Voting out the Fourth Beatitude: The Jesus Seminar Decides What Jesus Did and Did Not Say

The headline of the newspaper article caught my eye: “Scholars Vote on Which Quotes Are Really Christ’s.” Are the sayings of Jesus up for vote? I thought. Apparently they are—at least by one group of New Testament scholars.

That article appeared some months ago. By now the work of the Jesus Seminar has gained national attention. Led by Dr. Robert W. Funk, recently retired professor of religious studies at the University of Montana, the seminar is a national organization of about 30 senior fellows and a larger circle of corresponding fellows. With a few exceptions, these are all professional New Testament scholars of liberal theological persuasion. In addition to the professionals, the seminar includes associates—interested lay persons, students, and sponsors.

The purpose of the seminar, according to Dr. Funk, is “to inquire simply and rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said.” This will involve a radical reassessment of the “Jesus tradition.” And why is such a reassessment necessary? Because, it is alleged, much of what the Gospels report Jesus to have said did not come from him but is early Christian teaching, reflecting various needs of the church. Thus, for example, some scholars say the pronouncement of Jesus in Mark 2:27, “The Sabbath was made for man and not man for the Sabbath,” was not spoken by the historical Jesus but was put in his mouth by the early church as a weapon against Jewish opposition.

M. Eugene Boring, one of the more prominent members of the Jesus Seminar and a professor at Texas Christian University, reports the results of a study he made of the Beatitudes as found in Luke’s gospel. The first three (Luke 6:20b–21) he assigns to Jesus with “some measure of confidence.” But the fourth beatitude (“Blessed are you when men hate you …,” Luke 6:22–23) he assigns to the church “with a greater degree of confidence.”

Ready To Be Counted

Not only must a radical reassessment be made of the Jesus tradition, say the scholars of the Jesus Seminar, it must be communicated to the Christian public in a way that has never been done before. Says Dr. Funk: “… Radio and TV evangelists have traded in platitudes and pieties. Scholars, for their part, have limited their pronouncements to the classroom or buried their considered judgments in scientific journals and technical jargon. They have hesitated to broadcast the assured results of historical-critical scholarship out of fear of public controversy and political reprisal.”

The Jesus Seminar wants to change all this. The scholars involved are ready to stand up and be counted. (One of them resigned his teaching position at a theologically conservative school as a result—at least partially—of his involvement in the seminar.)

The seminar meets twice yearly and publishes a journal, Foundations and Facets Forum, which carries an account of its work, including technical articles on the Jesus tradition. Votes are taken at the semiannual meetings to determine the authenticity of specific sayings and parables attributed to Jesus. The votes are cast by color category: red for words that Jesus probably uttered; black for words he almost certainly did not utter; pink for words that could probably be attributed to him; and gray for words that probably, but not certainly, may be attributed to later voices. There is some talk of producing a Jesus Seminar New Testament with the words of Jesus printed in four colors.

Points To Ponder

Christians who take the Bible in a believing and straightforward way may smile and dismiss this endeavor out of hand—especially when the promotional literature states that the seminar “will explore the differences between what Jesus really said and what the early Christian community ascribed to him.” This seems at the outset to tip the balance in the direction of negative, even radical, conclusions.

But the seminar does make some points that conservatives could do well to note:

1. The work of biblical scholars is often carried on within the confines of the classroom and study; and the results have not been widely disseminated among the people in the churches. The result is a lack of biblical and theological sophistication among lay people. Christians need to be taught that the Bible is literature—that its various sections must be understood in terms of their literary genre and the meaning that the original author intended, before trying to understand and apply the meaning for today. Research in history, anthropology, archaeology, and linguistics (to mention only a few disciplines) has thrown much light on the meaning of the biblical text. This information ought to be readily available to the reader of Scripture.

A caution, however, needs to be sounded here. Biblical scholarship is sometimes highly subjective, and its “assured results” have been known to be anything but that. The pronouncements of scholars need to be carefully tested and not uncritically accepted. Nevertheless, evangelicals should place a high value on biblical scholarship and make every effort to insure that the findings of its responsible scholars are made known as widely as possible. We have much to gain and little to lose from such an endeavor.

2. The sayings and parables of Jesus present a crucial area for serious research. This is true for at least two reasons:

First, what Jesus said is, of course, of compelling significance for Christians. Jesus’ teachings are the basis of Christian ethics, of our knowledge of God, and our hope of salvation. “In the past God spoke to our forefathers through the prophets … but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son” (Heb. 1:1–2, NIV). If God has spoken to us by Jesus, we must know with some confidence what Jesus has said. Funk is right when he says, “Make no mistake: there is widespread and passionate interest in this issue, even among those uninitiated in the higher mysteries of gospel scholarship.” Evangelicals’ high view of Scripture intensifies their interest in this subject.

Second, conservative New Testament scholars have had great difficulty coming up with adequate answers in this area, or at least answers that have enjoyed widespread acceptance.

The reason is not hard to find. The complexity of the problem is almost overwhelming. Jesus’ sayings have come down to us in four canonical sources (our Gospels) and several noncanonical ones (Gospel of Thomas, Apocryphon of James, Gospel of Peter, Acts of Pilate, for example). The sources are in Greek, whereas Jesus spoke primarily in Aramaic. Since our Gospels are translations, the sayings of Jesus found in them are removed one step from the actual words he spoke. Happily, the problem of using the multitude of gospel manuscripts to establish a reliable text is not a serious one. In addition, the Gospels reveal significant variations in the sayings of Jesus and in the historical sequence in which he uttered them. The problems that arise from these phenomena and others have been recognized from early Christian times. (Attempts to solve them go back as early as the second century.)

Testing Authenticity

Modern scholars use various criteria to attempt to separate the authentic sayings (what Jesus actually said as reported by the gospel writers) from later church accretions. These scholars have proposed as many as a dozen of these tests—including, for example, the degree to which a particular saying is distinct from first-century rabbinic teaching, the presence or absence of Palestinian cultural factors, and the presence of puns when the saying is translated back into Aramaic (see, e.g., R. Stein, “The Criteria for Authority” in Gospel Perspectives, Vol. 1, ed. by R. T. France and David Wenham, JSOT Press). The “criteria” primarily arise out of linguistic and historical studies, form-, audience-, and especially redaction-critical, studies of the Gospels. Only relatively recently have evangelical scholars (and certainly not all of them) accepted redaction-critical methods as a legitimate tool in working on this problem (see “Redaction Criticism: Is It Worth the Risk?” CT, Oct. 18, 1985). Since agreement has not been reached among evangelicals about the tools of gospel criticism, a definitive solution to the problem of Jesus’ sayings is still some distance off.

In the meantime, conservatives will watch the work of the Jesus Seminar with interest. Whether it will produce results that will stand critical scrutiny remains to be seen. Presuppositions and theological biases (and we all have them) carried over into research have a way of determining the results.

When the five-or six-year project of the Jesus Seminar is completed and all of Jesus’ sayings are inventoried and voted on, how will the Christian public respond to a four color-coded Bible? Not very enthusiastically, I would venture to say. Many of us have problems with a simple red-lettered edition.

Such a Bible will almost certainly be rejected because Christians of almost any theological persuasion sense in Jesus’ sayings, as we have them in our Gospels, “a ring of truth.” And most Christians are wise enough to know that it is far more important to live by the words attributed to Jesus than to color code their authenticity. The sayings have an inherent authority derived from the Holy Spirit himself. As such, they remain the basis for Christian faith and duty.

Walter W. Wessel is professor of New Testament at Bethel Seminary West, San Diego, California, a translator of the New International Version of the Bible, and an editor of The NIV Study Bible.

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