The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics

Rating:
Summary: An Excellent Overview of a Most Valuable Enterprise
Review: Dr. Miller provides a fairly detailed explanation of what the Jesus Seminar is and how it works, and then answers two of its most prominent critics, Luke Timothy Johnson and Ben Witherington. Johnson appears to be somewhere near mainstream Christian and Witherington Fundamentalist (neither is identified by denomination). Dr. Miller is Roman Catholic.

Fellowship in the Jesus Seminar is open to anyone with an accredited earned doctorate in Religion, Theology, etc. The Seminar has published numerous books, including "The Five Gospels," in which the words attributed to Jesus are printed in (in decreasing order of perceived authenticity) red, pink, grey, or black. Red means the consensus of fellows of the Seminar is that these words are authentically a close English equivalent of what Jesus actually said (in Aramaic or possibly Greek) Black means the consensus of the fellows is that these are not authentic words of Jesus, OR that they are something that most any Jew of Jesus time probably said on occasion; that is, not distinctively of Jesus. Pink and grey are lesser degrees of certainty than red, but more than black.

One common criticism of the four-color schema is that any particular saying either WAS or WASN'T said by Jesus, there can be no in-between. This is, of course, true, but there ARE varying degrees of certainty as to whether particular sayings are authentic. Pink does NOT mean that the saying is, say, 66% authentic (that is an absurdity) but that the fellows, looking at the available evidence from nearly 2000 years ago, averaged to be about 66% convinced that Jesus actually said it (or 34% convinced that the didn't).

One shall change that I think would be beneficial would be to show some distinction between those words are in black because Jesus very likely did not say them, and those which are black because most Jews of jesus time said them on occasion. I suppose the distinction is so obvious to professional new testament scholars, but it would be helpful to us lay persons. They could use italics for the words not distinctively of Jesus, but which he probably did say. Also, it might blunt some criticism.

In any book that criticizes another, or responds to criticism, one may wonder whether the objects of criticism or the arguments of the critic(s) are presented fairly. To be certain, one must read the work(s) in question, in this case "The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels," by Luke Timothy Johnson and "The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew from Nazareth," by Ben Witherington.

However, I trust Miller's integrity enough to believe that he has presented the criticisms of Johnson and Witherington honestly, not in a watered-down, easy-to-refute version.

I recommend this book highly. It is not only interesting and informative, but lucid and well-written.

Rating:
Summary: A good idea that falls short
Review: This book provides a useful overview of both the Jesus Seminar's efforts to reconstruct the historical Jesus and the critical response such efforts have drawn from conservative Biblical scholars. Author Robert J. Miller makes it clear from the beginning that he is himself an active member of the Jesus Seminar and proud of its accomplishments. This volume is a collection of Miller's published essays about the Jesus Seminar divided into two parts. The first third provides background about the Jesus Seminar, explains its controversial voting methods and gives the principles that guide its work. The second two-thirds of the book concentrates on criticisms, especially those written by Luke Timothy Johnson and Ben Witherington. Miller diputes most of these criticisms, but carefully lays out the points of argument on both sides. His chapter on how scholars view the resurrection is especially fascinating for its focus on how nonbelievers respond to a religion's core beliefs. In sum, this is a carefully organized and thoughtful discussin of a pioneering project in biblical scholarship.

Rating:
Summary: A useful overview of a fascinating project
Review: This book provides a useful overview of both the Jesus Seminar's efforts to reconstruct the historical Jesus and the critical response such efforts have drawn from conservative Biblical scholars. Author Robert J. Miller makes it clear from the beginning that he is himself an active member of the Jesus Seminar and proud of its accomplishments. This volume is a collection of Miller's published essays about the Jesus Seminar divided into two parts. The first third provides background about the Jesus Seminar, explains its controversial voting methods and gives the principles that guide its work. The second two-thirds of the book concentrates on criticisms, especially those written by Luke Timothy Johnson and Ben Witherington. Miller diputes most of these criticisms, but carefully lays out the points of argument on both sides. His chapter on how scholars view the resurrection is especially fascinating for its focus on how nonbelievers respond to a religion's core beliefs. In sum, this is a carefully organized and thoughtful discussin of a pioneering project in biblical scholarship.

Rating:
Summary: A good idea that falls short
Review: Watching Biblical scholars debate is not pretty. They split hairs, parse the subtitles of each other's books and peck at each other's religious fidelity, scholarly rigor, or intellectual integrity. This might be inevitable, given the scarcity of material they work with. They have only a few ancient texts, with scant corroborating historical evidence and little hope of finding new documents.

Add to this the fact that over the past two millennia, a gigantic political, military, social, religious and economic superstructure has grown up around the Bible, using it to accumulate vast power and to justify wide extremes of behavior, from the ruthless to the benevolent. The slightest peep that challenges any part of this superstructure is bound to bring down upon the peeper the wrath of one offended faction or another.

Fortunately for Biblical scholars (and probably for the rest of us, too), most of them work in obscurity. The Jesus Seminar is probably the exception.

I admire the Seminar's goals of establishing what is historically verifiable about the life of Jesus and, as Dr. Miller's writes in "The Jesus Seminar and its Critics," "providing an alternative to the unchallenged fundamentalist assumptions that pervade American discourse about the Bible." What Seminar members are doing is courageous and ultimately helpful. But I was disappointed by this book. I hoped to find an introduction to the Seminar's findings and an overview of the criticism. What I found was a detailed - very, very detailed - look at the Seminar's voting process and Dr. Miller's painfully painstaking responses to some of the Seminar's critics.

What's missing, for me anyway, is an explanation of how the Seminar's members established that any of the New Testament can be accepted as historically accurate, since none of it was written while Jesus was alive and most of it, if not all of it, is the product of early Christians attempting to buttress their beliefs. "The gospels were written decades after Jesus by people who worshiped him as a divine being and regarded him as the spokesman for their own beliefs and ideals," as Dr. Miller writes. He briefly touches on one standard: whether or not a statement attributed to Jesus is distinctive enough to be something that no one else would have said and that his contemporaries would have remembered. But there's little other explanation of how the vetting process works.

I didn't get much of an overview of the criticism of the Seminar from this book, either. It was a little like listening to Dr. Miller's end of a phone conversation and having to guess what was being said on the other end. In one case, I wondered whether Dr. Miller was distorting the argument of a critic, Luke Timothy Johnson. Dr. Miller seems to accuse Johnson of using the word "memory" to mean a historically accurate account and thereby "harvest the fruit of history without doing the hard work of historical reconstruction." I haven't read Johnson's book, so I don't know the context in which he uses the word. But recent research and common sense tell us "memory" connotes not just a verbatim recitation of history but also a dynamic and personalized interpretation of history that changes with the experience of the one remembering.

But most of Dr. Miller's rebuttals seem sound, if sometimes tedious. And he has the honesty to acknowledge the instances when he thinks the Seminar's critics make good points.

The writing in this book can be dense and repetitive. Dr. Miller sometimes knifes into an offending argument from every possible angle to make sure it's dead, dead, dead. Sometimes he tells us what he's going to say, then says it, and then tells us what he just said.

There are good things in this book. The final chapter is a succinct and, compared to the rest of the book, easy-to-read explanation of the context and purpose of the early Christian Resurrection stories. And I may be asking for things that Dr. Miller never intended this book to offer. But if you're looking for a non-academic layperson's introduction to the Jesus Seminar's work and the criticism of it, this isn't it.