THE GOSPEL TRUTH?

JUDAS DIDN'T DO IT. OR AT LEAST THE CHARGES wouldn't stick. That was the decision of the judges (admittedly a little after the fact) in the Flamingo Resort Hotel Ballroom in Santa Rosa, California, late last year. Of course, there was testimony against him, primarily from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But that foursome is notoriously unreliable: the judges at the Flamingo already had to throw out the Evangelists' testimony on the Nativity, the Resurrection, the Sermon on the Mount and any number of other cases. So, as regards the matter of Judas, although there was a good deal of debate--some people felt the evidence showed he did do it, some people felt he did it with help from other Apostles, some people felt he was simply a literary device--the 50 panelists assembled at the Flamingo agreed that it was highly unlikely that for 30 pieces of silver, Judas Iscariot kissed his master, Jesus Christ, and thus betrayed him to the authorities to be crucified.

Sacrilege? Well, the Jesus Seminar is at it again. It is Holy Week, and some 1.5 billion Christians around the globe are celebrating the Passion and the Resurrection of their Lord, who died on the Cross for their sins and rose on the third day. Simultaneously, however, a book called The Acts of Jesus is in the editing process. It will repeat the assertion, published by the 75-person, self-appointed Seminar three years ago, that close historical analysis of the Gospels exposes most of them as inauthentic; that, by inference, most Christians' picture of Christ may be radically misguided. That their Jesus, in fact, "is an imaginative theological construct, into which have been woven traces of that enigmatic sage from Nazareth--traces that cry out for recognition and liberation from the firm grip of those whose faith overpowered their memories."

The issue of the so-called historical Jesus is not exactly new: it roiled the consciences of European academics for 150 years and contributed to American Protestant schisms in the 1920s. But until recently, much of the current generation of churchgoers remained blissfully unaware of its tangles. No longer. In the past decade, iconoclastic and liberal biblical scholars have actively sought to publicize their views, breaking them out of the rarefied academic atmospheres where they have incubated. These radical exegetes have now stirred spirited rebuttals from conservatives and traditionalists who want to make sure the faithful hear their side of the argument. For example, the Seminar's 1993 book The Five Gospels has already provoked a savage counterattack by Luke Timothy Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University and the author of the recently published The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. "Things of fundamental importance," Johnson thunders, "are being distorted."