[Dialogue] 4/12/12, Spong: On Being Honored by the Jesus Seminar

[Ellie Stock]

     HOMEPAGE        MY PROFILE        ESSAY ARCHIVE       MESSAGE BOARDS       CALENDAR









On Being Honored by the Jesus Seminar
In the early spring of this year the Jesus Seminar paid me a special tribute at its meeting held in Salem, Oregon.  First, I was invited to give two lectures to the assembled hosts of scholars and guests on “Changing the Christian Paradigm from Salvation to Wholeness.”  Next, I was featured in an hour long, one on one public interview conducted by Dr. Brandon Scott of the faculty of Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, which focused on my biography, my career and especially my work in those areas which have to do with changing patterns in sexuality. Finally, at the end of this gathering, six of the Fellows conducted a two-hour seminar on my contributions to Christianity and to the religious life of this nation.  I was deeply honored.
The brainchild of Dr. Robert Funk, a protégé of Rudolf Bultmann, who is, in my opinion, the greatest New Testament scholar of the 20th century, the Jesus Seminar has been in operation since 1985.  Its stated purpose is to open critical biblical scholarship to the general American public.  It began with about 28 charter members and in its history has involved a rotating membership of as many as 200 scripture scholars from across the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia and New Zealand.  Generally these scholars are academics teaching in university departments of religion, though some are on the faculties of theological seminaries.  The focus of the Jesus Seminar, however is not to uphold doctrinal matters or ecclesiastical concerns, it is first and foremost to be engaged in and to publicize contemporary, competent biblical scholarship and to make that scholarship available to the average man or woman in the streets and in the pews of our churches.  The seminar is also committed to a willingness to pursue truth no matter where it leads which frequently brings its Fellows and the Seminar itself into conflict with both traditional hierarchical figures and security seeking worshipers, who believe that truth must always confirm their previously arrived at position.
American churchgoers are generally not aware of the depth, reality and scope of the current academic debates among Christian scholars.  Most would be surprised to learn that there are no reputable and recognized biblical scholars, either Catholic or Protestant, who today treat the birth stories of Jesus, found in Matthew and Luke, as literal history.  These stories, written some 80 to 95 years after the birth of Jesus, were not created to tell us how Jesus was born, but to show what his followers experienced in him in his adult life. They are not history.  There are also very few recognized Christian scholars who are willing to support the thesis that the biblical narratives regarding the resurrection of Jesus have anything to do with a deceased body returning to the physical life of this world after having been dead and buried for three days.  Biblical scholars also recognize such things as the fact that no miracle stories are attached to the memory of Jesus before the eighth decade, and that the most popular of Jesus’ parables, such as the Good Samaritan, the Prodigal Son and Lazarus and the Rich Man, are found only in Luke, a late ninth to early tenth decade piece of writing and appear to have been unknown to all other New Testament sources.  There are many other points that I could use to illustrate the enormous gap between the Christian academy and the church pew, but these will suffice to make the point.  Things that are commonplace in the academy are thought of in the pews as highly controversial, divisive, radical and even heretical.  To address this gap is part of the reason that the Jesus Seminar was established.  The leaders of the Jesus Seminar see no reason that faith has to be combined with biblical ignorance and believe that the people who worship in our churches ought to be given access to the finest scholarship available.  Only a faith system that is both insecure and manipulative would want to keep its members in the dark.
The first major project of the Jesus Seminar was to seek to determine how many of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were in fact his authentic words and how many were sayings attributed to him by later Christian generations.  After years of rigorous debate the Seminar forced its Fellows to come to a corporate conclusion by voting with four colored beads.  If a Fellow believed that a saying attributed to Jesus in the New Testament was in fact the authentic voice of the Jesus of history, he or she voted “red.”  If the saying was thought to be close to the Jesus of history, but had been modified or changed to reflect the concerns of the Christian community at the time of its writing, he or she voted “pink.”  If the saying was believed to have been more the creation of the Christian community than of Jesus himself and reflected little or no possibility that Jesus could ever have spoken these words, he or she voted “gray.”  If the Fellow concluded that the Jesus of history could not possibly have said the words attributed to him, he or she voted “black.”  In 1993, the Seminar published its color-coded conclusions in a book entitled The Five Gospels, in which the Seminar’s scholars had added the Gospel of Thomas to the canon of the New Testament.  This book, co-edited by Robert Funk and longtime Fellow, Roy Hoover, a Professor of Religion at Whitman College, announced the consensus of the Seminar scholars that approximately 16% of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were considered authentic enough to fall into the red or pink categories, which of course means that 84% of the Jesus sayings in the New Testament were judged to be in the unauthentic gray or black categories.  Only one saying in the Fourth Gospel, for example, was accorded a pink rating (John 4:1).  All the others were gray or black, mostly black.
Of course, their work was controversial and denominational teachers, feeling the threat to their authority from the scholars of the Seminar, began to strike back in typical fashion.  If you cannot deal with the message, you attack the messenger.  Television evangelist, Pat Robertson, condemning the Seminar, accused them of saying that “Jesus had a ghostwriter.”  N. T. (Tom) Wright, an English evangelical and a sophisticated fundamentalist, made a living attacking the Jesus Seminar in both his lectures and in his writing with clever, but insubstantial barbs.  Many of the denominational teachers, who had not been invited into membership in the Seminar, because their scholarship did not merit it, attacked the scholars of the Seminar as “liberal elitists” and claimed that they themselves had chosen not to be members because of the Seminar’s non-traditional bias. These teachers appeared not to recognize that there is no such thing as “liberal” biblical scholarship or “conservative” biblical scholarship, there is only “competent” or “incompetent” biblical scholarship. No one, who claims the role of a scholar, can put scholarship into the service of any ideology.  Scholarship is dedicated only to the discovery of truth.  Scholarship is absent when religious propaganda is quoted, as is so often the case in the current political debate, when the content of the Bible and various doctrinal positions of some churches are used to bolster a narrow political and religious agenda.  The traditional prejudice against women, once again rampant in our nation, and the unwillingness to be open to and welcoming of gay and lesbian persons are the present, popular illustrations of this.  Proponents of these views, not surprisingly, constantly reveal a woefully incompetent and a profoundly uninformed reading of the biblical texts.  These violent twistings of the scriptures would have no appeal at all in our society had the Bible not been hidden under the reams of propaganda, masquerading as informed biblical scholarship, for centuries.  The work of the Jesus Seminar is thus crucial to the well being and the future integrity of both the political discourse and the Christian faith.
In the 1990’s, Robert Funk invited me to become a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar. I was the first Fellow not to be a professional academic.  I was a parish priest and a bishop.  In the course of my career, I have received significant academic recognition and have lectured and taught at some of the leading academic institutions of the world, like Cambridge and Oxford in the United Kingdom and Harvard, Yale, Union (NYC) and at the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley, California, in the United States.  My life’s focus, however, has not been on academia, but on those people who occupy the pews of our churches.  While being a successful author and possessing a number of honorary doctorates, I did not have an earned PhD, which was normally regarded as a pre-requisite for becoming a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar.”  Nonetheless, the Seminar honored me by accepting me to its membership.  I have loved my association with them over the years.  I have participated in their debates and deliberations.  I have been invited to address some of their largest gatherings, including the 2004 event called “The Jesus Seminar at Times Square.”  The Seminar has adopted some of the perspectives that I have offered and they have under-girded my career with their incisive scholarship.  I have previously been recognized by them in several ways.  I was chosen for membership in the “David Friedrich Strauss Society of Biblical Scholars,” a society named for an early 19th century German New Testament scholar, who first brought the findings of the academy to the attention of the people of Europe.  Later I was given the “John A. T. Robinson Award” for “Courage and Integrity in Theology.”
I was deeply touched by each of these honors.  To close the gap between the academy and the people in the pews has been both the goal of the Seminar and the primary ambition of my career.  The Jesus Seminar has been a major force in enabling me to fulfill that vocation.  I have many friends today among the Fellows of the Seminar and I believe they have a new respect for the willingness of the clergy and lay people that I represent to be engaged in biblical scholarship.
I am amazed at how many competent pastors and thinking lay people are still unaware of the resources the Jesus Seminar has available.  They offer to the churches of the Christian world a “Jesus Seminar on the Road” program, associate memberships to pastors who want to be in on the debates and the best quarterly theological journal I know, called “The Fourth R” If my readers want more information email with your request to members at westarinstiitute.org.
~John Shelby Spong
Read the essay online here.





Question & Answer
Jean, via the Internet, writes:
Question:
In regard to the later additions to the Jesus story in each of the gospels, can these be traced to the source “Q?” I have heard of this source, but do not know much about it.  I would appreciate some explanation of what “Q” is and what you think in regard to my question. 

 
Answer:
Dear Jean, 

The Q hypothesis (from the German word “Quelle” which mean “source”) was developed in the early 20th century when the discovery was made that both Matthew and Luke had used the gospel of Mark in the writing of their gospels.  Matthew was more dependent on Mark, incorporating about 90% of this first gospel into his own work.  Luke was a little less dependent, using about 50% of Mark. 

When scholars lifted Mark’s content out of these later gospels, they noticed that there were in both Matthew and Luke a number of verses that were identical or nearly identical in them that were still in the two, but were not from Mark.  This caused them to speculate that Matthew and Luke must have had a second source, one other than Mark from which they both also drew.  This would account for the non-Marcan similarities in both Matthew and Luke.  The theory became very popular especially in North America and isolating the Q material, referring to it as “the earliest now lost gospel,” gave it a certain allure.  Some scholars even wrote on the theology of the Q  writer. When this material is isolated, it includes primarily some sayings of Jesus.  It has no birth stories, no miracle stories, no parables and no account of either the crucifixion or the resurrection.  It is even referred to as “a sayings gospel.”  The Jesus Seminar is, on the whole, a strong advocate of the Q hypothesis. 

There is, however, a different way to think of the Q document other than as a separate source.  Matthew could have been the one who expanded Mark and Luke could therefore have had the benefit of both gospels.  Luke appears to have preferred Mark, but he also from time to time incorporated some of Matthew’s expansion of Mark into his gospel.  This would account for the non-Marcan similarity between Matthew and Luke.  That is the position that Michael Donald Goulder, the late English, New Testament scholar at the University of Birmingham developed in the prologue to his book entitled, Luke: A New Paradigm, which I believe is the best commentary on Luke that I have ever read.  If Goulder is right, Matthew is the author of Q and its early origin must be dismissed.  The weight of New Testament scholarship in America is strongly on the side of Q as a now lost document.  European New Testament scholarship is not nearly as sure. 

Many of the conclusions I draw from the New Testament would be strengthened if I accepted the Q hypothesis at face value.  I am, however, still not sure that Goulder is not right. 

~John Shelby Spong





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