Why the Ugly Attacks?

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The Jesus Seminar has received a good deal of attention from scholars, most of it negative. The polemical rhetoric of some of the seminar’s critics is, in all honesty, the ugliest I have ever encountered in scholarly writing.

The reason for this may have a lot to do with the fact that the seminar communicates its results to the public directly and without equivocation. The controversy this has sparked has put some other biblical scholars on the spot. A number of them have protested loudly that the approximately 50 active members of the Jesus Seminar do not speak on behalf of most New Testament scholars.

But this objection dodges a very basic question because it does not address the seminar’s fundamental views about the Gospels: that the Gospels are not historically true in all their details, that some of the words attributed to Jesus were not actually spoken by him, and that the Gospels contain historical memory from before Calvary and religious interpretation from after it—to put it bluntly, that they are a complex blend of fact and fiction. To discover the historical Jesus, the members of the seminar believe, we need a critical sifting of evidence rather than theological assurances.

These views, in fact, represent a consensus among critical scholars. This is not news to scholars, but it is to the American public. A huge number of Americans believe that inerrancy^a is the only legitimate approach to the Bible, that to take the Bible seriously is to take it literally. According to a recent poll, 40 percent of Americans believe that Jesus will return to earth in the next few decades.

The seminar’s critics are right to protest that many scholars disagree with the seminar’s results, but they do a disservice if they perpetuate the mistaken impression that doubts about the historical accuracy of significant portions of the Gospels are confined to some splinter group of allegedly radical scholars.

Many critics take a dim view of the seminar’s practice of voting on the authenticity of the sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Since the seminar was organized in 1985 by Robert Funk, a retired biblical scholar of international fame, the seminar has voted on the many hundreds of individual sayings and deeds attributed to Jesus. Seminar members vote by choosing one of four colors: red for items they judge to be certainly from Jesus, pink for items they judge to be probably from Jesus, gray for items on which they are undecided, and black for items they judge not to be from Jesus.^b Ben Witherington of Asbury Theological Seminary, for example, objects to this procedure on the grounds that truth is not determined by majority vote.¹ This is a red herring; no one claims that we have arrived at some absolute truth. Indeed, the Jesus Seminar got the 020idea of voting from the practice of various Bible translation committees and from the United Bible Society committees that vote on the critical edition of the Greek text.^c

Luke Johnson of Emory University has no objection to translation committees voting because “these votes are carried out privately.”² This is very revealing. For Johnson, the real sin of the Jesus Seminar is not that it votes on the historicity of the Gospels, but that it does so in public. Numerous snide comments by other critics about the seminar’s being “publicity hungry” and such show they resent this public face of the seminar. This criticism assumes that academics who speak publicly about religion should keep to themselves views that might be unsettling to mainstream Americans. (This assumption explains why biblical scholars have largely left it up to scientists to battle creationism in the public forum.)

The very fact that journalists who cover religion register such shock that scholars sometimes use words like “nonhistorical” or, worse, “fiction” to characterize some gospel passages shows what a good job our scholarly guild has done in keeping our secrets to ourselves. I wish that reporters who interview critics of the seminar would ask them which items in the Gospels they consider nonhistorical. If critics were to answer this question honestly, it would become clear that the seminar’s views on the general nature of the Gospels are shared by virtually all critical scholars, even though many of them disagree with the seminar’s specific results.

Several critics complain that members of the Jesus Seminar are “self-selected.” But this criticism is puzzling. Self-selection can only be a criticism on the assumption that membership in this kind of group should not occur by self-selection. How then? By invitation only? The Jesus Seminar is open to anyone with proper academic credentials. It has no way to exclude anyone who is qualified and who wants to join. But what if membership were 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.³

This brings us to the criticism that the seminar’s composition is such that its members do not represent mainstream scholarship. Luke Johnson asserts that members of the Jesus Seminar “by no means represent the cream of NT scholarship in this country…Most of the participants are in relatively undistinguished academic positions.”⁴

Well, wait just a minute. Since I don’t wish to embarrass anyone, I will use myself as an example. I am not in a “relatively undistinguished” academic position. I am in an absolutely undistinguished one. I’ve yet to meet anyone at Society of Biblical Literature meetings who’s even heard of the college where I teach. I teach eight courses a year, seven of 021them introductory courses. My college grants no sabbaticals. I have very little time for scholarly research and writing. I am, in short, an academic working stiff—which makes me like most biblical scholars in this country. I am much more representative of the rank and file of mainstream biblical scholars than are those in distinguished positions on the graduate faculties of elite universities.⁵

Ben Witherington has a different criticism: None of the members of the Jesus Seminar is a Fundamentalist. 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.⁶ 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 Fundamentalist 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 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 involve questioning the historical reliability of the gospel material, but rather fitting it all into a harmonized composite.

Consider another of Witherington’s remarks. Referring to the seminar’s finding that only 18 percent of the sayings can be confidently traced to the historical Jesus, Witherington concludes that the seminar “rejects the majority of the evidence (82 percent)…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.”⁷ But we are not “rejecting” any evidence; we are making judgments about what kind of evidence each saying represents. Some sayings are evidence for the historical Jesus, and some are evidence for early Christians who attributed their own words to Jesus.

One aspect of the Jesus Seminar’s work that consistently attracts attention is its commitment to investigating all early Christian sources regardless of their canonical status. Since the seminar gives careful attention to the Gospel of Thomas (hence the title of the seminar’s book containing the sayings of Jesus: The Five Gospels), all critics discuss the seminar’s treatment of Thomas. 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.”⁸ 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.”⁹ 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 the Gospel of 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 reworked a lot (but not all) of its material accordingly. But how does this make Thomas different from any other gospel? Isn’t John’s reworking of the Jesus tradition just as radical as Thomas’s? Is there some assumption by critics that Thomas’s Gnosticizing interpretation is so persasive that earlier, non-Gnostic material cannot be distinguished? In fact, the editorial modifications that refect a Gnostic perspective are usually utterly obvious, almost ham-fisted, and are easily detachable from earlier material.

Oddly enough, the seminar’s investigation of the Gospel of Thomas has resulted in the confirmation of the authenticity of numerous sayings in the canonical Gospels, a fact that critics of the seminar’s use of Thomas have completely overlooked. Most critics agree with the seminar that some of the sayings in Thomas are early and are not dependent on their parallels in the canonical Gospels.¹⁰ This is very important, for it means that both the seminar and nearly all its critics agree that Thomas cannot be left out of historical Jesus research.¹¹ Of the sayings unique to Thomas, the seminar voted none red and only two pink. Judging from the seminar’s results, Thomas tells us almost nothing new about Jesus—nothing that we didn’t already know from the 022other gospels. Nevertheless, the seminar’s findings on Thomas show that this gospel does make a valuable contribution to our understanding of Jesus. If the seminar is right in its assessment that Thomas is an independent source (as many, perhaps most, critical scholars agree it is), then Thomas provides multiple independent attestation^d for a number of otherwise singly attested canonical sayings. By my count, there are 32 such items. This means that the Jesus Seminar’s use of Thomas has the result of increasing our confidence in the historical reliability of a good deal of canonical material. This needs to be appreciated because a few critics (like Luke Johnson) presume that the seminar’s attention to Thomas challenges the authority of the canon. The reality is precisely the opposite: Thomas has helped to confirm the authenticity of material in the Gospels.

An important finding of the Jesus Seminar that is widely derided is its conclusion that only 18 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus are colored red or pink. All seminar critics use this figure to show how skeptical the seminar is.

But consider what this 18 percent is 18 percent of. The 90 red and pink sayings are 18 percent of all the sayings attributed to Jesus in all Christian texts from the first three centuries, including gospels the seminar unanimously voted black in their entirety, such as the Dialogue of the Savior, the Apocryphon of James, the Gospel of Mary, and the Infancy Gospel of Thomas. Regarding the Gospel of John, most Jesus scholars outside the seminar would agree with us that few, if any, sayings in it are demonstrably authentic. So, if we consider only the sayings in Matthew, Mark and Luke, the percentage of red and pink sayings is a great deal higher than 18 percent.

But there is more to the equation than this. A number of the members of the seminar, myself included, treat the gray material¹²—and there is a lot of gospel material that the seminar has colored gray—as an expanding fund from which to increase the database for information about the historical Jesus beyond the red and pink minimum. The only items excluded in principle from the database are those colored black. If you include some of the gray sayings—not all of them, but some—the amount of authentic material approaches, if it does not exceed, 50 percent.

The rancorous tone of some of the seminar’s critics reflects a belief that it is proper not only to attack opponents’ ideas but also to insult them personally, by impugning their intellectual honesty, their moral integrity and even their religious commitments. Perhaps I am saddened more than others by this verbal abuse because I am a member of the group at which the attacks are aimed. So I leave it to you to decide whether language like this brings shame on those at whom it is directed or on those from whom it comes.

The pettiness and nastiness of some of the criticisms of the seminar shows that the seminar’s work has hit a nerve. The issues at stake are more than academic, so it is natural that some will have strong feelings about them. That is no excuse, however, for debasing the discussion with personal attacks. Even if a few readers relish the spectacle of biblical scholars slinging mud at one another, incivility in scholarly discourse distracts attention and energy from the real task, that of increasing our understanding.

Those who participate in debates over the historical Jesus, regardless of their particular religious beliefs, should want to increase our understanding of Jesus—out of respect for Jesus and the inheritance he has bequeathed to us. Jesus’ teaching about how we should relate to opponents is unambigious. Honest disagreement is not to be avoided, for it can lead to greater understanding. What we disagree ahout is indeed important, but so is how we disagree. We should all conduct this debate about Jesus in a manner that honors his teaching and his memory.

A longer and more detailed version of this essay is available on the Jesus Seminar home page: http://www.rci.rutgers.edu/~religion/jseminar/jsem.html.

The Jesus Seminar has received a good deal of attention from scholars, most of it negative. The polemical rhetoric of some of the seminar’s critics is, in all honesty, the ugliest I have ever encountered in scholarly writing.