THE GOSPEL TRUTH?

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By contrast, they shunned passages that they felt represented post-Jesus rationalizing by his disciples. That eliminated most language used to contextualize or connect; borrowings from the Old Testament (including most of what Jesus said on the Cross); and sayings expressed in explicitly Christian terms. Also taboo were monologues by Jesus to which there could have been no witness, verses expressing foreknowledge of events after his death and any claims on his part to be the Messiah. And one final admonition: "When in sufficient doubt, leave it out."

And leave it out they did. According to the The Five Gospels, only 18% of the words ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels may have actually been spoken by him. John was eliminated completely; only one sentence in Mark met muster. Of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew, the only words in red were "Our Father" and "Love your enemies," and four other brief sayings.

Last year the Seminar moved on from verses attributed by the Gospels to Jesus to descriptions of events. The as yet unpublished results were made available to participants this month in a thick spiral notebook. The Seminar found all the Nativity descriptions to be inauthentic except for the name of Jesus' mother (Mary). No miracle working made the cut, although Jesus is generally credited with having healed some of the sick. He had a disciple named Mary Magdalene, entered a synagogue at least once and met some Pharisees. As regards the Passion and Easter: all descriptions of Jesus' trial are deemed inauthentic, along with his Palm Sunday statement that he is the Messiah. On the authority of the Jewish historian Josephus, the Seminar records as historical the high priest Caiaphas' denunciation of Jesus to Pilate. When the next book comes out, the Resurrection, predictably enough, will appear in black print ("There's been some mistake").

Crossan's wish that the message reach the public was granted. It would be hard to find a newspaper in America that hasn't done a story on the Seminar over the past decade. That's obvious upon reading Luke Timothy Johnson, who seems to quote most of them in his book-length, outraged response to the Seminar, The Real Jesus.

"People have no idea how fraudulent people who claim to be scholars can be," says Johnson. Stocky, graying, slightly owl-like, he teaches New Testament at Atlanta's Emory. Like Crossan, Johnson took priestly orders as a young man but gave up the collar in order to marry. But Johnson never broke with the church, and as time went on, he became progressively more alarmed at the work of his fellow scholars.

Crossan and other liberal Jesus scholars, he believed, were exploring avenues "subtly contemptuous of the convictions of faith." As long as the debate had been quarantined in the corridors of the academy, he had held his peace. The advent of the Jesus Seminar, however, marked a major outbreak of what Johnson considered a dangerous contagion. "Americans generally have an abysmal level of knowledge of the Bible," he says. "In this world of mass ignorance, to have headlines proclaim that this or that fact about [Jesus] has been declared untrue by supposedly scientific inquiry has the effect of gospel. There is no basis on which most people can counter these authoritative-sounding statements."