THE GOSPEL TRUTH?

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So he provided one. With gusto. Over his book's 177 pages, he calls the Seminar "a 10-year exercise in academic self-promotion" and a "self-indulgent charade" and accuses Funk of "grandiosity and hucksterism." More substantively, not only does he find the Seminar wildly unrepresentative of scholarly consensus on the New Testament today; he thinks it "extraordinarily difficult" to avoid the impression that it is not hostile "to any traditional understanding of Jesus as defined by the historic creeds of Christianity."

The book's first part is devoted to a savage critique of the Seminar and its methodology. The group, writes Johnson, was "self-selected" not on grounds of quality of scholarship (he notes pointedly that one of its members is Paul Verhoeven, whose credit as director of the movie Showgirls is far more recent than his Ph.D.), but on prior agreement on a goal. The goal, he maintains, is to discover a Jesus devoid of anything "mythical" or concerned with the actual possibility of a world to come, but reflective instead of the countercultural attitude favored by liberal academics. Although Johnson approves of some of the criteria the group applies to Scripture, he is derisive of its elimination of most long passages (members of oral cultures, after all, are renowned for memorizing epics) and fails to find a historical basis for its preference for quotes that flout the established order. Most important, he is dismayed by what he calls the Seminar's refusal to consider the Gospels' general "pattern" in favor of isolated passages. "What is left," he writes, "is a small pile of pieces."

Pieces which the unscrupulous can then reassemble as they see fit. Although it is impossible to prove any of the Gospels false, so little of them can be historically proved to be true, Johnson suggests, that by emphasizing that fact, scholars like Crossan and Funk have put themselves in the position of "jigsaw-puzzle solvers who are presented with 27 pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle and find that only six or seven of the pieces even fit together." A reasonable person, he maintains, would "put those pieces together, make some guess about what that part of the puzzle might be about and then modestly decline overspeculation about the pieces that don't fit." Instead, "these solvers ... throw away the central piece ... and then bring in pieces from other puzzles [i.e., apocryphal manuscripts]. Finally, they take this jumble of pieces, sketch an outline of what the [whole thing] ought to look like on the basis of some universal puzzle pattern, and proceed to reshape the pieces until they fit the pattern." Inevitably, he writes, that pre-determined pattern is dictated by the puzzlers' sociological or political prejudices.