“I’m wookin’ pa’ Jeezis in aw da wong pwaces, wookin’ pa Jeezis…”
It seems there’s a new way for the intellectual elite to disregard the Church, now that they can’t ignore the enormous impact Jesus of Nazareth has had on the world. I was reading a book jacket the other day at Borders and the authors blurb referred to him as “the world’s foremost expert on the historical Jesus.” It’s very subtle, but also very clear.
The effect that a statement like this has on the reader is profound. It creates the assumption that the Jesus portrayed in the Bible is a mythical version of the “real” Jesus. It allows them to say this without stepping into the world of religion. One author is said to explain the “development of Christian theology from the life of the historical Jesus.”
I have to admit up front that I’m not a research scholar, but I have my wits about me. I try not to judge without investigating. I don’t have the means or the time to read every page of Jesus search writing that’s available, but I pick up what I can. I do pursue theology vigorously, and log my hours studying the historical context. That being said, there are several things that tick me off about this whole “real Jesus” idea.
First, these “experts” have no basis for their ideas other than skepticism. They look into the New Testament and see a bunch of accounts of things they deem impossible. So they try to figure out who made them up and why they included them in the story. It’s similar to the anecdote that Thomas Jefferson cut all of the miracles out of his Bible. They only take the “realistic” things from the Gospel.
Of course, as a proponent for the “traditional Jesus” I have little basis other than my belief that the Bible is true, my experience of Christ, and the actions of the Apostles. But, if their view starts with the Bible as untruth, and mine starts with the Bible as truth as our only bases, then our views are equally founded.
Second, from what I’ve read (which is not everything available, of course) much of the arguments in favor of the historical Jesus are based on conjecture and suspect history. One author asserts that Pilate was responsible for Jesus execution. Another mentions two divergent early Christian views: “The Jerusalem tradition in which Jesus is believed to be the resurrected Christ, and the Q Gospel tradition in which Jesus is remembered as the founder of a way of life.”
This is a cute idea, and sounds quite distinguished when approached uncritically, but there is a significant problem. The ‘Q’ Gospel is pure theory, used to attempt an explanation of the similarities in the Synoptics (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). But we don’t know if it actually existed. The other explanation is that these events actually happened and people saw them. Also, those aren’t two different traditions, they are two aspects of Christianity.
Essentially, these books and articles and studies all seek “to distinguish the mythology from the history of Jesus.” But how can they say, with such certainty, that what they consider mythology can’t be true?
I know that neither the Christians, nor the seekers of the historical Jesus have concrete proof, but why should their side be considered scholarly truth, and ours based in mythology?
Wikipedia: Historical Jesus
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Blogs4God
[...] Bob also states that he’s never heard a Lutheran express anything resembling Spong’s remarks, that “traditional theism is ‘dead,’ the incarnation is ‘nonsense,’ the resurrection of Jesus is a fiction, or the understanding of the cross is ‘a barbarous idea.’ I am an ELCA minister, and one of our pastoral staff has expressed–in private, in classes, and from the pulpit–his belief that the Gospels are not an account of Jesus’ life, but dramatized, with some truth and some fiction, to “illustrate” for the audience the principles of faith. Those thought’s definitely resemble Spongs, and many come directly from Marcus Borg, a scholar of the “historical Jesus”. It’s happening, Bob just chooses not to notice. [...]