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Home > Magazines > Bible Review > December 1993

Jesus in Four Colors

To what extent are the Gospels historical—or nonhistorical—and what does one do with the nonhistorical parts?

By Marcus J. Borg

An event in the history of Jesus scholarship is about to occur. In December, accompanied by considerable media attention and a major advertising campaign, a new multicolor edition of the Gospels will be published: The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.1 The feature of this edition that will attract the most attention is its presentation of the sayings of Jesus in four colors: red, pink, gray and black. The colors represent a descending scale of scholarly judgment about whether a given saying is “authentic” (that is, goes back to Jesus himself), or is more the […]

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Footnotes

1.

See Marcus Borg, “What Did Jesus Really Say?” BR 05:05.

Endnotes

1.

Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993). The fifth gospel is the Gospel of Thomas, discovered in Egypt in 1945. In addition to containing the texts of the five Gospels printed in four colors, the over-500-page volume will include an extended introduction and commentary.

2.

Some in the scholarly World have also disparaged the seminar’s work, usually on the grounds that one cannot settle historical questions by voting. Of course, that is true. What voting can do is to measure the degree of scholarly consensus. Although that consensus will change over time, the voice provides a useful measurement of where the discipline presently stands.