Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar -- By: William Lane Craig

Journal: Faith and Mission
Volume: FM 15:2 (Spring 1998)
Article: Rediscovering the Historical Jesus: Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar
Author: William Lane Craig


Rediscovering the Historical Jesus:
Presuppositions and Pretensions of the Jesus Seminar

William Lane Craig

Philosopher and Theologian
1805 Danforth Drive
Marietta, GA 30062–5554

Lecture 1 of the Carver-Barnes Lectures
Delivered at Binkley Chapel
Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary
Wake Forest, NC, September 24-25, 1996

In 1985 a prominent New Testament scholar named Robert Funk founded a think tank in Southern California which he called the Jesus Seminar. The ostensible purpose of the Seminar was to uncover the historical person Jesus of Nazareth using the best methods of scientific, biblical criticism. In Funk’s view the historical Jesus has been overlaid by Christian legend, myth, and metaphysics and thus scarcely resembled the Christ figure presented in the Gospels and worshipped by the church today. The goal of the Seminar is to strip away these layers and to recover the authentic Jesus who really lived and taught.

In so doing, Funk hopes to ignite a revolution which will bring to an end what he regards as an age of ignorance. He blasts the religious establishment for “not allowing the intelligence of high scholarship to pass through pastors and priests to a hungry laity.”1 He sees the Jesus Seminar as a means of disabusing laymen of the mythological figure they have been taught to worship and bringing them face to face with the real Jesus of history.

The degree to which the Gospels have allegedly distorted the historical Jesus is evident in the edition of the Gospels published by the Jesus Seminar. Called The Five Gospels because it includes the so-called Gospel of Thomas along with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, their version prints in red only those words of Jesus which the fellows of the Seminar determine to be authentic, actually spoken by Jesus. As it turns out, fewer than 20 percent of the sayings attributed to Jesus are printed in red.

According to the Seminar’s reconstruction, the real, historical Jesus turns out to have been a sort of itinerant, social critic, the Jewish equivalent of a Greek cynic philosopher. He never claimed to be the Son of God, to forgive sins, or to inaugurate

a new covenant between God and man. His crucifixion was an accident; His corpse was probably thrown into a shallow dirt grave where it rotted away or was eaten by wild dogs.

Now if these conclusions are correct, we who are Christians today are the victims of a massive delusion. To continue to worship Jesus today in light of these conclusions would be either idolatry or mythology—i...

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