Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, December 12, 1993 TAG: 9312120022
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID CRUM KNIGHT-RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Jesus probably did not say about 80 percent of the words attributed to him in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, the scholars say in a 575-page book to be released by the Macmillan Publishing Co. on Monday. It's called "The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say?"
The scholars avoid drawing conclusions about the two most basic Christian beliefs that Jesus was God's son and rose from the dead. But they do attack some of Christianity's most sacred traditions.
According to the Jesus Seminar scholars:
Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah and did not predict the end of the world.
Jesus probably did share a symbolic last meal with his disciples just before his death. But Jesus' words in the Bible, comparing himself to the bread and wine that he passed around the table, probably were written by followers after his death.
The Lord's Prayer, which the Bible says Jesus composed himself, also was compiled by Christians after his death.
"The Lord's Prayer is really a pretty good summary of Jesus' concerns, but we don't believe that Jesus taught His followers like: `OK, all together now, let's pray,' " says John Dominic Crossan, a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar in 1985 and professor of biblical studies at DePaul University in Chicago.
"The image that comes out of our work is not a Jesus who was an apocalyptic visionary as much as he was a social revolutionary. And that is a massive step in our understanding of Jesus," Crossan said.
A movie about Jesus, based on the scholars' conclusions, is being planned by director Paul Verhoeven, the creator of "RoboCop" and "Total Recall." Verhoeven began attending the scholars' meetings shortly after they were organized, taking notes for his screenplay.
Crossan agreed that a gap has opened over the past quarter-century between the public and biblical scholars, who feared their controversial work might cost them their jobs. The scholars banded together as the Jesus Seminar and published the book in an effort to narrow the gap, he said.
The group continues to meet periodically and has turned now to studying the hundreds of actions attributed to Jesus in the gospels.
"It's healthy for us to go to the public with our work," Crossan said. "For too many years the scholarly consensus has been: Don't frighten the horses.
"So we've been writing in scholarly journals that nobody in their right mind ever reads, and we've been discussing these things at conferences that only scholars ever go to."
The group expects some churchgoers to be shaken by its conclusions, said Robert Funk, Crossan's co-chair and the full-time director of the Westar Institute in Sonoma, Calif. Funk organized Westar as a private, non-profit institute to sponsor the seminar's meetings.
"I can't imagine anyone wanting to have a faith that cannot withstand the tests of historical fact," Funk said.
At seminar meetings, the scholars examined all four of the Bible's gospels as well as a fifth ancient document, the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in Egypt in 1945.
The majority of the scholars are members of Christian churches, but they agreed to set aside doctrinal concerns and judge the 1,500 sayings of Jesus on the basis of historical records. Jesus left no written texts and none of the original gospels have survived. Instead, the scholars studied and compared hundreds of ancient copies of the gospels.
They discounted some of Jesus' sayings because the versions conflicted sharply from one document to another. Other sayings appeared to be well-meaning additions by church leaders after Jesus' death. Some were eliminated because they did not fit properly into the chronology of Jesus' life.
Halfway through the Gospel of Mark, for example, Jesus supposedly tells disciples that they should "take up their cross." That doesn't make sense, the scholars concluded, because Jesus had not yet been crucified and the cross did not yet have a symbolic meaning to Christians.
The new image of Jesus that emerges, Funk said, is of "an itinerant sage. He wandered around and had no permanent address as far as we can tell.
"He seems to have been a social radical and he had a good sense of humor. He seems to have said a lot of things with a twinkle in his eye, like telling people that they should not be concerned about the speck in their neighbor's eye when they've got a whole timber stuck in their own."
Crossan added: "Jesus was concerned about the evil of the Roman colonial situation in which he lived, in which the peasantry was oppressed, in which their land was expropriated. He was highly critical of injustice in the world and He said that people have to do something about it."
Ultimately, the gospels do not prove Jesus' divinity, Funk and Crossan said. Even after the scholars' work, however, there is room left for the Christian faith that Jesus was God's son, they said.
"That's how it was when people looked at Jesus in the 1st Century," Crossan said. "One person would respond to Him by saying, `This man should be crucified.' And another person would say, `No, He should be worshipped.' "
by CNB