First Glance
“Did Jesus actually say that?” This is the question New Testament scholars in the Jesus Seminar are asking. The Jesus Seminar has spent nearly five years scrutinizing every word in the Gospels attributed to Jesus. After analyzing each phrase by established criteria to determine its historical authenticity, the group votes, rating the degree of authenticity by color (black, gray, pink and red), from black for “almost certainly not” authentic to red for “yes, almost certainly” authentic. The goal of the Jesus Seminar is to publish (in 1991) The New Red-Letter Edition of the Five Gospels, in which the words of Jesus will be printed in the four colors that correspond to the seminar’s voting. In “What Did Jesus Really Say?” seminar spokesperson Marcus Borg explains the criteria scholars have developed—over the past two hundred years—for making very sensitive judgments about the sayings of Jesus.
Borg chairs the religious studies department of Oregon State University and holds a Ph.D. from Oxford University. He has written two scholarly books on the historical Jesus, Conflict, Holiness and Politics in the Teaching of Jesus (Edwin Mellen, 1984) and Jesus: A New Vision (Harper & Row; 1987). Adela Yarbro Collins reviews Jesus: A New Vision in Bible Books; this controversial book portrays Jesus not only as spiritual, but also as a passionately political social reformer.
In the first interview ever published in BR, “Israel’s Emergence in Canaan,” BR editor Hershel Shanks talks to the controversial biblical scholar Norman K. Gottwald. The co-inventor of the “peasant’s revolt” or, as Gottwald now calls it, the “social revolution” theory of Israel’s emergence, Gottwald maintains that the Israelites originated largely as a Canaanite underclass who revolted against their rulers. In this wide-ranging interview, Gottwald discusses the origins, nuances and consequences of his “social revolution” theory, examines the development of Israelite religion, looks at the Exodus tradition, and explains the influence of Marxism on his historical studies.
Since receiving his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1953, Gottwald has taught and lectured at such leading institutions as Princeton, Brown and Brandeis. He has served as the W. W. White Professor of Biblical Studies at New York Theological Seminary since 1980. In addition to his many papers in scholarly journals, he has contributed articles to The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible and to Encyclopaedia Judaica. The most recent of his six books are The Tribes of Yahweh: A Sociology of the Religion of Liberated Israel, 1250–1050 B.C.E. (Orbis, 1979) and The Hebrew Bible: A Socio-Literary Introduction (Fortress, 1985).
“The children struggled in [Rebecca’s] womb,” Genesis 25:22 says of the prenatal Esau and Jacob. So begins one of the classic tales of sibling rivalry in the Bible. Powerful as the biblical account is, the story of these two ill-matched brothers gains even more drama and immediacy in the Midrash, the vast body of rabbinic scriptural commentary that developed at the same time as the great Talmudic legal codes in the early centuries of the Common Era. Pinchas H. Peli, recently deceased Bible scholar and philosopher of Judaism, helps us wade into this great sea of Jewish literature with “Responses to Jew-Hatred.” Peli shows how the ancient rabbis turned the Jacob and Esau story into a paradigm of Jew-gentile relations and in the process sought to relieve their despair as a conquered and often hated people with an “inner literature” of continued faith and ever-present hope for redemption.
Few contemporary authors are as qualified to guide a reader through rabbinic literature as was the late Pinchas Peli. Descended from a long line of rabbis, Peli was equally at ease with ancient rabbinic law and lore and with contemporary Jewish and secular philosophy. The most recent of his 11 books are Torah Today: A Renewed Encounter with Scripture and Shabbat Shalom (both published by B’nai B’rith Books). Before his untimely death in April, at age 59, he was professor of Jewish studies and chairman of the department of Hebrew literature at the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.
When Joanne Swenson was assistant minister at Boston’s Old South Church from 1983 to 1987, she couldn’t understand why a large number of faculty and students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as scientifically oriented a group as anyone could find, regularly attended an evangelical congregation just blocks away from her own more liberal, mainline church. The paradox of leading researchers and students attending a church whose view of the world would seem so at odds with modern science led Swenson to important insights on the very different views of God each church was offering its worshippers. It also led her to see strengths and weaknesses in each approach, as she explains in this month’s My View column, “Neither the liberal Nor the Conservative God Is Adequate.”
Swenson was ordained as a minister of the United Church of Christ in 1982. She is completing her doctorate in theology at Harvard Divinity School and provides preaching and adult education at several churches in the Portland, Maine, area.
In “Canon: Choosing the Books of the New Testament,” George Howard explores the obscure history of how—and why—some early Christian works came to be accepted as part of the Christian Bible while others were excluded. Professor of religion at the University of Georgia, Howard is the author of The Gospel of Matthew According to a Primitive Hebrew Text (Mercer University Press, 1987), a subject presented to BR readers in “Was the Gospel of Matthew Originally Written in Hebrew?” BR 02:04.
Thanks to the largesse of John Paul Getty II, 18 illuminations wrenched from a precious 13th-century Bible have been returned to the Bible’s rightful owner, the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore. “Bible for a King,” traces the story of the peripatetic Conradin Bible.