Historical Jjesus, Who is t he Real Jesus?

Today we will learn and reflect on the Historical Jesus movement.
One ancient heresy in the early church is the Arian heresy. Arian
claimed that Christ was not eternally begotten, that he was a creature,
like us, and that there was a time when Christ was not.
Today Christianity faces similar challenges. Some scholars want to deny
that Jesus has a divine nature, some say that Jesus is only a wise
teacher, and other scholars belong to the Historical Jesus movement,
that claims that Jesus did not say everything the Gospels say he said,
that some sayings are genuine, while other sayings were merely
attributed to Jesus, which implies that some scholar can somehow tell
the difference, except that each historical Jesus scholar has a different
list.

At the end of our talk, we will discuss the sources used for this
video, and the additional lessons we learn from these sources,
and my blogs that also cover this topic. Please, we welcome
interesting questions in the comments. Let us learn and reflect
together!

Historical Jesus,
Who is the Real Jesus?
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Let us vote on each of the sayings on Jesus, a red bead for each truly authentic saying of Jesus, a
pink bead when the saying sure sounds like Jesus, gray, maybe, a black bead for a saying Jesus
could not have said, although centuries of biblical scholars thought and taught otherwise.
Using this voting method, the self-appointed members of the Jesus Seminar in 1985 pronounced
that only fifteen sayings were truly said by Jesus, while another seventy-five sayings were
probably words of Jesus. There were a few eminent scholars in the group, most were middling
academics, none were from the most eminent theological universities. But it was great
television, great headlines, great press, controversial conspiracies, grabbing ten minutes of fame
for this or that ignorant expert.
The original attendees of the Jesus Seminar have mostly been forgotten, with only a sparse
mention by Dr Wikipedia, but unfortunately the historical Jesus baton was passed to Bart
Ehrman, one of the foremost textual critics of the New Testament, which means his specialty is
examining the ancient Greek manuscript texts for variants. Dr Timothy Johnson wrote a book
disputing the claims of the historical Jesus, The Real Jesus, which will be our main source. This
book first looks back to the history of the church since the Reformation, and in the United States
since World War II and the GI Bill, to understand how such beliefs can become widespread.

The story behind the Christ Pantocrator icon displayed here is
one of the oldest icons in the world, dating back to the sixth
century, preserved in the oldest continually functioning
monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt. If you ask the Orthodox
monks who the historic Jesus and who the real Jesus was, and
they will point out to this icon, copied from other icons over the
centuries, and attest that this is a true depiction of Jesus, this is
the actual face of Jesus, this is the historical appearance of the
Jesus who was both Son of God and son of man. We have a
video with some fascinating history of St Catherine’s monastery
at Mount Sinai.

(QUICK HISTORY OF BIBLICAL INTERPRETATION)
To understand the history of the Jesus movement, we need to
understand the history of modern Biblical Interpretation, and to do that
we need to start with the Protestant Reformation.
Nobody was more surprised than Luther when the 95 Theses he tacked
onto the church door of Wittenberg were quickly translated from Latin
to German and re-printed by the thousands by the recently invented
printing presses to circulate all over Germany, ad Europe. But when
summoned to the Diet of Worms he was not allowed to discuss church
reform as he wished but was simply asked if he would recant. The next
day came his famous reply, “Here I stand, I can do no other, so help me
God.”

Luther Posting his 95 Theses in 1517, by Ferdinand Pauwels, painted 1872

Luther at the Diet of Worms, by Anton von Werner, painted 1877

Luther was eager that his followers understood Scriptures properly, and
his Scriptural commentaries are vast, but the common understanding of
his slogan Sola Scriptura meant that the Scriptures would no longer be
interpreted according to the Tradition of the Church Fathers, now each
Christian can interpret Scripture individually.
Luther himself interpreted Scripture using his method of content
criticism, not on the basis of their acceptance by the Church or Tradition,
but on his personal judgment of their theological worth. The weakness
was quickly recognized as every rebelling theologian also had his own
personal biblical interpretation, as unique as was each of their
personalities. As the practice of Confession was not abolished but rather
forgotten and neglected in the Lutheran tradition, so too were the
Church Fathers forgotten and neglected, even in the American modern
Catholic Church.

Disputation of the Holy Sacrament, Raphael, 1510

What Luther was preaching was something new, he did not
believe the Pope himself was corrupt, Luther thought the
institution of the Papacy was corrupt, and that colored his
theology. In most of his writings Luther would constantly
interrupt what sounded like brilliant theology by stopping to
curse the pope, often using vulgarities. Lutheranism never
formally rejected the authority of the Church Fathers, but Luther
himself in his informal Table Talks derided the wisdom of the
Church Fathers. To be fair, this was in part a reaction to Luther’s
Catholic opponents often abusing Tradition by making the
Church Fathers say anything they wanted them to say.

Pope Julius II on the walls of the conquered city of Mirandola, by Raffaello Tancredi, 1890

We chose this painting of Pope Julius II because he was known as the
warrior pope, because on two occasions he led the papal troops into
battle. He selected his papal name in honor of Julius Caesar, and he
waged war as a secular ruler to consolidate his political power over the
Vatican states. He spent lavishly to rebuild St Peter’s Basilica,
commissioned Michelangelo and other artists to decorate the walls and
ceilings of the Sistine Chapel and other buildings and established the
Vatican museums. These vast expenditures drove his successor, Pope
Leo X, to approve the sale of indulgences to finance these projects. ,
which Luther objected to so fiercely, and which was the spark that
started the Protestant Reformation.

Fresco in Capella Sistina, Vatican, First Council of Nicaea, 325
Professor Johnson: “What has fundamentally eroded was the framework of canon, creed, and church
by which Christianity had defined itself in debate since the late second century. The creed was
under attack, the canon was challenged, and the church’s tradition was regarded as the problem.”

Biblical interpretation evolved with the rise of the independent
University system in the Renaissance, Enlightenment, and the
Reformation. The early Church Fathers had a classical Platonic Greek
education, but in the centuries following the first Roman Christian
Emperor Constantine, the church was involved in education, and in the
foundation of the early University system. Over the centuries the
universities became more independent, more secular, valuing science
more, valuing theology less, trends that were greatly accelerated after
the French Revolution. Most modern biblical scholars tend to ignore
the Church Fathers altogether.

Over the centuries, the principle of individual interpretation evolved into new
scholarly approaches using the historical-critical method used by German Lutheran
scholars of the nineteenth centuries. Multiple source theories were proposed.
Scholars have nearly unanimously accepted the theory that Mark was the main
source for Matthew and Luke. Although this relationship is clouded in the English
translation, if you read the original Greek text, you can clearly detect that Matthew
and Luke adopted, edited, and added to the text from Mark.
In the late 18th Century, several German Biblical scholars analyzed Scriptures using
higher criticism, treating the texts as literature. Friedrich Schleiermacher proposed
the still undiscovered Q sayings were a secondary source for the content found in
both Matthew and Luke but missing from Mark. For the Torah, Julius Wellhausen
found textual evidence for the multiple JEPD sources compiled quite late in Jewish
history. (Review next slide, JEPD ONLY)

J Source: Genesis 2: Man created first, names
the animals, Eve is created, creation from man’s
perspective, God is addressed as Jehovah.
E Source: Genesis 1: Man created on the sixth
day, creation from God’s perspective, God is
addressed as Elohim.
P Source: Priestly regulations in Leviticus.
D Source: Deuteronomy author.
Dr Wikipedia: “The consensus around the
classical documentary hypothesis has now
collapsed.” “There has been a revival of interest
in ‘fragmentary’ and ‘supplementary’ models,
frequently in combination with each other and
with a documentary model, making it difficult
to classify contemporary theories as strictly one
or another.”
Synoptic Gospels Old Testament: Torah: JEPD Hypothesis

An interesting interpretation of the JEPD theory is offered by Gary Rendsburg, a Jewish Scholar
who recorded the excellent course on Genesis for the Teaching Company. Rendsburg argues that
the Lutheran Wellhausen was influenced by the anti-Catholicism and anti-Semitism of his time.
The J and E sources could be dated early, as they contained the basic stories, but it was
important theologically to date the legal material in the P and D sources in a much later time
because as a Protestant he wanted these sources to be less credible. Rendsburg say out that
linguistic analysis shows no Persian loan words in any of the Torah, which you would expect to
find if you date the P and D sources as late as Wellhausen suggests. All of the Torah was
composed in classical Hebrew rather than late Biblical Hebrew, which means that all of the Torah
is older than 550 BC.
Dr Wikipedia: “The consensus around the classical documentary hypothesis has now collapsed.”
“There has been a revival of interest in ‘fragmentary’ and ‘supplementary’ models, frequently in
combination with each other and with a documentary model, making it difficult to classify
contemporary theories as strictly one or another.”

What Professor Rendsburg and other conscientious biblical scholars
heavily emphasize is you cannot find the inner meaning of Scriptures by
chopping them up and analyzing them in isolation; but rather, you find
meaning in Scriptures by viewing them as a literary whole. Often
evangelicals make this same mistake when they memorize Bible verses
in isolation, which often leads to proof-texting, where you quote only
those verses that support your personal interpretation of Scripture. To
find the inner meaning of a Bible verse, you need to first understand the
context in the chapter preceding and following the verse, then in
context of that book of the Bible, then in the context of the Old and New
Testaments, and after consulting the teachings of the Church Fathers.

Moses with the Tables of the Law, by José Juan Camarón y Meliá, painted 1785

The best example is once, during a Bible study, someone was
quoting a verse from the middle of the Book. The theme of the
Book of Job is that sometimes the righteous suffer though they
are innocent. The middle of the book of Job are the soliloquies
from the friends of Job, who urge him that he must have sinned,
and if he would only repent, then God would make him whole.
So, we know from the context of these books that these
soliloquies in the middle of the book are subtly flawed
arguments that the author challenges you to puzzle through.

Obscure Controversy
on Talmud, by Carl
Schleicher, painted
late 1800's

Job and his friends, Kristian Zahrtmann, painted 1887

A major problem with the JEPD theories is that although you can find many often-
told stories in the Old Testament that clearly have two sources, there are many
other stories that cannot be as easily explained by the classic JEPD hypothesis,
leading to too many PhD thesis with increasingly strained logical straws not easily
grasped.
The quest to find the historical Jesus buried in the Scriptures, to discover what
Jesus was really like, not merely what sayings tradition attributes to Jesus, was first
attempted in the Enlightenment by Jefferson, Strauss, and other scholars, but this
attempt put to an end partly by Albert Schweitzer, who argued these attempts
minimized the eschatological and apocalyptic dimensions of Jesus’ life. Likewise,
the second attempt in the sixties to paint an historical Jesus who was relevant was
not inspiring, nor was it promoted well, and interest waned.

The Deluge, Noah’s Ark, Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo, 1509

Charlton Heston in The Ten Commandments, 1956

Biblical interpretation is continuing to evolve with the expansion
of the University system in the US after World War II. With the GI
Bill came a vast expansion of the community college and
university system, with a demand for thousands of PhD’s in all
fields, biblical studies included. Many colleges today are
independent of the church, and indeed often these biblical
studies are often non-denominational. You have this odd
situation where colleges hire professors to teach biblical studies,
but they are not permitted to open their studies with prayer,
since that violates separation of church and state.

President Roosevelt signs the G.I. Bill into law on June 22, 1944

Also, the sixties saw ever more radical interpretations under the
guise of liberation theology and feminist studies. To survive in
academia, you must publish or perish. When writing papers to
publish, innovation is preferred over orthodoxy. And change and
innovation was what the Sixties were about.
Concurrent with these trends is the effect of television on all
aspects of our culture, distrust of authority from the Sixties, and
the growing competition between the growing influence of a
fundamentalist mindset in our religious communities and a
totally agnostic and hedonistic mindset in our culture in general.

MAINLINE ATTITUDES TOWARDS THE HISTORICAL JESUS
For Catholics, Vatican II cleared the way for Catholics to study the Bible
using the historical-critical method and other spiritually edifying
methods. Cardinal Ratzinger penned an encyclical on biblical
interpretation discussing both the dangers and benefits of using the
historical-critical method. He cautions that the historical-critical method
is often too narrow in its historical approach, ignoring the biblical
revelation in the history of the church, meaning the Church Fathers.

In the chapter on hermeneutics in the Catholic New
Jerome Biblical Commentary notes that although the
Vatican is encouraging closer study of patristic
exegesis, Catholic scholars have a “reluctance to
return to the more-than-literal exegesis of the
Fathers.” And, “the (Catholic) church would
challenge modern scholars to emulate the success of
the (Church) Fathers in having the Bible nourish the
faith, life, teaching, and preaching of the Christian
community. But in terms of practical guidance in
modern literal exegesis of individual texts, patristic
authority is of restricted importance.”
In other words, as CS Lewis notes, in our modern
culture we discriminate against what is ancient and
promote what is modern.
St. Augustine by Peter Paul Rubens,
painted 1636 - 1638

The third historical quest for the historical Jesus was more successful because the
founder of the Jesus Seminar, Robert Funk, knew how to promote it on television
and in the press. The only notable scholars associated with his movement are
Funk himself, John Crossan, and Marcus Borg, and their writings are problematic.

The Transfiguration, by Peter Paul Rubens, painted 1605

What was the theological agenda for this third historical Jesus
movement? Opposition to fundamentalism. They do not want the
fundamentalists to monopolize the airwaves, so they shamelessly
promote their views so they fit in thirty second sound bites. They value
radical academic independence, and denigrate subservience to
tradition, and have no fear for ignoring Scripture they personally do not
judge is historical, and for elevating newly discovered gnostic writings
over Scripture in their quest for the historical Jesus. Witherington
quotes Funk as saying, “methodology is not an indifferent net – it
catches what it intends to catch.”

Methodist revival in
USA 1839, J. Maze
Burbank,
watercolor 1839

HOW SCRIPTURES ARE COMMONLY ABUSED BY HISTORICAL JESUS AND MODERN SCHOLARS
All books of Scripture should be read as a literary whole. Whether a book of Scripture has one
author or multiple authors and a redactor is irrelevant, the Holy Spirit inspires the process, the
oral tradition of the church that preceded the writing down of Scriptures. Professor Johnson’s
wrote the The Real Jesus, this is his list of common abuses by scholars in the historical Jesus
movement:
REPEAT:
1. Often the canonical Gospels are rejected because they are not deemed reliable historical
sources. Too much trust is placed on gnostic apocryphal gospels dated much later than the
canonical Gospels.
2. Other canonical sources, such as the Epistles of Paul, are often ignored when shaping a history
of Jesus. As the “inventor” of Christianity so called modern scholars think he is biased.
3. The mission of Jesus is described more in egalitarian or social terms rather than as a religious
mission primarily calling people to repentance. Jesus might be seen as charismatic, but he is seen
more as a Sixties guy, accommodating, not too much of a preacher.

REPEAT
4. Although these theologians cloth themselves in supposed objectivity, they have a real
theological agenda. They are sure that what they believe is true, and we need to agree with them,
even though they do not study the Tradition of the Church in forming their beliefs. Indeed, often
the more radical scholars believe that institutional Christianity distorts their Jesus movement.
5. Overemphasis of the importance of historical dimension of Jesus, often ignoring the Jesus who
calls us to repentance. He quotes Crossan: “If you cannot believe in something produced by
reconstruction, you may have nothing to believe in.”
6. A critical agenda that involves the dismantling of traditional Christian views. This is a reaction of
these very liberal biblical scholars against American Fundamentalism.
As Johnson notes, Scripture is not historical, it is pastoral. The Gospel, the Good News, the
message, matters far more than the historical settings. Whether the sermon is on the mount or
on the plain, or when Jesus overturned the money changers’ tables, is an important detail in
Scriptures, the message is what matters.

Professor Johnson: Abuses, Historical Jesus Scholars
1. Often canonical Gospels are rejected while too much trust is
placed on gnostic apocryphal gospels.
2. Other Scriptures, such as Pauline Epistles, are often ignored
when shaping a history of Jesus.
3. The mission of Jesus is described more in egalitarian or social
terms rather than as a religious mission primarily calling people
to repentance.
4. Historical Jesus theologians have a hidden agenda, they do not
respect the traditions of the Church.
5. Overemphasis of the historical dimension of Jesus, often
ignoring the Jesus who calls us to repentance.
6. A critical agenda that involves the dismantling of traditional
Christian views. This is a reaction of these very liberal biblical
scholars feel against American Fundamentalism.
As Johnson notes, Scriptures are not historical, they are
pastoral, they change our lives. The Gospel, the Good News,
the message, matters far more than the historical settings.

The spiritual danger of constructing your historical Jesus is you end up
constructing your own personal Jesus, which is not that bad a thing,
because your own personal Jesus is crafted in your own image, why that
is a Jesus who is a personal friend who is not that demanding, a personal
Jesus who is just the Jesus you want him to be.
Like the personal Jesus of Depeche Mode,
Your own personal Jesus
Someone to hear your prayers
Someone who cares
someone who is always there,
and this personal Jesus might even call you on the telephone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2GEOcEcRtY
Reach out, touch faith
Someone who cares
Someone who's there
Feeling unknown
And you're all alone
Flesh and bone
By the telephone
Lift up the receiver
I'll make you a believer
Take second best
Put me to the test
Things on your chest
You need to confess
I will deliver
You know I'm a forgiver

What can be better than the alright Jesus of the Doobie Brothers,
I don't care what they may say
I don't care what they may do
Jesus is just alright, oh yeah
Jesus, he's my friend
He took me by the hand;
This personal Jesus who is going to lead me far from this land.

Jesus is just alright with me,
Jesus is just alright with me,
Jesus is just alright
Jesus is just alright
(REPEAT)
Jesus, he's my friend;
He took me by the hand;
Led me far from this land
(REPEAT)
I don't care what they may say,
I don't care what they may say,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQ2T107k1FU

The best Jesus of all is the Jesus of the one-hit wonder of Norman
Greenbaum, the Jesus who will recommend us to the Spirit in the Sky,
which sounds like an American Indian deity.
We have gotta friend in Jesus, when we go up to the spirit in the sky
when we die, we are gonna go to the place that is the very best.
This is a friendly Jesus, especially if we have never been a sinner who has
sinned.

When I die and they lay me to rest
Gonna go to the place that's the best
When I lay me down to die
Going up to the spirit in the sky
Going up to the spirit in the sky
That's where I'm gonna go when I die
I'm gonna go to the place that's the best
Prepare yourself you know it's a must
Gotta have a friend in Jesus
So you know that when you die
He's gonna recommend you
To the spirit in the sky
He'll recommend you to the spirit in the sky
That's where you're gonna go when you die
When you die and they lay you to rest
You're gonna go to the place that's the best
Never been a sinner, I never sinned
I got a friend in Jesus
So you know that when I die
He's gonna set me up
with the spirit in the sky
Oh set me up with the spirit in the sky
That's where I'm gonna go when I die
I'm gonna go to the place that's the best
Go to the place that's the best
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxzFUX5a3xg

These personal Jesuses are really great because they don’t expect us to
repent and lead a life worthy of repentance, as St Paul once said, none of
these personal Jesuses demand that we change our lives, we just go to
heaven because Jesus is a nice guy.
This reminds us of the joke you have likely heard before:
What is the difference between those who go to church on Sunday and
those who go to the beach on Sunday?
Those who go to the beach on Sunday don’t need to go to church
because they do not need to change.
Those who go to church on Sunday don’t need to change neither,
because they go to church.

South Beach, Miami, FL, photo by Mike Bey

We found an interesting video of an interview with Norman Greenbaum,
that one song has provided a comfortable retirement, though he
definitely is not living in a mansion. Spirit in the Sky has hit number one
on music charts both in the US and England several times, and this one
hit has been played in many movies, including Wayne’s world, and has
even been played by the Apollo 11 mission control desk. Norman says
that if you have only one outstanding accomplishment in your life, that is
enough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdvV3yZ92-Y

The scholar Ben Witherington wrote a book, The Jesus
Quest, that examines the Historical Jesus movement, and
summarized and critiques the major scholars in the
movement, which we will examine.
These theories often tell us more about the theologians
than they tell us about Scripture.

His book includes
summaries of
views and
critiques of:
John Crossan
Marcus Borg
John P Meier

THE JESUS OF CROSSAN, ITINERANT CYNIC PHILOSOPHER
The Jesus of John Crossan, according to Witherington, is like one of the
earliest pictures of Jesus on a fourth century sarcophagus in Rome, where
Jesus is sitting on a rock, like a Cynic philosopher, with long hair and
beard, holding a papyrus roll in his left hand, gesturing with his
right. There are some similarities between Jesus and the proto-typical
Cynic philosopher, both loved to speak in aphorisms, both could speak
boldly and bluntly. But Cynic philosophers showed no respect for
authority, whereas Jesus sometimes would speak against the scribes and
the Pharisees, he did respect authority, telling the lepers to present
themselves to the priests after they were healed, saying to give to Caesar
what is Caesar’s when asked if He should pay the tax. And Cynics, like
Americans today, liked to be self-sufficient, whereas the Gospel exhorts us
we are powerless and helpless before God.

The Tribute Money, by Bernardo Strozzi, painted 1630's

Witherington’s main criticism is since Crossan ignores major portions of
Scripture, especially Mark, producing a non-Jewish Jesus, a Jesus that
does not deal with issues like Sabbath, marriage, divorce, or His
impending Resurrection. What we have is the egalitarian Jesus who is
not a true Cynic but rather a Jewish peasant Cynic, whatever that is, who
especially likes children and the powerless. Johnson criticizes Crossan
for preferring the apocryphal Gospel of Peter with its talking cross and
the dubious Secret Gospel of Mark over the canonical sources. The
Jesus of Crossan does not judge us, does not call us to repentance, does
not call us to forgiveness, indeed, his Jesus does not even talk much
about God, his Jesus is not even the Jesus of the Resurrection.

Let the Little Children Come unto Me, Carl Bloch, 1800 Jesus heals the ten lepers

The table of contents in Crossan’s main work shows Jesus to be a
Sixties sort of guy, as can be seen by chapters titled like: Peasant
and Protester, Magician and Prophet, Bandit and Messiah, and
Rebel and Revolutionary. Likewise, Jesus Christ Superstar is also
a Sixties sort of Jesus.
Some of Crossan’s introductory background material on slavery
and poverty and society in the Roman world is interesting, if you
can safely ignore his chopping apart and rearranging Scripture.

THE JESUS OF MARCUS BORG, MAN OF THE SPIRIT
Witherington notes that a “clear trend among Third Questers (of the historical Jesus) is
to deemphasize the eschatological nature of Jesus and his message.” This is
particularly true of Marcus Borg.
Witherington asks, “Is this an attempt to salvage a Jesus to whom moderns can
relate?” Borg imagines that even if Jesus did mention Himself as the Son of Man, this
was not meant to be eschatological; Borg posits that the clearly eschatological
references to Jesus were inserted into Scriptures by early church leaders. The Jesus of
Borg is a mystic who experiences reality from another level of spiritual reality and is the
conduit through which this power of God or spirit flows into the lives of more mundane
people.
In addition, the Jesus of Borg is the subversive sage and a radical social prophet who
rebelled against the system of his day, another very Sixties sort of guy, but in more with
the spirit. The Jesus of Borg protests against the purity laws because it causes conflicts
between Jews and Gentiles. The Jesus of Borg is compassionate, but the Jesus of
Borg cannot imagine himself to be the Messiah, the Son of God.

Johnson notes that the Jesus of Borg wants to recast the Jesus, divine Son of God, into
a more historically correct Jesus, a Jesus who could not have been incarnated to die
for the sins of the world on the cross. How can we prove that? How unhistorical!
Instead, Borg wants “to build faith through critical history.” How this human vision of
the Jesus of Borg can become our new vision for faith is not entirely explained by Borg
is puzzling. What sort of faith is this? It is a faith where the “politics of holiness” are
replaced by the “politics of compassion.” In short, the Jesus of Borg is the Jesus who
would be comfortable in any university faculty lounge, or as Professor Johnson puts it,
a faculty lounge lizard.
As with Crossan’s book, as I read the chapter titles of Borg’s main book, Meeting Jesus
Again for the First Time, I ask myself, should I be reading this stuff? Some of the
chapters remind us of Jesus, the Sixties guy. The titles include Jesus, Compassion and
Politics, and Jesus and Wisdom: Teacher of Alternative Wisdom.

There are some scholars in the historical Jesus movement who
are legitimate, who are not agnostic, who do not twist Scripture,
who do not seek to manipulate the media to sell more
books. Ben Witherington’s book the Jesus Quest opens with a
great chapter on the historical context of the New
Testament. Both Witherington and Johnson are impressed with
one scholar in particular, John Meier.

MEIER’S STUDY OF JESUS: MARGINAL JEW OR JEWISH MESSIAH
Witherington credits Meier’s work with “caution and careful,
detailed argumentation.” Unlike many other modern scholars,
Meier does not dismiss the spiritual Gospel of John as a source
of historical data about Jesus. Like the other historical Jesus
scholars, Meier uses criteria to sift through the Gospel material,
but he does not use the criteria to discard material, and he uses
the criteria more conservatively.

Miracle of the Bread and Fish, by Giovanni Lanfranco, painted 1623

Most importantly, Meier sees the resurrection as a happening in the
spiritual realm rather than the historical realm, but that this does not
disprove the resurrection. It is still very real to the believer. Like
Johnson, he distinguishes between the historical Jesus and the real
Jesus, the Jesus of faith, Jesus who is truly the Son of God.
Interestingly, Meier, the historical Jesus scholar with the best reputation,
wrote the chapter on the historical Jesus in the leading US Catholic
commentary on Scripture, the New Jerome Commentary. This chapter
represents an example of what the Catholic Church views as a respectful
view of the historical and traditional Jesus.

The Resurrection of Christ, Hendrick van den Broeck, Sistine Chapel, 1500's

Professor Johnson tolerates Meier, saying that “Meier’s treatment is as
solid and moderate and pious as historical Jesus scholarship is every
likely to be.” Johnson tolerates Meier because he prefers the canonical
sources because the extracanonical sources offer little authentic
knowledge that is not in the canonical sources. Johnson writes, Meier is
not embarrassed about the eschatological Jesus, he is not embarrassed
about a Jesus who works miracles, he is not embarrassed about the
Jesus who is resurrected from the dead, ascending to Heaven to be on
the right hand of God. Meier is not embarrassed by the Jesus of
faith. Johnson examines Meier’s more conservative use of the criteria of
authenticity, and notes how subjective and slippery they can be even
when applied by a careful scholar.

Jesus walking on
the Sea of Galilee,
by Paul Brill,
painted 1590

So, who is this historical
Jesus Meier describes in
the New Jerome Biblical
Commentary, endorsed
by the Catholic
Church? Meier writes,
“the ‘Jesus of history’ is
a modern theoretical
reconstruction – a
fragmentary, tentative
portrait painted by
modern scholars – and
is not to be identified
with the full reality of
the Jesus who actually
lived in the First
Century AD.”

Although the canonical Gospels are our main historical sources, they do not aim to
depict the Jesus of history. Meier’s well thought out commentary contains many
interesting insights, like the term Abba, Our Father, was probably offensive to pious
Jews in ancient Palestine. Meier is not quick to announce that big chunks of
tradition are suddenly irrelevant and should be ignored.
However, there is still much in Meier that would disturb traditional scholars.
Although he is not as aggressive as other historical Jesus scholars, he does regard
certain sayings of Jesus as inauthentic.

Meier makes the startling pronouncement that Jesus
did not use the word ‘love’ often in His authentic
sayings. Jesus’ rebuke to Peter, Get behind me, Satan,
Meier thinks was created by the early church. Meier
cautions that some of the prophecies Jesus made
about his crucifixion are probably “retrojected into the
life of Jesus.”
Then Meier backtracks and writes, “This is not to say
that such sayings are necessarily later creations; the
exclusion is a tactical one, to isolate data that are
reliable as possible.” If you say a saying is inauthentic
historically, but then say it may be authentic
spiritually, you are still casting doubt on the validity of
the Scriptures. So even Meier falls short of building
up Scripture rather than tearing it down.
Descent from the Cross, Rubens 1617

BART EHRMAN, AGNOSTIC ON JESUS
Dr. Wikipedia reports that Robert Funk passed in 2005, his Jesus Seminar
organization is no more, and judging by the size of his Wikipedia
biography, Funk is largely forgotten now. Today’s historical Jesus
movement now is dominated by Bart Ehrman, who was never active in
the Jesus Seminar. Ehrman grew up as a hardcore fundamentalist, but
he became a liberal Christian due to his academic studies, later
becoming agnostic due to his failure to reconcile human pain and
suffering with a loving God. You might say that now Bart Ehrman is a
fundamentalist liberal scholar.

As one of the top ten lecturers in number of titles for the Teaching
Company, Bart Ehrman has a wide audience for his courses and
books. Unfortunately, Ehrman is one of the top textual criticism scholars
in the world, which means he studies the ancient Greek manuscripts for
their original meaning. Unfortunate, because he is an agnostic, an
unbeliever reacting against his fundamentalist roots. Ehrman does not
chop up the Scriptures, he has more respect for the text than Borg or
Crossan. Rather, Ehrman is guilty of slandering Scripture, putting a
conspiratorial spin on his interpretations. Why? Ego? Does he let his
publisher suggest the titles so he can sell more books?

For example, in a lecture on pseudonymity Ehrman explains that in the
ancient world sometimes a student would pen a work in the name of his
teacher as a sign of humility, but then he takes a leap and says not all
acts of deception were good! He precedes this observation by calling
people who write in another’s name forgers. Does he imply that some of
the authors of the New Testament are somehow guilty of committing a
crime? Then he says the Timothy Epistles were assuredly not written by
Paul, leading the reader to make the leap that these were forgeries or
frauds. His series of lectures on “The Greatest Controversies of Early
Christian History” include topics like Was Jesus Married? Was Pontius
Pilate a Secret Christian? Does the New Testament Contain
Forgeries? These lectures are for entertainment but instead lead many
to lose their faith.

Aside from his slanders, Ehrman has intellectual integrity, he
does not try to deny that Jesus was baptized by John, nor does
he try to deny that Jesus was crucified, and he has criticized the
slanderous and heretical Da Vinci Code book and movie.

JOHNSON ON THE JESUS OF HISTORY
Luke Timothy Johnson, whose book the Real Jesus we have been
quoting from, is a former Benedictine monk who left the religious
life to marry and teach biblical studies in a university setting. As
he explains in his Teaching Company courses on St Paul and the
Gospels, he originally taught using the standard historical-critical
methods, but after some semesters the standard scholarly
explanations did not make as much sense to him when he had to
explain them to his students. Johnson has more respect for the
traditional interpretations of Scripture than most historical-critical
scholars.

Conversion of St Paul,
Workshop of Michael
Willmann, painted
1600's

For example, scholars have long debated that Paul was not the
author of Timothy. But while admitting that Timothy was
probably written later than the other Pauline Epistles, Johnson
tries to find a theory that preserves the traditional Pauline
authorship, that maybe late in his career Paul had several
associates write letters to communities under his direction,
which he then signs. There is internal evidence that St Paul did
not write all his epistles, since in one Epistle he states, And I am
writing this greeting in my own hand. What do we gain by
challenging tradition needlessly? If these academic speculations
cause believers to lose their faith, are they worth it?

Another example is his treatment of the story where Jesus is
writing in the sand, asking that whoever is without sin should
cast the first stone against the adulterous woman, which is
missing from several older manuscripts of John. Most modern
scholars say this story was added much later and is not an
authentic Jesus story. Johnson instead poses the theory that it is
a valid oral tradition of Jesus that eventually found its home in
John, he says this because there are a few ancient manuscripts
that include this story in the book of Luke.

The Woman
taken in
Adultery, by
Guercino,
painted 1621

There is a brief mention of the historical Jesus movement by
the Orthodox scholar John Beck in “Scripture in Tradition,”
which says the historical Jesus movement is a “blatant
betrayal of the biblical witness.”
John Beck acknowledges that form criticism and other
historical methods can be useful, but cautions we should read
Scripture for knowledge OF GOD, not for knowledge ABOUT
GOD, that we should interpret Scripture in language WORTHY
OF GOD, we should not atomize the text, but instead keep the
Scriptures whole. The Bible is not self-interpreting, the Holy
Spirit inspired the authors of Scriptures, and also the patristic
interpreters. Although we should measure tradition using
Scriptures, Scripture was also born of tradition, through the
presence of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of Truth, who guides the
church, and who should guide us in our quest to live a godly
life. Jesus said what Scriptures record that He said, because
the compilation of Scriptures was inspired by the Holy Spirit.
In early tradition, the Samaritan woman
at the well was Saint Photine.

It is undeniable that our earliest biblical manuscripts are far removed from the
original copies. But, if we believe that Scriptures are inspired by the Holy Spirit, we
just need to have faith that God treasures His Words sufficiently to guard and guide
their eventual transmission.
The spiritual danger of proclaiming that Jesus did not say everything the Scripture
say he said, is that we can simply cut out those teachings of Jesus that make us feel
the most uncomfortable, so that rather than discovering the real Jesus of history, we
instead discover the imagined Jesus in our imaginations. Although it may seem
easier to follow a Jesus of our own designs, that is not a Jesus calling us to
repentance and change.

According to Cardinal Ratzinger, who was crowned as Pope Benedict, one of the
unintended consequences of Vatican II was the overemphasis on the historical-
critical method in the Catholic Church, in vain he tried to persuade the Catholic
Church, in particular the American Catholic Church, to primarily study the
interpretations of Scriptures from the writings of the early Church Fathers, and the
medieval Church Fathers.

We now want to close with the closing thoughts
and prayers of St Augustine:

St. Augustine in His Study, painted 1502 by Vittore Carpaccio
We should pray to read Scriptures as St
Augustine prays in his Confessions: “How
wonderful are your Scriptures! How
profound! We see their surface and it attracts
us like children. And yet, O my God, their
depth is stupendous. We shudder to peer
deep into them, for they inspire in us both the
awe of reverence and the thrill of love.”

St Augustine cautions that we not cling to our personal interpretation of
Scriptures as it involve more personal pride than possession of divine
truth, that we should be respectful of others’ prayerful interpretations,
that there can be multiple interpretations of Scripture. This is a common
problem with scholars using the historical-critical method, indeed
scholars of all stripes: they are tempted to presume that only their way is
the highway to understanding Scriptures.
In nearly every work, St Augustine constantly emphasizes that the
Scriptures should be interpreted to further our two-fold Love of God and
love for our neighbor, especially in his classic work, On Christian Teaching,
or On Christian Doctrine. This is a key work on Biblical Interpretation in
both the medieval and modern churches.

SOURCES: Luke Timothy Johnson’s The Real Jesus which was a primary source for
this video has an interesting perspective, he includes a balanced view of the
unintended consequences of the ongoing history of the Protestant Reformation that
is the prehistory of the Historical Jesus movement, up to the unforeseen
consequences of the GI Bill and expanding American University system and its affect
on public religious education.
Ben Witherington’s book on the Jesus Quest is also essential for understanding the
modern third Historical Jesus movement.
John Beck’s Scripture in Tradition persuasively argues for biblical interpretation
based on the study of the ancient Church Fathers, a view that was taken by the
modern Catholic Vatican II Church Fathers and every subsequent Pope, but which
has been deprecated in the American Catholic Church and which is ironically shared
in the lectures and books by Professor Johnson.

You can pick up a reasonably priced used copy of the New Jerome Biblical
Commentary for its many insightful essays on theology and biblical interpretation.
Its historical-critical commentary is so condensed that it is difficult to read and
comprehend.
Over the years I have picked up three of Marcus Borg’s books to read someday, in
part because of the provocative titles, and also John Crossan’s main book, but since
Ben Witherington has read them, I do not have to, although I may one day.
We mentioned the Jewish professor Gary Rendsburg excellent lecture series on
Genesis, which is on my Top Ten list of Great Courses lecture series, although it has
not been brought forward to Wondrium yet, his other Top Ten course on the Dead
Sea scrolls has. Also ironically, while he talks about the shortcomings of the
historical-critical method of biblical interpretation, he does not include any mention
of the classic medieval rabbinic commentators, including Rashi, Rambam, and
Ramban.

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Although we did not use it as a direct source for this video, we also wish to make
you aware of another Great Courses lecture series on my Top Ten list, and that is
Professor Allitt’s Great Courses on American Religious History. Professor Allitt is
both British and Catholic, but he is very balanced and respectful of all the religious
traditions whose history he discusses.
My blog was the basis for this video, but it has many personal reflections that I
chose not to carry forward into this video, if you are interested.

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quotes in this blog, please type in
the phrase to the search box in
my blog to see the referenced
footnote.
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