THE GOSPEL TRUTH?

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There are, after all, four Gospels, whose actual writing, most scholars have come to acknowledge, was done not by the Apostles but by their anonymous followers (or their followers' followers). Each presented a somewhat different picture of Jesus' life. The earliest appeared to have been written some 40 years after his Crucifixion. Which was most accurate? Even Luther had a favorite Gospel (John) and appeared to regard the rest as less essential. And starting with the 1835 critique The Life of Jesus by David Friedrich Strauss, apostles of the new scientific method raised additional questions with increasing urgency: Might faith have caused the writers of all four Gospels to embellish on actual fact? Did the politics of the early church cause them to edit or add to Jesus' story? Which parts of the New Testament were likely to be straight reportage rather than pious mythmaking?

Depressingly few, the so-called higher critics found. There are only two or three references to Jesus in six pagan or Jewish sources, providing precious little corroborating data. Even if the standard for authenticity were agreement between the Gospels, there is less of that than one might imagine: the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan are just two of several parables that appear in only one version. By 1926, Rudolf Bultmann of Germany's University of Marburg, the foremost Protestant scholar in the field, threw up his hands: he called for a halt to inquiries regarding the Jesus of history. So unreliable were the Gospel accounts that "we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus." He advised good Christian scholars to concentrate on the Jesus of faith. But, as it turns out, they didn't.

The Jesus Seminar "was nothing new," says John Dominic Crossan, its co-chair, recalling the invitation he received from University of Montana professor Robert Funk to start the group. "I'd been working on the historical Jesus since 1969. What was new to me was his argument that there was an ethical necessity to let the public in on what [we] were doing." Crossan's voice still betrays the 62-year-old's origins in Tipperary, Ireland. He moved to America, joined the Servite order and was ordained in 1957. He left the priesthood to marry in 1968, but he admits his departure was probably inevitable owing to "constant trouble" over his biblical views.

Crossan was deep into what might be called the postmodern state of Bible studies. Experts had long considered sources for the Gospels undreamed of by Luther: passages from Luke and Matthew, for instance, that did not reflect the earlier written Mark but corresponded to one another were ascribed to a document known as Q, a bare-bones collection of sayings. In the 1980s, radicals took a large step farther. They suggested that only Q and similarly minimalist early documents, real and notional, might constitute authentic reporting; the rest of the Gospels was mostly tacked-on religious revisionism.