This “historical” Jesus performed no miracles, but he did have the healer’s touch, a gift for alleviating emotional ills through acceptance and love. He called for an utterly egalitarian Kingdom of God-not on some day of judgment, but in the here and now. He wanted people to experience God directly, unimpeded by hierarchy of temple or state. The authorities executed him, almost casually, after he caused a disturbance in Jerusalem during Passover. Jesus lived on in the hearts of followers old and new, but he did not physically rise from the dead. Taken down from the cross, his body was probably buried in a shallow grave-and may have been eaten by dogs.
If that’s who Jesus was, then every important article of the traditional Christian faith goes out the window-no virgin birth, no divine nature and, most devastating of all, no Resurrection. The scholars who posit these theories belong to the Jesus Seminar, a group of 77 New Testament experts who meet twice a year to deconstruct the story of Jesus and build their own version of what happened. They are sober people, and Christians themselves in most cases. But they revel in the outrage their views provoke and bask in the limelight created by their own publicity machine.
At their most recent session, in early March, the Fellows of the Seminar concluded that the Last Supper was probably just a meal, not a sacramental event, and that Gospel accounts of Judas’ betrayal were “Christian fictions.” What the Seminarians are left with after they strip away the “myths” is Jesus as a Jewish sage, full of pithy maxims and even some oddball humor. “There is more of David Letterman in the historical Jesus than Pat Robertson,” says Seminar member Arthur Dewey, of Xavier University in Cincinnati.
The Jesus Seminar is perhaps best known for color-coding the New Testament. Since its founding in 1985, the group has studied the sayings of Jesus, using colored beads to vote on the accuracy of each one. A red bead is cast if the scholar thinks “Jesus undoubtedly said this or something very like it.” Pink is for a statement close to what Jesus probably said. Gray is for something he didn’t say, though the ideas were close to his, while black is for something he neither said nor thought. Last December, the group published a new version of the Gospels, with Jesus’ sayings in colored type-little of it in red. in the Lord’s Prayer, the only words Jesus said for sure were “Our Father.”
Critics charge that the Seminar is overly fond of publicity, and some members admit to massaging their message. “There was a deliberate decision to play to the media,” admits John Dominic Crossan, a professor of Biblical studies at DePaul University in Chicago and cochair of the group. “We thought the colors would be more photogenic.” But Crossan argues that publicity and color-coding help academics communicate their findings to the public.
In addition to the four canonical Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John), Seminarians draw on a variety of early Christian writings, some of which are dismissed as apocryphal or irrelevant by other experts. There is a fragmentary “Gospel of Peter,” unearthed in Egypt in the 19th century. There is a vanished Gospel called “Q,” for the German Quelle (source), whose existence can only be inferred from common passages in Matthew and Luke; the theory goes that those authors drew on this earlier document, which has since disappeared. And then, more substantially, there is the “Gospel of Thomas,” a collection of Jesus’ sayings discovered in Egypt in 1945. In its new edition of the Gospels, the Jesus Seminar includes Thomas as a full-fledged number 5, though some other authorities question whether it is a genuine first-century work. Even the Seminarians seem to have some doubts about Thomas. In their color-coded version, only three short statements by Jesus are printed in red.
Members of the Jesus Seminar peel the New Testament apart like an onion, discarding what they think was added on by the early Christians, who created an institutional church by transforming Jesus from a mortal peasant to a deity who triumphed over death. In Mark’s Gospel, they note, a messenger in a robe announces the Resurrection; in Matthew, the messenger is an angel; in Luke, he becomes two angels, and in John, one of the angels becomes Jesus himself.
From the mainstream to the fringes, institutional Christendom finds much to fault in the Seminar. Fundamentalists say the canonical Gospels are literally true, and that’s that. More liberal Christians charge that the Seminar relies too heavily on fringe writings from the early Christian era. And they complain that by concentrating on Jesus’ social message, the Seminarians overlook his warnings about an impending judgment Day. “The methodology is skewed in favor of Jesus as a sage,” says Paul Achtemeier, professor of Biblical studies at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, Va. “They are ignoring the apocalyptic elements in the Gospels.”
Can a faith, or an organized religion, be built and sustained on the kind of Jesus described by the Seminar? Christian members of the group insist that it can be-and has been. “Christian belief is an act of faith in the historical Jesus as the manifestation of God,” Crossan writes in his new book, “Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography” (209 pages. HarperCollins. $18). The Jesus that he and his colleagues deduce may strike some Christians as more immediate and believable than the traditional figure portrayed by Raymond Brown and other mainstream theologians. Whatever Jesus one believes in, the fact that a great religion grew from such humble beginnings may, in itself, suggest a divine plan.
