Introducing
The Jesus Project
R. Joseph Hoffmann, Ph.D.
Chair, Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion
The
Jesus Seminar, founded in 1985 by the late Robert Funk of the University
of Montana, was famous for all the wrong reasons—its voting
method (marbles), the grandstanding of some of its members, the
public style of its meetings, even its openly defiant stance against
the claims of miracles in the Gospels—including the resurrection
of Jesus. Except for the marbles, none of this was new. The use
of additional sources, such as Gnostic and apocryphal gospels, to
create a fuller picture of the Jesus-tradition and the focus on
context as though it provided content were at least innovative.
But the Jesus who emerged from these scholarly travails was so diminished
that—as I wrote in a FREE INQUIRY article in 1993—he
could not exist apart from his makers: “The Jesus of the [Jesus
Seminar] is a talking doll with a questionable repertoire of thirty-one
sayings. Pull a string and he blesses the poor.”
By
the end of their most visible period in 2000, the members had pared
the sayings of Jesus down to 18 percent of those attributed to him
in the New Testament and pictured him as a wandering teacher of
“wisdom” who preached in riddles and parables about
a God of love who preferred sinners to the wealthy, comfortable,
and wise of the world. Gone, by and large, was the utterly mistaken
eschatological prophet who preached the end of the world and never
expected to found a church—much less a seminar—in his
name.
What
the Seminar had tacitly acknowledged without acknowledging the corollary
is that over 80 percent of “Jesus” had been fictionalized
by the Gospel writers. That is to say that, if we are to judge a
man’s life by his sayings, the greater portion of the literary
artifacts known as the Gospels is fictional. If we are to judge
by actions, then what actions survived historical criticism? Not
the virgin birth, or the Transfiguration, or the healing of the
sick, or the purely magical feats such as Cana, or the multiplication
of loaves and fishes. The Resurrection had quietly been sent to
the attic by theologians in the nineteenth century. The deeds—except,
perhaps, the attack on the Temple (Mark 11:15–19)—had
preceded the words to the dustbin years before, yet scholars insisted
the historical figure was untouched. Only faith could explain this
invulnerability to harm.
The Way Forward: The Jesus Project
On
a pleasant day in January 2007, at the University of California,
Davis, the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion
(CSER) asked the question that had been looking for a serious answer
for over a hundred years: Did Jesus exist? The CSER fellows, invited
guests, present and former members of the Jesus Seminar, and a wide
variety of interested and engaged attendees applauded roundly after
three days of lectures and discussions on the subject—appropriately—“Scripture
and Skepticism.” The Jesus Project, as CSER has named the
new effort, is the first methodologically agnostic approach to the
question of Jesus’ historical existence. But we are not neutral,
let alone willfully ambiguous, about the objectives of the project
itself. We believe in assessing the quality of the evidence available
for looking at this question before seeing what the evidence has
to tell us. We do not believe the task is to produce a “plausible”
portrait of Jesus prior to considering the motives and goals of
the Gospel writers in telling his story. We think the history and
culture of the times provide many significant clues about the character
of figures similar to Jesus. We believe the mixing of theological
motives and historical inquiry is impermissible. We regard previous
attempts to rule the question out of court as vestiges of a time
when the Church controlled the boundaries of permissible inquiry
into its sacred books. More directly, we regard the question of
the historical Jesus as a testable hypothesis, and we are committed
to no prior conclusions about the outcome of our inquiry. This is
a statement of our principles, and we intend to stick to them.
The
Jesus Project will run for five years, with its first session scheduled
for December 2007. It will meet twice a year, and, like its predecessor,
the Jesus Seminar, it will hold open meetings. Unlike the Seminar,
the Project members will not vote with marbles, and we will not
expand membership indefinitely: the Project will be limited to fifty
scholars with credentials in biblical studies as well as in the
crucial cognate disciplines of ancient history, mythography, archaeology,
classical studies, anthropology, and social history.
At
the end of its lease, the Jesus Project will publish its findings.
Those findings will not be construed as sensational or alarming;
like all good history, the project is aiming at a probable reconstruction
of the events that explain the beginning of Christianity—a
man named Jesus from the province of Galilee whose life served as
the basis for the beginning of a movement, or a sequence of events
that led to the Jesus story being propagated throughout the Mediterranean.
We find both conclusions worthy of contemplation, but as we live
in the real world—of real causes and outcomes—only one
can be true. Our aim, like Pilate’s (John 18:38), is to find
the truth.
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