Saturday, May 10, 1997

Religious historians take a fine-toothed comb to uncover what Jesus really said

By Paul Galloway / Chicago Tribune

When he's invited to speak in a church, he purposely avoids the place where the pastor proclaims the word of God - and where he once stood himself as an ordained member of the clergy and earlier as a spellbinding, self-styled teen-aged evangelist.

"I have too much respect for the pulpit to put me in it anymore," Robert W. Funk said in an interview before his featured appearance in a recent colloquium on the historical Jesus at the First Congregational Church of Wilmette in Wilmette, Ill.. "I prefer to be at a lectern or table below the pulpit because what I'm going to say may be inimical to the tradition represented by these buildings."

May be inimical? You can bet the family Bible that this soft-spoken, tough-minded, 70-year-old New Testament scholar, native of Evansville, Ind., and former seminary professor is certain to deliver views that diverge sharply from doctrines of orthodox Christianity.

After all, Bob Funk is the founder of the controversial Jesus Seminar, a group of some 200 religious historians, which has concluded that 82 percent of the declarations, aphorisms, parables and stories attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were actually composed by the authors of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, which are thought to have been written from 40 to 75 years after Jesus' death.

Consider, for example, Funk's take on the divinity of Christ: "I don't think anybody will ever persuade me that Jesus thought of himself as the Messiah or claimed to be the Messiah or God's son. And how could he, when everything he said points in the other direction?

"He taught his disciples that those who tried to save their lives will lose them, and only those who lose their lives will redeem them. Does that mean he was going to give advice he wasn't going to follow himself?

"It would be no mean trick for you and me (to allow ourselves to be crucified) if we knew we were God's son and three days later we'd be alive again. I think I could manage that.

"What would be hard for me to do would be to give up my life when I thought that was going to be it. We have cheapened this person in a way that causes him to lose his attractiveness for many people who do have moral integrity, and we've made him more attractive to people who have their own self-interests at stake."

How so? "Most people believe in the resurrection because they want to participate in it," Funk said. "It's not principle with them."

And what did Jesus' integrity entail? "He had a vision of the world under the direct aegis of God, and what he was trying to transcend was the notion that there were expendables in his society.

"Children, for example, were expendable (in those days). A lot of parents put female babies to death. And people who had diseases or handicaps were marginalized.

"Women were chattel. Notice the wording of the commandment in the Hebrew Scriptures forbidding you from coveting 'your neighbor's house' or 'his wife, or male or female slave, or ox, or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.' The wife is in the same category as servants and cattle or any other possession."

In addition to putting words in Jesus' mouth, the Gospel writers also softened sayings that seemed too difficult to accept.

For instance, Funk pointed out, Matthew has Jesus saying that "The last shall be first and the first last," which means that the lowly and the humble are as welcome to God as the mighty and self-righteous.

"We think that is what Jesus said," Funk observed. "But Mark writes it as: 'Many of the first will be last, and of the last many will be first.' "

Jesus makes a number of harsh statements that were unaltered, Funk continued: "One you don't see quoted much is: 'Whoever comes to me and does not hate his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple.'

"We have to imagine a real-life situation where this would have made sense to the radical that Jesus was. Think of the patriarchal arrangement in his time, where three or four generations lived in the same two-room house, governed by an aging patriarch who made life-and-death decisions for everybody - which girl infants lived, who married whom, what professions you were allowed to follow. I think Jesus was saying unless you give that arrangement up, you can't be a follower of mine."

Funk presents a compelling synthesis of the distinction he finds in the Gospels between the real-life Galilean Jew of history and the spiritual figure that is the Christ of faith in "Honest to Jesus" (HarperCollins), published in 1996.

The book is based to a large degree on Funk's experience with the Jesus Seminar, which he organized in 1984 after establishing his own religious publishing house (Polebridge Press) and a scholarly research center (Westar Institute) in Santa Rosa, Calif.

The goal was to generate greater public awareness about the prevailing judgment of biblical scholars and mainstream theological schools that the gospels of the New Testament, like the rest of the Holy Scriptures, are a mixture of historical fact and mythological truths, assessments heretofore treated as if they were family secrets.

"The reason I left seminary teaching was because my students who became pastors weren't passing along what they had learned to the people in the pews," Funk said. "The answer, I think, is that many churches have become increasingly beleaguered, defensive and afraid of losing membership."

The consequence, he asserted, is a lack of self-critical, up-to-date engagement with forward-looking theologies and Bible study, which he believes is essential for vitality, renewal and protection against dogmatic and narrow religious beliefs.

The Jesus Seminar has countered this silence by meeting twice a year to consider a selection of Gospel texts which contain the words, deeds and portraits attributed to Jesus and then, through the application of informed empirical techniques and discussion, to decide on their authenticity. In doing so, they consider two central questions:

Is there reliable evidence that Jesus actually said this and did this? Or were the parables, aphorisms, dialogues and stories under observation made up by his followers or the Gospel authors.

"The Jesus Seminar is really a group of academic prima donnas who have learned to listen to each other," Funk says. "In the process a number of us have gone through a number of transformations, and to see these distinguished people who are supposed to know everything and to have judgments about everything change their minds is the most exhilarating thing that has ever happened to me. And it has allowed me to change my mind."

The seminar members represent a variety of beliefs - from practicing Christians and Jews to agnostics, from Southern Baptist evangelicals to liberal mainline Protestants; one-third, Funk said, are Roman Catholics.

"About 99 percent of what we do is mainstream, middle-of-the-road stuff," he said. "Our colleagues outside the Seminar will read what we say and tell us, 'Everybody knows that. You're doing stuff that's old hat.'

"Yet when people ask if we often agree in the Seminar, my answer is never. Most of the votes have been divided.

"We developed this voting system with colored beads (see the coding chart at the top of this article) so we'd have some results to record, and we do this the same way we grade papers, by weighted averages."

Critics of the Jesus Seminar include fundamentalists and conservative evangelicals who believe that the Bible is infallible - inspired by God and historically and scientifically factual - and liberal and centrist scholars who accuse its members of leaping to conclusions with inadequate evidence and succumbing to personal biases.

Stephen Patterson, 39, a professor of New Testament at the Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis and a member of the Jesus Seminar who shared the podium at the Wilmette church with Funk, spoke about the challenges of reconstructing history.

"History is an imaginative enterprise," he said. "There's no clean starting point. We are looking at this mass of ancient texts and materials and asking, 'Is there any history in here? Any patterns, lines of development, any plausible clues about time and context?' "

Just as there is good art and bad art, there is good history and bad history, Patterson said.

"Bad history is that which totally self-serving and claims to be more than it is. You need pre-suppositions, but you can check your prejudices as you proceed. We do this in the Jesus Seminar by working as a group."

Funk added, "We never make claims about objective truth. The best we can do is to make tentative claims based on historical probability. One new discovery can change the whole thing."

(c) 1997, Chicago Tribune.

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