c. 1999 Religion News Service
SANTA ROSA, Calif. _ In 1985, an iconoclastic group of Bible scholars with a flair for controversy formed the Jesus Seminar to recover the historical Jesus of Nazareth they said was hidden beneath the layers of mythology attached to him in the 2,000 years since his crucifixion.
Breaking the academic mold, the scholars began holding twice-annual meetings in the presence of spectators and the media to pursue their consensus-oriented scholarship. Decisions were made using a gimmicky voting system featuring colored beads, including red to denote the biblical sayings and deeds of Jesus considered most historically accurate and black for those deemed historically improbable.
Over the years, the scholars _ or”fellows,”as they called themselves _ concluded Jesus was not born of a virgin and did not say most of what is attributed to him in the New Testament. They also determined Jesus did not proclaim himself the son of God or the Jewish Messiah, and _ challenging the cornerstone of traditional Christian belief _ said there was no evidence to conclude the Resurrection happened in any physical sense.
Jesus Seminar founder Robert Funk labeled such conclusions”the production of knowledge that makes a difference,”even as the group’s many conservative critics dismissed the findings as the warmed-over laments of faithless secularists out of step with the Christian mainstream.
After 14 years of radical revision of the Christian biblical tradition, however, the scholars have, they admit, pretty much run out of things to say about the historical Jesus. Still, they are not about to call it quits.
For seminar fellows, the question now is how to perpetuate interest in their findings, which already have spawned dozens of study groups meeting in living rooms, church basements and online in the United States, Canada, western Europe, Australia and New Zealand.
They’ve also been forced to consider whether sustaining their growing movement means reorganizing in ways that for some come uncomfortably close to mimicking the very church institutions they generally regard as utterly lacking.”We’re at a crossroads, no doubt about it,”said Funk, a former university professor and executive secretary of the Society for Biblical Literature.”We’ve got some tough decisions to make.” A clear sign of the continued strong interest in the seminar was on view recently (Oct. 20-23) at a Santa Rosa hotel, where more than 600 scholars and supporters gathered to hear the group’s best-known members expound on”The Once & Future Jesus.”The crowd was the largest in seminar history. Another 200 people were turned away from the sold-out session.
The event was, in the main, a rehash of the seminar’s findings, most of which have been published in a series of well-received books by Funk and such other seminar luminaries as former Roman Catholic priest John Dominic Crossan and Oregon State University religion professor Marcus Borg.
It also served as the formal introduction of the Rev. Gregory C. Jenks, a 47-year-old Anglican pastor from Australia who, as associate director, will take over the day-to-day running of the Westar Institute, the seminar’s corporate umbrella. At 73, Funk will step back to devote himself exclusively to writing and public speaking while retaining the title of director.
Seminar members also debated the implications of their findings for the church, particularly the mainline Protestant and liberal Catholic traditions from which they draw the bulk of their supporters.
(An informal survey taken at the meeting found virtually all those on hand called themselves Christians and remain attached to the church. About three-fourths said they were retired, active or former clergy. Methodists constituted the largest single denominational group, about 15 percent, with Catholics coming in second at about 10 percent. Lutherans, Quakers, Presbyterians, Unitarian Universalists and United Church of Christ members also were well represented.)
However, questions about the seminar’s immediate future dominated much of the four-day session. Many were posed by supporters, who for $25 annually can become”associates”and participate in seminar meetings, including voting. For many of them, the Jesus Seminar has become an intellectual or spiritual passion, and their desire is to open their home congregations to its findings.”People are asking how the deconstruction of the Jesus myth affects our faith and makes a difference in our lives,”said fellow Daryl D. Schmidt, chairman of the religion department at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth.”They deserve an answer.” John T. Moore, a retired Army intelligence officer from Annandale, Va., said many associates such as himself are motivated by the simple desire for ongoing fellowship with like-minded individuals”who take the church and real history seriously.””The heart of the Christian message is we need to be in a community of believers,”said Moore, who attends a United Church of Christ congregation.”The work of the Jesus Seminar so far has been deconstructionist. It’s time to start constructing.” Seminar leaders, however, remain unsure about how to proceed _ despite a number of suggestions from both fellows and associates.
Members of one seminar-related online discussion group, for example, are pushing for the creation of liturgies. Their hope is to get guidelines for conducting funeral services and other occasions that reflect the seminar’s non-mystical view of Jesus as a radical reformer in the Jewish”wisdom tradition”who challenged hypocrisy and injustice in the religious and political systems of his day.
Westar has also been asked to design a logo churches can post to indicate their openness to Jesus Seminar findings. Funk said he was”not adverse”to the idea, although he has yet to act on the request.
Turning the seminar into some sort of para-church institution to train pastors and even form congregations also has been informally raised. However, seminar fellows _ who number about 200, not all of them still active _ and associates alike are generally quick to dismiss this suggestion.”I’m absolutely aware that doing historical research has theological implications,”said Crossan, a retired DePaul University professor and former seminar co-chair.”But I have absolutely no interest in starting anything like a church. That’s not my job.” Basye Holland Shuey, a 51-year-old”spiritual workshop”leader and Episcopal churchgoer from Huntsville, Ala., and seminar associate, agreed.”I want answers and integration of my faith with what’s real about God,”she said.”But I don’t think getting too organized will work. You try to institutionalize and you get stuck in a box. That’s what happened to the early church. It got screwed up.” For now, at least, working within existing churches appears to be the favored approach for keeping the seminar’s message before the public _ in addition to further academic studies by a smaller number of fellows interested in the Apostle Paul, the biblical Book of Acts and the Nicene Creed.
The seminar’s next meeting has already scheduled a session for associates on how they can bring the scholars’ conclusions about Jesus to their home churches.
An effort is also being made to draw in more theologians to broaden the discussion about the historical Jesus and the church’s development. In addition, the fellows are seeking to increase the number of weekend workshops and other speaking engagements they schedule, generally for church groups. “Unless people take this home and bring it to their churches, this will remain just academic chatter,”said Crossan.
Whatever future steps are taken, seminar fellows and associates insist that continuing to spread the word about the demystified Jesus they have put forth is crucial to the future of Christianity.
In their view, much of western Christianity _ despite the current growth of evangelical and fundamentalist churches _ has rejected Jesus out of a science-induced belief that since the Bible is not historically accurate it cannot contain eternal truths about the nature of God and human society.”An older way of seeing Christianity has come undone for millions of people,”causing them to lose their faith in church teachings, said Borg. Stuck in”fact fundamentalism,”such people must be taught to read the Bible metaphorically, as many seminar fellows insist, if they are again to appreciate the wisdom inherent in Jesus’ basic teachings, said Borg.”What is needed is the realization that (Bible) stories can be true without being factually true,”he added.”The vision of Jesus in the Bible must be seen as a lens with which to view God while understanding that the lens is not God.” (OPTIONAL TRIM FOLLOWS. STORY MAY END HERE.)
Bishop John Shelby Spong, head of the Episcopal Church’s Newark, N.J., diocese and a seminar supporter although never a fellow, said that”the Christian church will surely die”if”premodern beliefs”about a mythologized Jesus are not jettisoned.”A total radical reformation is needed to save the church,”said Spong.”We can’t just tinker with the edges while not facing the core questions.” For critics such as Philip Jenkins, however, the claims of Borg, Spong and other seminar supporters amount to little more than”interesting navel gazing.”A history and religious studies professor at Pennsylvania State University, Jenkins believes the seminar’s importance is far less than its backers insist.”Christianity doesn’t need to change,”Jenkins said during at the Santa Rosa gathering.”The average person at this meeting is white and middle aged. But the average Christian in this country in 30 years is going to be a young Hispanic or Asian Pentecostal or fundamentalist. That may not be the kind of Christianity the Jesus Seminar likes, but it’s certainly alive.”There’s a lot of good scholarship here but it’s been focused to produce an agenda for recovering fundamentalists with an elitist, anti-religion bias.” Jesus Seminar supporters admit they are seeking to counter conservative Bible literalism. But they confidently add that time and modern communications appear to be on their side.
The influence of the seminar’s metaphorical approach toward Jesus and the Bible is destined to spread around the globe, said Spong, impacting the thinking of Christians who today uncritically accept traditional teachings. Once that happens, he added, their churches are bound to change as well.”The heart will never worship what the mind rejects,”he said.
DEA END RIFKIN
