ver.: 01 May 2008
Examine these matters closely; be critical :
A site user asked me this question :
>How do you draw the line between "sensible
and measured"
> use of higher critical principles and the sort of radical
stupidity
> exhibited by the Jesus seminar?<
The place to draw the line is at what one is using a tool for. One of the crucial things wrong with the use of Bible-critical methods by many theological writers today is that it is wrong in its purpose.
The Jesus Seminar spends its time trying to figure out what Jesus did or didn't say, so they can construct some sort of a picture of Jesus that is supposedly stripped of the deceptive fenegeling of first-century Christians. This effort starts by assuming that what the early church reported Jesus to be is not what Jesus was. I for one think the assumption works havoc on the method. Those who wrote the Gospels, whether they were the actual Apostles or not (remember, Luke doesn't claim such status for himself), are the ones who are in the best position to describe to us Jesus' purpose and character, much more than His precisely-preserved words could ever do. They report on a Jesus who made them who they were, not a 'them' that made Jesus into what they wanted. If you forget that, then critical techniques will just lead you away from the truth of the matter.
The Seminar is on a wild goose chase. Or rather, given the use of the Wild Goose as a symbol for the Spirit by the early Celtic Christians, maybe they're running away from the wild goose chasing them. They will find a bare-bones "historical Jesus" when critical methods are used with their a priori presumptions, but they still won't find the real Jesus. Whatever is found in Scripture is there for us to follow, not nitpick about or play judgement games on. The critical tools are there to be used for getting beneath the surface of a passage of Scripture, to get at the scope and the range of what Jesus (or the prophets, historians, poets, and story-tellers) said and did. This may be found in the forms of literature they use to convey God's message. There may be some cultural or ethnic or socio-economic or gender blinders that have to be removed from us before we can see the message. We need to understand what was happening back in first-century Palestine before we can climb deeper into the passage. And yes, we have to deal with what the writers drew on and how the text got passed to us. Each of these things are done every day in unsystematic ways by rank-and-file bible students everywhere; us educated types just make a system out of it so we can have more control over the method. With that comes a problem : control over method is control over results.
When believers use analytical tools, they use them to dig deeper into the text to know better what God is saying so they can follow God better. In that sense, it doesn't matter who actually wrote the words, just that the words are inspired by God like none others. When a commentator or seminary prof uses them, it's more often than not to acquire dispassionate knowledge, supposedly for others to use. "Dispassionate" learning may be useful for some situations, but it defeats the whole purpose of Scripture! It was told and written to ignite you!
I must start by saying that probing into 'the historical Jesus' is itself a good thing. Yet I have some very deep problems with many of the things said by many in the critical 'quest for the historical Jesus'. For most of the questers, before they even begin, they assume that the miracles and the claim to be 'one with the Father' are a fiction created by the early church. They build a Jesus that fits their own picture of what they think he should be, or what they think the human race needs him to be. Then, they cut out as 'inauthentic' anything that doesn't fit the picture.
For instance, the Gospels say Jesus identified himself as being 'one with the Father'; this is presumed by many Questers to be just the church's hindsight. Yet even politics by itself would not have forced so rapid a demise; some element of blasphemy would be needed to get everyone behind the charges. And that is what the Gospels report. Another example is that some of the Jesus Questers think that Jesus had no well-defined inner circle, that this was just projecting the leadership of the early church back into Jesus' time. Yet, it's fairly clear from Acts and Paul that 'the Twelve' didn't operate long as a group in the early church, and that other leaders quickly emerged -- such as Paul, Apollos, Timothy, Barnabas, and the deacon Philip. (This is echoed by tradition, which has the former disciples soon leaving Jerusalem to spread the Gospel in far-flung places, dying martyr's deaths there. While those stories themselves are heavily flavored with legend, we must pay attention to the fact that they all report the apostles separating.) As an organized body of leaders, the Twelve was history long before the Gospels were written, so why would the gospel writers project it back? Having small bands of disciples was the typical way a great holy man would teach - or more precisely, mentor - back then. So it makes sense that Jesus would do it that way, too.
The way to do history is from the evidence outward, not from the method inward, and then see what explains best what actually happened.
A lot of people are angry about what even the best of the Questers say about Jesus. The Questers know what Bible students have known for two millenia, and what Jesus himself knew from studying the Law and the Prophets : we have a lot of ideas that we think are Scriptural but are not, and we just gloss over a lot of things in Scripture because we think we know what it means. The 'search for Jesus' has reminded us of a lot of stuff we've shoved out of our neat traditions. For instance, Jesus was from a working artisan class, not one of the poor or rich. His homelessness was part of his itinerance -- his chosen task of going from place to place preaching -- and not due to poverty. Galileans weren't the rubes from the sticks that Jerusalemites loved to tease them as. Jesus felt pressured by crowds, snapped at a woman who sought healing, turned his mother away when she questioned his sanity, let his anger show in the Temple, and let a friend die so he could show his authority over death. These things are not nice, but they are in the evidence, openly stated in Scripture. But say that to the faithful, and you get anger. They don't want to come to grips with a human God or a divine Man, even if they confess this fact every week when they recite the creed, and sing praises of it every Christmas. You can't discover the good news about why it happened if you don't acknowledge that it happened.
I seek spiritual honesty, but it's hard to find.
back to top
The great religions have great stories. Great stories tell great truths which help us deal with life. And we love to tell the story. But Christianity (like Islam and Judaism) is not about the great stories themselves. It is about the real-life main character behind the stories, a real-life One whom you can come to know through that story. That same real-life being is the One who made the great Truths true and Reality real. Today's thinking presumes the opposite : the story is what counts, and the primary character can be no more real than Captain Picard or Homer Simpson. That's the premise behind virtual reality : the new technology lets you become your own story-teller (with the help of your software-deity, of course). Sounds good, except that you're not the author of reality, just a writer of fiction. God will not be relegated to the same level as Hercules (who never crushed a real army) or Pecos Bill (who didn't dig the Rio Grande) or Jessica Fletcher (who never solved a single real murder case or for that matter never wrote an actual novel about solving real murder cases). God is the real author and the main character, and God wrote us. I don't really have much of a choice about trusting God with the story line, since the other choices are figments of far lesser authors.
You might read some articles on postmodernism that refer to "narrative" and "metanarrative". "Narrative" refers to the stories as they are told. Through stories, events and/or facts take on a context, and thus meaning. You can think of "metanarrative" as a story line that give a central meaning and impact to many meaningful stories - it holds them all together. The Bible has a metanarrative running through it, about God rescuing creation from the horrible results of its wandering ways. It is a story of love and betrayal, and of the ultimate sacrifice. But the Bible's metanarrative isn't owned by the Bible. It is the Bible's story line because it is life's central story line -- all of our lives, whether or not we are aware of it, whether or not we hate it or love it with a passion, or don't care at all. You are in it, every day in every way, just by being. That's why the Bible's story line is so utterly inescapably important. It is where the much-fabled "meaning of life" is found -- the meaning of your life, and of all life.
Another reader asks "aren't all metanarratives just a
well-disguised power game -- a mere useful explanation, not the
real cause of what happens?" As much as you live by a
Christian metanarrative, you live in a way that specifically
renounces, rejects, and proposes an alternative to,
power games. The power gamesmen will try to use anything for
power games, and faith is no different. But there is a real
Someone causing this metanarrative. That Someone doesn't take
well to manipulative humans; God can, and does, bite back. In
the power game, God ultimately holds the winning hand, which
means if you're playing against him, you don't.
rise to higher depths
There are a lot of books and articles being written about 'other Gospels'. The two most often mentioned are 'Q' and the Gospel of Thomas.
Q was not a written gospel in the sense we now have. It was a written source or set of sources about incidents in Jesus's life that was used by the authors of Matthew and Luke for some of what they wrote. ('Q' stands for Ger. Quelle, which means in English 'source'.) The Q source no longer exists, and is not mentioned in any ancient writings. We know of it only by the strong common wordings of most of the non-Mark material found in Matt and Luke. The Q source may not have been authorized by any particular apostle, but was generally seen as accurate. So the authors of Matthew and Luke used it, and then tried in their own way to convey what the incidents meant.
Ever since scholars figured out that there must have been such a source, there have been those who have been trying to reconstruct it. But there's really no way of accurately doing so. We know the parts that Matthew or Luke used, but have no clue as to what they did not use. When they did use Q, they used it in their own way to make their own case, just like I use others' materials in preparing my Web site but I write it up my own way. So what ends up happening is that these scholars either publish a gussied-up harmony of Matt/Luke, or expand on the Q stuff by leaning on their own imaginations or other sources outside the Bible.
That's where the Gospel of Thomas comes in. Thomas was a work known by the ancients, coming from a faction within the North African or Syrian Gnostic community, and recently rediscovered. It clearly uses Matt, Mark, and Luke as sources, probably also John, and maybe Q and other witness stories. (Many accounts of Jesus' life may never have been written down, but were passed along by story-telling. Indeed, John says there's a lot more. The Gospel authors selected only what they saw as the most important.) It was written long after Matt or Luke, say, around 140 AD at the earliest, and isn't mentioned by anyone for decades after that. Because it is several generations later than the Gospels, from an era long after anyone alive at Jesus' time had died, it would by any reasonable standard be seen as a tertiary (third-rate) source, not to be relied upon for accuracy except as backup for primary or secondary sources. Even more importantly, instead of giving us differing angles on the same Jesus who had the same agenda (as the Gospels do), Thomas gives us a different-acting Jesus with a very different agenda which strongly resembles that of a group that didn't exist until well after Jesus died.
To me, Thomas is not a gospel, just a mostly-partisan
collection of sayings that portrays Jesus in a way that doesn't
add up and makes him rather pointless for us today in the 21st
Century. There could remotely be a passage or two somewhere in
it that Jesus actually said that we don't otherwise have. Yet
its viewpoints strike a badly discordant chord, so I think that it's
not gainful for use by anyone who is not involved in scholarly
pursuits, and even scholars must remember to take it for what
it really is.
more on the Bible as Scripture
climb out of this dig
A site user emailed me this :
> Another problem I have is my continued doubt about the
inerrancy
> of the Bible and the need for literal interpretation of
the
> Bible (particularly the account of creation and the
rejection
> of science by many denominations).<
I try not to use terms like 'inerrant' or
'infallible', because the church of today uses them
for dividing people instead of helping them embrace truth. It's
best to look to the Bible for faith and faithful living rather
than science. It tells facts, yes, but it tells them in order
to tell the truth. You can look at the site :
http://www.spirithome.com/scripdef.html
if you want more on that; you may not agree with all of what's
there, but that's fine - you are to believe Scripture, not a
web site.
The Bible is a completely, totally, entirely
biased resource -- that's what makes it so
good. The prophets, priests, story-tellers, and apostles who
wrote the Bible wrote it not as a neutral observation of fact
or history, but as an account of God's work by His
enthusiastic, passionate, extreme, committed, monomaniacly
partisan supporters. They want you to lay your life into
God's hands. They want you to believe the Good News, follow
Christ, love your neighbor, and trust the Spirit. They want
that because they discovered for themselves that nothing else
matters (or better, that all else matters because these things
matter). That's why they wrote! The Spirit enabled them to see
through the events of their day to get at the grand purposes
behind them. Those grand purposes still underlie the events of
our day. God speaks to us through the Bible as it is, above any
other source. Most of us are too busy being obsessed partisans
of our selves to see God's purposes. The Bible takes us out of
that. Trust the Spirit who's using the Bible, rather than the
words people invent to describe the Bible.
More on the use of
Scripture;
More on literalism.
on words to describe the Bible.
Are you wondering or studying other things about the Bible? Try these pages :
There's also a PDF booklet of all the pages on scripture, including all of the word definitions found here on spirithome.com.
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