Religion: Who Was Jesus?

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According to this method, a text can be deemed reliable only if it contrasts with the thinking of both contemporary Jews and the first Christians; the presumption is that a saying that sounds odd or unique is unlikely to have been fabricated by the Gospel writer. For example, the hero in the famous parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10: 30-35) is not a Jew but a detested foreigner with a false religion. This surprising element makes the story distinct and, in the opinion of the Jesus Seminar, more likely to be authentic, especially since it emphasizes that the kingdom of God belongs to the outcast.

But critics of this methodology complain that it produces a Jesus who is uprooted from his Jewish surroundings and at odds with early Christianity. The Jerusalem School is particularly distressed. In 1986 it issued a stinging two- page statement tearing into the Jesus Seminar for discarding anything in the Gospels that it considered Hebraic in origin.

Another area of controversy focuses on apparent contradictions among the Gospels. For instance, while Luke and Mark report that Jesus categorically forbade divorce, Matthew says he made an exception in cases of adultery. Liberal scholars would say that one version got the facts wrong. Conservatives treat such discrepancies as either insignificant or readily explainable. "It is fair to say that all the alleged inconsistencies among the Gospels have received at least plausible resolutions," concludes an international panel of 34 Evangelical scholars in the 1987 report The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.

Most of the methods of analysis used by liberal New Testament critics represent an attempt to be scientific and rigorous about historical fact. But to many theologians, that effort is wrong-minded from the very start. Any approach that begins by rejecting the miraculous and the supernatural "has no hope of coming to terms with the texts," argues Oden of Drew Theological School. "Science must stick to its own field of competence," concurs Monsignor Richard K. Malone, a professor of moral theology at the Pope John XXIII National Seminary in Massachusetts.

Others complain that the methods used by critics can never be as objective as they sometimes claim. This was a major charge leveled by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, the Vatican's doctrinal overseer, in an important U.S. address last January. Ratzinger said many scholars make the "false claim" that they have found exact scientific methods for showing how the traditions about Jesus developed. He insists that such work is, by its nature, subjective, relative and arbitrary. "Pure objectivity is an absurd abstraction," says the Cardinal. "It is not the uninvolved ((person)) who comes to knowledge. Rather, interest itself is a requirement for the possibility of coming to know."

Ratzinger's attack was not just another academic lecture, since he speaks officially for the church. Liberal New Testament scholarship, with its shredding of the Gospels, poses distinct problems for organized religion. Most Protestant groups in the West have been deeply divided by it. Indeed, America's huge Southern Baptist Convention is close to civil war on the subject and is squeezing out employees who express the slightest twinge of doubt about Gospel fact.