/1/
Two quotations can illustrate the gist of the criticism. Richard Hays states
that the Seminar's "attempt to present their views as 'the assured
results of critical scholarship' is---one must say it---reprehensible
deception" (47). Similarly, Howard Kee states, "The Seminar's claim
to speak for the majority of scholars is grossly inaccurate" (27).
Regarding this, it is doubtful that
the Seminar actually claims to speak for a scholarly consensus. I say
"doubtful" because I have looked carefully for such claims in The
Five Gospels and have been unable to find them. Perhaps others have, but I
have not located a quotation from the The Five Gospels that makes this
sweeping claim, nor have the critics to whom I wrote asking for the page
numbers on which these claims can be found.
I did find three items in The Five
Gospels that should be mentioned in this context. First, there is this
assertion on p. 35: "the kind of scholarship represented by the Fellows
of the Jesus Seminar is the kind that has come to prevail in all the great
universities of the world." In its context, this clearly means that the
kind of scholarship practiced by the Seminar is critical scholarship,
as opposed to dogmatic or apologetic scholarship. This statement cannot be
taken for a claim that the specific methods or results of the Seminar would be
endorsed by a majority of critical scholars. Second, Robert Funk's discussion
of the "fifth pillar" of "scholarly wisdom" (pp. 3-4) can
rightly be taken as an implicit claim that most scholars no longer view Jesus
as an eschatological figure. I doubt this implication is accurate. Third, the
mention of an early version of the Gospel of Thomas presents a controversial
thesis as a bland fact. However, none of these three entries amounts to the
kind of claim that Hays and Kee allege.
In a letter responding to my inquiry,
Richard Hays identified two sentences in The Five Gospels (one of them
the one from p. 35 quoted above) that, if taken out of context, might mislead
uncritical readers. He also wrote to me that the Seminar has claimed
repeatedly to represent the scholarly consensus in its public statements, as
documented in Luke Johnson's book, The Real Jesus. Johnson excerpts
dozens of statements culled from newspaper clippings. These are all brief
remarks, many not even full sentences, all quoted out of context. To be sure,
Seminar members have said some dumb things to the press. And Robert Funk, who
frequently acts as spokesman for the Seminar and who is quoted more than all
other members combined, tends to speak provocatively. Even so, I could not
find more than one or two statements that even seem to make this claim.
(The closest one comes to it is in headlines, such as "Jesus did not
predict his own second coming, scholars say." But as we all know,
headlines are written by journalists, not scholars.)
Nevertheless, a number of people have
the impression that the Seminar claims to represent mainstream scholarship,
and so there must be something that is creating this impression.
/2/
Several critics point out that members of the Jesus Seminar are
"self-selected" and they clearly intend this to be a criticism. But
this is puzzling. Self-selection can only be a criticism on the assumption
that membership in this kind of group should not be by self-selection. How
then? By invitation only? The Jesus Seminar is open to anyone with the proper
academic credentials. It has no way to exclude anyone who is qualified who
wants to join. What if membership was by invitation only? Would that make the
Seminar more credible? And if members were not self-selected, who
should do the selecting? Criticizing the Seminar because it is self-selected
amounts to criticizing it for not being elitist.
Ben Witherington makes a truly unique
criticism of the composition of the Jesus Seminar: that none of its members
are fundamentalists. He states that fundamentalists could not participate
because the Seminar's approach is biased in that its agenda is to develop a
non-fundamentalist portrait of the historical Jesus (44). Actually,
fundamentalists could join the Seminar if they wished, but Witherington is
correct to think they would feel out of place. The only way that the absence
of fundamentalists in the Jesus Seminar can be construed as a criticism of its
agenda is on the assumption that historical Jesus research can be carried out
on the basis of fundamentalist convictions. But obviously, if we start with
the belief in the literal historicity of every verse in the Bible, we rule
out, by definition, critical judgments about the historical reliability of
anything in the gospels. Witherington's assumption here that an unbiased
approach to the historical Jesus must include the fundamentalist perspective
really amounts to a rejection of the very basis of historical-critical
scholarship.
For Witherington, apparently, the
quest for the historical Jesus does not question the historical reliability of
the gospel material, but consists only of fitting it all into a coherent and
harmonized composite. Consider one of his closing comments on the Jesus
Seminar. Referring to the Seminar's finding that 18% of the sayings can be
confidently traced to the historical Jesus, Witherington concludes that the
Seminar "rejects the majority of the evidence (82%) . . . I will leave
the reader to decide whether it is a truly scholarly and unbiased approach to
reject the majority of one's evidence and stress a minority of it" (57).
This statement implies that Witherington accepts all the gospel
material to be evidence for the historical Jesus; only on this assumption
could he accuse the Seminar of "rejecting" evidence. Without this
assumption, one could not say that the Seminar rejects any evidence for
the historical Jesus, but rather that it finds only 18% of the sayings to be
evidence for the historical Jesus. This is not "rejecting" evidence;
it is making judgments about what kind of evidence each saying is: some
are evidence for the historical Jesus and some are evidence for early
Christians who attributed their own words to Jesus.
For a thorough critique of
Witherington's book, see Robert J. Miller, "Can the Historical Jesus be
Made Safe for Orthodoxy? A Critique of The Jesus Quest by Ben
Witherington, III," Journal of Higher Criticism 4.1 (Spring 1997).
/3/
As a fascinating aside, Hays' list of the major graduate institutions whose
faculty are not members of the Seminar is: Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Duke,
Chicago, Union, Vanderbilt, SMU, and Catholic U. Johnson's article shows some
literary dependence on Hays', but Johnson redacts Hays' list of distinguished
institutions to include Emory, where Johnson teaches.
/4/
Another question raised by the squabbling over scholarly consensus is: why is
it so important for us to claim that consensus is on our side? It's not too
difficult to figure this out. We believe that scholarly consensus confers
authority. And authority confers power, the kind of power we all crave, the
power of persuasion. Especially when we address the public, or our students,
to say that position X is the position of the vast majority of scholars is a
power play. It says: if you don't agree with it, you're either uninformed or
you're not very smart. There is nothing wrong, per se, with power plays. But
we owe it to ourselves and to our audiences, especially to our students, to be
circumspect about how we use them. For whatever my advice is worth, I believe
we would all greatly benefit if we suspended our biblical work and spent six
months in power-therapy with the works of Michel Foucault and Raimundo
Panikkar.
/5/
In introducing this gospel to readers, critics emphasize its gnostic
character. Howard Kee states that "the whole of the Gospel of
Thomas" is a "radical Gnostic reworking of the Jesus tradition"
(25, emphasis added). Birger Pearson asserts that Thomas is "completely
dominated by a (probably Syrian) type of Christianity oriented to mysticism
and informed by the myth of the descent and ascent of the soul" (322,
emphasis added). Such characterizations are surely overstated. Many sayings in
Thomas have no gnostic or mystical content at all. Some of them are close
parallels to their canonical counterparts.
Everyone grants that Thomas has its
own distinctive theological tendencies and that it has reworked a lot (but not
all) of its material accordingly. But how does this make Thomas different from
any other gospel? Isn't Matthew a thorough reworking of Mark? Isn't John's
reworking of the Jesus tradition just as radical as that of Thomas'? Is there
some assumption by critics that Thomas' gnosticizing interpretation is so
pervasive that earlier, non-gnostic, material cannot be distinguished? In
fact, the redactional modifications that reflect a gnostic perspective are
usually utterly obvious, almost ham-fisted, and are easily detachable from
earlier material.
/6/
For example, Witherington asserts that "the Seminar seems to be overly
optimistic not only about the antiquity of the sayings found in the Gospel of
Thomas but also about its independence from the canonical Gospels" (48).
He also says that "of the sayings in Thomas that have no parallels in the
synoptics, a few may be authentic" (49, emphasis original).
Ironically, Witherington is more "optimistic" in this regard that
the Seminar. Of the sayings unique to Thomas, the Seminar found none
that it could rate red and only two that it could rate pink.
/7/
Only Luke Johnson rejects this premise. But he rejects the legitimacy of all
historical Jesus research. Commenting on the inclusion of Thomas in The
Five Gospels, he charges, "Its inclusion seems to make primarily a
political or 'culture wars' point: the Gospels are to be considered of value
only insofar as they are sources for the historical Jesus" (19-20). Of
course, if this were so, the Gospel of John would not have been included.
Johnson's guess about why the Seminar included Thomas is quite mistaken, and
his willingness to pronounce on the motives of people he has never spoken to
is plainly arrogant. He didn't need to guess why Thomas was included; he could
have asked.
Birger Pearson's analysis of the
Seminar's use of Thomas is puzzling. He charges that the Seminar's assumptions
about Thomas are "quite naive" (322), but then points out that of
all the sayings unique to Thomas, the Seminar found only two that it could
plausibly trace to Jesus, results with which Pearson agrees and which are,
therefore (presumably) not naive. This is puzzling because one expects naive
assumptions to produce naive results. The clear implication, then, is that the
Seminar's methods must have corrected for the alleged naiveté of its
assumptions. This is high praise indeed, though I doubt very much that Pearson
intended it.
/8/
For example, Howard Kee refers to the Seminar's "manipulation of evidence
in order to rid Jesus of an apocalyptic outlook," a procedure he calls
"prejudgment masquerading as scholarship" (25). Richard Hays
asserts, the "Jesus Seminar employs its conviction that Jesus was a
non-eschatological thinker as a stringent criterion for sorting the
authenticity of the sayings material" (45), and "an a priori
construal of Jesus and his message governs the critical judgment made about
individual sayings" (47). Luke Johnson charges that Jesus' eschatology is
"simply dismissed without significant argument" (22).
/9/ At
this point, it is very tempting to follow a tangent on the topic of how we can
know what "really happened" in the Jesus Seminar. There are numerous
eyewitnesses to the Seminar's events, first-person reports from participants
like myself, and Robert Funk and Roy Hoover, authors of The Five Gospels,
writing as spokesmen for the Seminar. In short, many aspects of the writing of
the book called The Five Gospels are tantalizingly similar to the
process we presuppose for the writing of the ancient gospels. It would not
even be inappropriate to characterize Bob Funk as a kind of
"evangelist" for the historical Jesus. So while the Seminar tried to
figure out what "really happened" in the life of Jesus, a vaguely
analogous problem can arise when we try to figure out what "really
happened" in the Jesus Seminar. But, to pursue this question further
would divert us from our present topic.
/10/
Critics claim that the Seminar used the apocalyptic content of sayings as a
criterion of inauthenticity. This may be true for a few members of the Seminar
(though no one really knows since we were not required to say how we voted,
much less why we voted the way we did). But as a general statement, it
is simply not true.
/11/
Ben Witherington states that the Seminar "omitted, almost entirely, the
theological and eschatological matrix out of which all Jesus' teaching
operates" (55).
/12/
Pearson turns the words of Luke 17:21 against the Seminar: "I would
submit that eschatology is present 'right there in (the scholars') presence',
but they 'don't see it'" (330). He also refers to "the Seminar's
failure to notice the eschatology in their data base" (333).
/13/
Showcase examples are the parables of the Sower and the Mustard Seed. Other
examples are Luke 17:33 ("Whoever tries to save his life will lose it,
but whoever loses life will save it") and the beatitudes on those who are
hungry and those who weep (Luke 6:20). The question here is whether every
reference to a future state of affairs is necessarily apocalyptic.
Birger Pearson goes so far as to
argue that even sayings that explicitly proclaim the presence of the
kingdom are eschatological, not because of what they say, but because of the
context within which he insists they should be interpreted. According to
Pearson, Luke 11:20 is apocalyptic (despite its announcement that the kingdom
"has arrived") because it deals with exorcism. In fact, for Pearson
even Luke 17:20-21 (God's rule is right there in your presence) is
apocalyptic, because Pearson asserts that "the key to its proper
interpretation" is Luke 11:20 (330).
Pearson's analysis of the two
authentic parables that are unique to Thomas is even more specious. He
maintains that these must be understood eschatologically, not because of what
they say, but because they need to be read the same way as other parables that
Pearson takes to be eschatological. He argues that the parable of the Empty
Jar (Thom 97) "can be compared" to the parable of the Wise and
Foolish Maidens (Matt 25:1-12) and that the parable of the Assassin (Thom 98)
should be read in the context of the Tower Builder (Luke 14:28-30) and the
Warring King (Luke 14:31-32). He holds that "once the eschatology is
removed" from these two Thomas parables, they "are reduced to pure
nonsense" (332). Pearson's objection to "removing" these
parables' eschatology begs the question because there is no eschatology to
"remove". What eschatology Pearson sees in them is imported from the
context he creates. Thomas 97 and 98 appear eschatological only if one reads into
them the eschatology of the other parables Pearson selects (and the
eschatology of the Tower Builder and the Warring King is far from obvious).
/14/
Nested with this assumption is another one that is seldom challenged: the
assumption that the Palestine of Jesus' time was rife with apocalypticism. The
premier evidence for this is, of course, the Dead Sea scrolls. However, the
question relevant to the historical Jesus is whether there was pervasive
apocalypticism in Galilee in the twenties of the first century
CE and for this the scrolls are not very useful. The current consensus on the
Dead Sea scrolls is that they represent the views of a small, disaffected, and
physically isolated sect. What about the Galilean day laborers, fishermen,
shopkeepers, and marketplace scribes to whom Jesus spoke? What evidence do we
have that allows us to reliably gauge their outlook? (By the way, this would
make an excellent topic for a dissertation.) Are we so sure that we know
enough about this to take for granted that Jesus' environment was all that
apocalyptic?
A common criticism of the Jesus
Seminar is that its non-apocalyptic Jesus would not have gotten crucified. The
assumption here is that an apocalyptic message (which may or may not include
explicit or implicit messianic claims) is both the necessary and sufficient
cause for Jesus' execution. But this assumption does not hold up under
scrutiny. An apocalyptic message by itself does not get you killed.
If it did, the entire Qumran community would have been snuffed out in a mass
execution. John the Baptist, even with his high public profile, was not
executed for his apocalyptic message, but for his personal attacks on Herod.
An apocalyptic message has to combined with something else for its messenger
to become a political threat. But this is as true for a
non-apocalyptic message. Wouldn't anyone who disrupted the temple on
the scale that Jesus is reported to have done be perceived as a dangerous
troublemaker, regardless of his message, or even if he had no particular
message at all? One can argue that disrupting the temple is a symbolic act
with an apocalyptic meaning, but this is not its only plausible
interpretation.
There is an assumption more
fundamental than any of this, an assumption that exists virtually unchallenged
in all historical Jesus research, within the Seminar and outside of it. The
assumption is that there must have been a connection between Jesus' death and
his teaching, that he was killed because of what he stood for. While this is
obviously a reasonable assumption, it is not a necessary one. Several prior
assumptions are required to support it, for example: that the Romans crucified
people only after due process to establish that crucifixion was the proper
punishment; that Jesus' teaching and activities were known by the Jewish
authorities in Jerusalem prior to his arrival there; that these Jewish
authorities, unlike his disciples, truly understood his teaching and its
implications.
Without all of these assumptions, and
others besides, we cannot confidently stipulate that Jesus must have
been killed because of his message. It becomes plausible to imagine that his
death was a routine act of state brutality by a military dictatorship, whose
motive for the institution of crucifixion was not so much to punish the guilty
as to terrorize the population. Crucifixion, after all, is not just a form of
execution; it is a public spectacle, a theater of cruelty that burns into
everyone's mind the absolute power of the state and their own vulnerability to
it.
I am not asserting that there was no
connection between Jesus' message and his death, only that this is an
assumption that rests on several other assumptions, all of which may be true,
but none of which is self-evident. If the hesitations to grant any of those
prior assumptions are in any way reasonable, then we need not assume that
Jesus was necessarily executed because of what he taught. We certainly
do not need to assume that Jesus would not have been killed unless he had had
an apocalyptic message.
/15/
Richard Hays charges that the Seminar's portrait of Jesus is "an
ahistorical fiction achieved by the surgical removal of Jesus from his Jewish
context. The fabrication of a non-Jewish Jesus is one particularly pernicious
side effect of the Jesus Seminar's methodology" (47). Birger Pearson
takes Hays' surgical imagery to prurient proportions: "The Jesus of the
Jesus Seminar is a non-Jewish Jesus. To put it metaphorically, the Seminar has
performed a forcible epispasm on the historical Jesus, a surgical procedure
removing the marks of his circumcision" (334).
/16/
Sometimes this accusation is followed by the insinuation that the Seminar is
anti-Semitic. Jewish members of the Seminar may be in a better position than I
am to address this, but from my perspective as one who knows most members
personally, this is pure slander.
/17/
For a full discussion of the various nuances of meaning in the Seminar's color
scheme, and of all the problems with our voting process, see Robert J. Miller,
"The Jesus Seminar and the Search for the Words of Jesus," Lexington
Theological Quarterly 31.3 (Fall 1996).
/18/
N. T. Wright has drawn attention to this "flaw" in our procedure to
support his verdict that "A voting system like this...has nothing
whatever to commend it" (Jesus and the Victory of God, Fortress,
1996, p. 34). Our system for averaging votes is not perfect, but it is better
than any other system we know. In fact, the "problem" Wright points
to is quite small: out of the 518 sayings the Seminar analyzed, 15 sayings
(less than 3% of the total) with slight majorities of red and pink votes are
colored gray.
/19/
Voting among biblical scholars to determine consensus on issues of translation
and textual criticism is by now an uncontroversial tradition, even if it is a
relatively recent practice. But the tradition of voting among ecclesial
authorities to determine official doctrines about the Bible is much more
ancient. For example, the Catholic Church formally adopted the contents of
Jerome's Vulgate as the canon of the Bible at the Council of Trent. The vote
among the bishops in attendance was 23 for, 15 against, with 16 abstentions.
Voting does carry a potential for
misrepresentation if all that is published is the final result, for this might
give the appearance of unanimity when in fact some votes may have been close
calls. This is why the UBS uses its A-B-C-D rating system and why the Jesus
Seminar publishes the percentage of red, pink, gray, and black votes for each
individual item.