Jesus and Salvation Series (Part 6B)

Welcome to the Summer 2006 study for the Koinonia Class of Calvary Baptist Church, Denver, Colorado. We’re looking at the issue of Jesus and Salvation, using the book “Is Jesus The Only Savior” [James R. Edwards, Is Jesus The Only Savior? (Grand Rapids/Cambridge: 2005)]. We encourage each person to buy a copy and follow along


Which Jesus is The Revised Jesus?

“Perhaps ‘the revised Jesus’ you refer to is the Jesus of the four gospels.” That was the opening comment to a series of questions emailed to me which I posted in the last article (Part 6A).

If I read that comment (and the other questions) correctly, and if I’m reading The Jesus Seminar scholars correctly, it is a very good summary of how I think Marcus Borg and the other Jesus Seminar scholars would state the question at hand. All we have to do is change the questions to positive comments using the writings of The Jesus Seminar scholars themselves.

My summary of The Jesus Seminar’s concept of Jesus

1. The Jesus of the four gospels is not “the real Jesus”. The gospels, as written, revised history so as to present a concept of Jesus that included the mythology that developed over the years between the crucifixion and the writing of the gospels. The result was that the biblical Jesus became more than just a man.
   
   
2. In particular, the fourth gospel (John) put words into Jesus’ mouth that made it appear that Jesus himself knew that he was the Messiah and more—“the way, the truth, and the life”—the only way to God. Then Paul theologized about Jesus in his letters; and his writings added to the growing revisionary history making it seem like Jesus was co-equal with God and that Jesus’ death was the means to our salvation.
   


3. In addition, over the next 250-300 years, as the church grew and became accepted and institutionalized, church leaders revised history even more: through their theologies, church councils (and the creeds which came out of those councils), and especially in selecting certain books to be included in the canon of Scripture and rejecting others, they formalized the mythology which had developed about Jesus (e.g. Jesus dying for our sins, the physical resurrection, etc.). None of that mythology was historically “true”, the scholars would say (i.e. you could not have captured it with a video camera). But it could be considered spiritually true because in believing it, people did seem to develop a deep spiritual relationship with God; and their lives were consequently changed.
   


4. The scholars would say that, as historians, they have been able to get behind the layers of stories, interpretations, and metaphors and come up with a concept of Jesus that is historically more true to the original Jesus than the picture presented in the four Gospels, the rest of the New Testament, and the later creeds of the church.Therefore, they would say that theirs is not a “revised Jesus”, but the “true Jesus”; and the Jesus the church has preached for the past 1900 plus years is the “revised Jesus”.

Conclusion:

Question 7 in the last post was, “Why do we need faith if doctrine provides all the answers?” Surely that does not mean to imply that we don’t need doctrine because faith provides all the answers. No, both the question and the last sentence are hyperbole. We will have both faith and doctrine whichever way we go.

As I quoted Edwards in the last post, “The conclusions of the Jesus Seminar about Jesus—indeed, anyone’s conclusions about any figure of history—are ultimately questions of faith based on the best evidence possible. That being the case, the proper question to ask is which reconstructions best fit the evidence we possess.”

Traditionalists have faith and doctrine, and faith that their doctrine is true.

Non-traditionalists have faith and doctrine, and faith that their doctrine is true.

The question for each Christian is who to believe. I admit that I am an amateur when it comes to the specialized study of the type done by those in The Jesus Seminar and other New Testament scholars. I don’t know enough to write the books myself, so I have to read both sides (see “The Meaning of Jesus—Two Visions” by Marcus Borg and N. T. Wright) and then choose which one to believe.

For me the choice is whether to believe almost 2,000 years of Christian faith and doctrine from those who tend to believe the Bible is reliable, rather than almost 200 years of the faith and doctrine of those who tend to believe the Bible is not reliable. After all, if we discard the Bible (or 88% of it), why should we believe anything about Jesus? What could possibly be left that is of value for the ultimate questions of life?

In the next chapter of Edwards’ book, we will look at the question: “How Reliable Is The New Testament as a Historical Document?”