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"The Real Jesus: The Mistaken Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels," by Luke Timothy Johnson (Harper San Francisco, 182 pp.; $22, hardcover).

"Who do scholars say that I am?" asked a recent CT cover story on the flourishing industry of Jesus studies (Mar. 4, 1996). The answer seemed to be almost anything but the risen Christ worshiped by believers around the world. Yet, while the radical revisionists have claimed the lion's share of media coverage, their conclusions are by no means representative of the whole spectrum of New Testament scholarship. Now, from within the scholarly guild, Luke Timothy Johnson has mounted a frontal assault that demolishes the pretensions of the Jesus Seminar and reaffirms the Christ of faith.

Johnson's book "The Real Jesus" is one of the most exhilarating religious books published in this decade. His formidable task, which he performs with gusto, is to sort out the claims made by Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, Robert Funk, Burton Mack, and other much-publicized scholars so that Christians, and other fair-minded people, can take stock of what is actually being asserted.

A former Benedictine priest and currently a professor of New Testament at the Candler School of Theology at Emory University in Atlanta (in 1995, Doubleday published his commentary on the Epistle of James in the acclaimed Anchor Bible series), Johnson is a soft-spoken man, at first glance an unlikely candidate for polemics. He was motivated to write his book, he says, out of a genuine sense of outrage over the preposterous claims being made by the Jesus Seminar and its fellow-travelers--above all, the claim, repeatedly reinforced by the media, that their peculiar form of scholarly reductionism somehow represents the "consensus view" of "most" New Testament scholars.

In fact, says Johnson, the conclusions reached by the Jesus Seminar represent the views of a tiny minority of mostly second-rate scholars working at mostly second-rate schools. None of the current Jesus Seminar scholars teaches at any of the major centers of New Testament scholarship in the United States--such as Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Duke, Union, Chicago, or Emory. While the Jesus Seminar publicists would often speak of 200 "participants," Johnson says, in fact only about 40 people attended the meetings and wrote papers.

Of these, only a few, such as founders Crossan and Funk, have any sort of prestigious credentials as scholars. Some, such as Paul Verhoeven (director of the films Basic Instinct and, most recently, the NC-17-rated Showgirls), are not New Testament scholars at all and participated merely as interested observers.

The views of some 40 people cannot reasonably be said to represent the thinking of, say, the more than 6,900 members of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) and the thousands of others, in and out of graduate school and seminaries, who have had some contact with systematic biblical study.

Johnson does not merely challenge the credentials of Jesus Seminar members; indeed, he is at his best when he "deconstructs" the philosophical assumptions and methodological idiosyncrasies that underlie so much New Testament scholarship. Far from displaying a more scientific, more "critical" view of the New Testament, Johnson says, many of these scholars are touchingly naive in the way they approach historical sources and in their understanding of what history actually is or can achieve. The epistemological gullibility of these exegetes--especially regarding the nature and limits of historical knowledge--simply astonishes Johnson.

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April 29 1996, Vol. 40, No. 5