represent an early strand of tradition about Jesus. They argue the earliest view of Jesus was only that he was a great teacher. But the whole line of reasoning is circular. The only reason for thinking these passages in Thomas are early in the first place is because they contain a view of Jesus that these scholars already believed was the original Jesus. In truth, there is no good reason to prefer the 2nd century Gospel of Thomas over the 1st-century gospels of the New Testament.
If you discredit everything that says Jesus is divine and reconciles people with God, there’s an outright contradiction between the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith. The Jesus Seminar believes the historical Jesus was a bright, witty, countercultural man who never claimed to be the Son of God, while the Jesus of faith is a cluster of feel-good ideas that help people live right but are ultimately based on wishful thinking.
Generally speaking, the Jesus Seminar says this: there are religious symbols that are quite meaningful to people - the symbol (or idea) of Jesus being divine, of the cross, of self-sacrificial love, of the Resurrection. Even though people don’t believe those things actually happened, they nevertheless can inspire people to lead a good life, to overcome existential angst, to realize new potentialities, to resurrect hope in the midst of despair - blah, blah, blah.
But Jesus isn’t a symbol of anything if he’s not rooted in history. The Nicene Creed doesn’t say, “We wish these things were true;” it says, “Jesus Christ was crucified under Pontius Pilate, and on the third day He rose again from the dead.” The theological truth is based on historical truth. That’s the way the New Testament talks. In Peter’s sermon in Acts 2, he says, “you guys are a witness of these things; they weren’t done in secret. David’s tomb is still with us, but God has raised Jesus from the dead. Therefore, we proclaim Him to be the Son of God.”
Now take away miracles and you take away the Resurrection, and then you’ve got nothing to proclaim. Paul said if Jesus wasn’t raised from the dead, our faith is futile, it’s useless, it’s empty
Who wants a symbol? People want reality, and the Christian faith has always been rooted in reality.