Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium

Rating:
Summary: Separating Fact From Fiction
Review: Honest to Jesus is a no nonsense book that will delight the serious reader and quester for the historical Jesus. Out with mythology, out with theology, out with canonical boundaries. The There will be none of these in Funk's historical journey back to Nazareth to recover the identity of the real Yeshua.

Bob Funk, biblical scholar and founder of the Westar Institute which sponsors the Jesus Seminar project, has written a book that gives the layperson an inside look at what critical scholarship has unveiled thus far about the man we today know as Jesus. Funk avers that the Jesus whom Christianity has appropriated as its founder, god, messiah, savior, redeemer, miracle worker, etc. is hardly a good picture of the man who lived almost two millennia ago. The Christian Jesus/Christ is larger than life, a theologized and mythologized version. Funk asserts that the Apostle's Creed glaringly points to the importance the Church has placed on the life of Jesus--there is no mention of his life at all apart from his virgin birth, death and resurrection. The Creed turned Jesus into a god-man.

Funk's quest is to find the Jesus before all the layers of mythology and theology were piled on top of him. The quest for the historical Jesus is to determine what Jesus really said and did, what his vision of God was, what Jesus was trying to direct our attention to. Ultimately Christianity is not about Christ or Jesus but about God....

Rating:
Summary: Cutting, faithless, scholarly look at Jesus
Review: Honest to Jesus is an interesting, energetic, and riveting book for anybody who is concerned about asking questions that would scare the pants off of Rev. Smiley in the average orthodox Christian pulpit. If you're not up to the challenge and are totally satisfied with your version of "faith," you won't want to pick up this book. Be prepared to lose some sleep. The book depressed me and energized me, all at the same time. Funk pushes the limit of scholarship to uncover the historical Jesus. However, be warned: there is more to the historical Jesus than what Funk suggests.

There is a lot that we don't and can't know, being human and having a finite lifespan. Funk proposes that historicity is the answer to nearly every problem and intellectual question. To this end, Honest to Jesus will stimulate minds, but dull hearts in the same time. Be ready to rethink your views on God's Kingdom - and Funk's, while you're at it.

Rating:
Summary: Tracing Jesus On A Round Trip Between Nicea And Nazareth
Review: In HONEST TO JESUS Robert Funk describes the methods used by biblical scholars in their quest of the historical Jesus. He shows how the Jesus Christ of the Nicean Creed of the fourth century can be traced back to the humble Jewish sage of Nazareth and then retraced on a return trip to Nicea where he is resurrected after three centuries of promotion by his gentile admirers to full divinity as the Second Person of the Holy Trinity. Funk also uses a good part of the book attempting to describe the historical Jesus using what the author considers to be the likely authentic words and deeds of the real Jesus.

Funk believes that public knowledge about the ancient gospels is woefully inadequate. Mainline churches do not address the questions people in the pews are asking about Jesus. Biblical scholars may know many of the answers to these questions but the scholars are only talking to each other. The aim of the quest of the historical Jesus is to liberate Jesus from this prison and especially from the captivity of the church creeds.

Christianity took its conclusive shape with the formation of church creeds and canons at church councils held in the fourth century C.E. Progress in this area was aided by the support and guidance of Roman Emperor Constantine.

World dominance of Christianity is at an end, according to Funk. It is not, however, the end of Christianity but actually a great opportunity to begin anew. Our understanding of the origins of the Christian religion is constantly changing. Funk believes a new perception of Jesus is possible if we place him back in his modest beginnings in Nazareth.

We have forgotten many things about Jesus that must have been obvious to his contenporaries, according to the author. For instance, Jesus was a social deviant who practiced an open table. He also criticized public displays of piety and certainly did not support the use of brokers in one's relationship to God.

Rating:
Summary: Violins, please.
Review: Robert Funk is a knowledgeable fellow, and some of his points about aphorisms, translation, early texts, and parables are pretty good. I wouldn't give Funk the lowest rating just because I disagree with him; I have reviewed Crossan and Borg more positively. But honestly, I couldn't appraise this book any higher.

For one thing, about half the book is an ill-tempered rant against Christians, Funk's students, and his colleagues. Some is positively maudlin. "I agonize over their slavery as opposed to my freedom. I have a residual hankering to free my fellow human beings from that bondage (of orthodox Christian belief), which can be as abusive as any form of slavery . . . " (Of Raymond Brown and John Meier!) "In their hands, orthodoxy is safe, but critical scholarship is at risk. Faith seems to make them immune from the facts." "I found myself playing the role of an academic John the Baptist."

Funk reminds me a bit of Karl Marx. He has lost his faith, but retains a Messiah complex. He has nothing good to say about anyone -- his former students, Christians, fellow academics -- who deigns to disagree with him. He sees himself as a revolutionary. "Throw off your faith in a God who answers prayer, in a Christ who conquered death! You have nothing to lose but your chains!" But Marx could at least be poetic. Funk's weaknesses as a writer and a scholar make his exalted view of his role in history hard for me to take seriously.

The scholarly weaknesses are many.

For one thing, there is that talk about the "evolution" of the "sayings tradition." By 70 AD, young disciples of Jesus (and mostly would have been young) would only be 50 or 60 years old. What was to stop them from giving direct imput? Why must we assume that only second or third hand reports were available by that time?

Also, like all the Jesus Seminar material, Honest to Jesus bases its argument on taking the "Gospel" of Thomas seriously. I find I can't do that. Perhaps it would help if Funk answered the powerful arguments against Thomas levied by Meier, Wright, Sanders, and other top-notch scholars. But he opts out, evidently preferring ad hominem attacks to rational debate.

Funk does better on parables and aphorisms. Surely, as he says, it is highly unlikely that any early scribe invented the peculiar and remarkable sayings of Jesus. It does not however follow, as Funk assumes, that any "conventional morality" in the Gospels must be a transplant, because Jesus must be unpredictable. A person who only offers exotic teaching is a smart-aleck or a sophist, not a true sage. Great literary critics, like Chesterton, Lin Yutang, or even Thomas Cahill, recognize in the Gospels a higher synthesis of obvious and subtle truths, rather than playing those levels of truth off against one another as Funk does.

"Physician, heal thyself." Here's another problem. Funk praises metaphor, but speaks almost exclusively in cliches. He commends kindness, but then savagely attacks everyone arounnd him. He derides dogmatism, but is himself remarkably dogmatic.

The basic message of this book can almost be summed up thus: "Jesus taught wonderful things, but his disciples misunderstood him completely. Fortunately, a crack team of scholarly experts, led by yours truly, has advanced in scientific understanding far beyond their hapless peers, to say nothing of the disciples or ordinary pew proles. We few experts are able to see through Christian lies about Jesus to the truth: Jesus not only rode donkeys, he also voted for them. Repent and be saved."

Politics aside (as far as possible, please), why should we care what Funk's deconstructed, human Jesus would want, or "demand?" He does not explain.

And in the end, Funk offers no very strong historical argument for his skepticism, but a lame philosophical prejudice. "In the wake of the Enlightenment . . . we presumably know better." As he put it in another book, how can people who have "seen the heavens through Galileo's telescope" believe in miracles?

Skeptics are going to have to do better than that.

I just read books by NT Wright and Rodney Stark on related topics. That's how to do scholarship! They set their ideas out in clear, dispassionate, and sometimes witty phrases, without undue polemic, fairly explaining opposing positions and why they chose to differ. Crossan and Borg can also be read with pleasure, and a measure of respect. But as with Marx, the combination of flaky theories, self-righteous self-promotion, shrill invective, and stitled prose that I found here, made reading this book a painful chore.

author, Jesus and the Religions of Man

Rating:
Summary: Challenging study of the beginnings of Christianity
Review: Robert Funk is the founder of the Jesus Seminar, a controversial group of scholars, who attempted to study scripture through historical and literary methods. Funk and his collaborators have opened many doors to theology as they studied the beginnings of Christianity and the foundations upon which it has been built.

The implications are intimidating. It leaves obe with little to believe.

Nevertheless the inadequacies of creedal Christianity have developed accretions that have taken the meaning away from the sage and social deviant Jesus. The redactions to the Gospels have insulated and isolated hierarchical community from world views that actually would nourish faith within.

Some conclusions: Jesus had a biological father, if not Joseph, then someone else. A bastard Jesus has appeal and certainly fits into his vocation to call the outcast and outsiders to God's domain. Jesus is not divine in the sense he was spawned by a deity, he is divine, like all of us are divine, in his discovery that in God's domain humans are all children of God - dydimoi of Jesus - his twins.

Funk's twenty-one theses are challengees to Christians and their governing bodies to formulate and re-formulate the creeds that cut off discovery: Nicea, Chalcedon, etc. When one compares the meaning of Jesus' parables, aphorisms and sayings top what the Church has become, one wonders whatever has the Church to do with God's doman.

The challenges of the Jesus Seminar call people to look at their creeds, ethic. Jesus asked people to trust in God, who he called father. If people gave creedence to Jesus' call to become one with the outsiders, what would happen to privilege, to rank? One suspects the Church would collapse.

Yet the Church has experience and resources to incarnate Jesus' vision. The spiritual traditions and theological reflections of the church call us to renew ourselves - and our vision - to make God's doman our own. To the extent people can, people incarnate Jesus' vision. And by trusting in the unconditional love of God, people may discover their grand mystery, which has been intimated by stories, visions and all create human expression: we are God's children.