Jesus Seminar is laboring to preserve its own ‘myth’ By Mark Tooley Volume 33, Number 3 Posted May 22, 2000 A long time ago there was a man named Jesus. He was a Jewish cynic and teacher of wisdom who fought against the domination system of his day. He proclaimed a reign of God based on liberty, equality and fraternity. To protect their political and economic power, the Roman and Jewish leaders crucified him. Although dead, His teachings were so vivid to His followers that they spoke of Him as though He were still alive, although they never intended to be taken literally. Unfortunately, some new converts to His cause, who never actually knew Him, took this talk too seriously and began to expect that He would actually return to establish His Kingdom. When He didn’t, they were disappointed. So they developed new ideas, actually pagan in origin, about a life after death in which they would finally meet Him. ‘Manipulated followers’ Meanwhile, the dominant system of that day, growing fearful of this growing movement devoted to the dead man Jesus, decided that it must co-opt that movement. The manipulated followers of Jesus became “the church” and began establishing rigid dogma that had little to do with the real Jesus. They compiled “scripture” written long after Jesus’ death by people who claimed to know Jesus but who really did not. Some of this scripture was based on fragments of fact, but most of it was made up. Forgetting who Jesus really was, the church set about to use these scriptures to oppress people who disagreed with it, and also to oppress women, racial minorities and homosexuals. Jesus became just a pretext for a new domination system. But a few courageous intellects stood up against this church. Confronted by science and reason, the church finally lost its monopoly on power, and eventually all truly educated people ceased to take this church and its teachings very seriously. But the myths spun by the church continued to captivate a lot of people, who although lacking intellect, nonetheless still wielded political influence. They still want to oppress women, racial minorities and homosexuals, and prevent the true reign of God about which the real Jesus spoke. Dispatching the ‘myths’ So an adventurous band of brilliant scholars, fearless and true, gathered together under the name of the Jesus Seminar. With breathtaking consensus and mental acuity, they disproved and vanquished the church’s remaining myths, to which only the foolish and the superstitious masses still cling. The true reign of God, based not upon a supernatural deity, but a promethean humanity devoted to equality and justice, is now within sight, if you look closely. We have the Jesus Seminar to thank. The mythology of the Jesus Seminar, summarized above, is simple, straightforward and appealing to academic egos swollen enough to believe their own claims about their importance. None of it would be taken very seriously except that the Jesus Seminar has established a comfortable media niche for itself. Meeting for nearly two decades now, the scholars realized that by packaging conventional liberal theology into media sound bites they would gather headlines and gain credibility as the supposedly cutting edge of biblical studies. The media attention would also allow them to sell their own books. The Jesus Seminar’s denial of Christ’s divinity and miracles is regularly folded into the stories that national magazines compile for Christmas and Easter. These denials are portrayed as new scholarly discoveries, although they are not supported by new archaeological or manuscript finds, but by the Jesus Seminar’s unique brand of literary critique and ideological presuppositions. Running out of material But the Jesus Seminar is running out of material. Its scholars have denied everything about the Gospels that they can possibly deny. The Jesus Seminar has now reached a point of denying any concept of supernatural deity. But atheism is neither shocking nor new. It is actually fairly boring. Realizing the quandary in which it has placed itself, the Jesus Seminar is going to construct a new creed to replace the Nicene Creed, although the new statement of faith will be kept suitably “ambiguous” to avoid “embarrassment,” according to Jesus Seminar founder Robert Funk. “We don’t want to become a church in a world that is already filled with too many churches,” he promises. So what is the Jesus Seminar’s future? Convinced that local churches are “hungry” to hear the truth about its scholarship, the Jesus Seminar now dispatches its scholars to congregations around the country for weekend seminars. I attended one seminar, convened at a United Church of Christ congregation in suburban northern Virginia. It struck me as rather odd. A crowd of no more than 75 mostly older church members had gathered for the event in their small but upscale church facility. The speakers were Funk and Lloyd Geering, a scholar from New Zealand. As they are supposedly leaders of the planet’s spiritual vanguard, (Jesus Seminar scholars like to speak of “the planet.”) I was surprised that Funk had traveled across the continent and Geering half the circumference of the world to spend two days with a rather ordinary and small audience of persons who had paid $50 each for the privilege. Non-probing questions Geering and Funk pleasantly explained why the traditional understanding of the Gospels could no longer be believed. The audience asked polite and non-probing questions. I was loathe to think unkindly of the congregation, but was befuddled as to why they were so comfortable with being told the God they supposedly worship does not exist and the church to which they belong is no longer relevant. But I was more puzzled by the willingness of Jesus Seminar scholars to travel the country speaking to unspectacular groups who have gathered for a minor fee in the social halls of small churches. I would have thought the Jesus Seminar would be confident enough to take its performance to the metaphorical big city, not just the rural backwaters. With the possible exception of Marcus Borg’s traveling conversation with orthodox Christian writer and Anglican priest Tom Wright, the scholars of the Jesus Seminar seem curiously unwilling to engage serious thinkers from outside their perspective. When I heard him at the Virginia church, Funk did boast of how the Jesus Seminar had thoroughly discredited other liberal academics who had challenged the Seminar on minor points. But the Jesus Seminar avoids close-up debate with orthodox Christian critics who do not play by the Seminar’s own ideological rules. ‘Mythic messiah’ Funk, while dismissing the “mythic messiah,” called for a true messiah who will be found in “random acts of kindness, some proposal to close the hole in the ozone, some discreet move to introduce candor into politics, some new intensive care program for the planet.” One member of the audience asked the scholars why there was no Republican among them. “God is a political agenda that is driving our inquiry,” he suggested perceptively and not disapprovingly. “What’s driving this, the God behind this, is the agenda of individual rights and rational inquiry that we got from the secular agenda of the Enlightenment.” Mark Tooley is research associate for the Institute on Religion and Democracy.

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