The Jesus Seminar, Jesus, and Higher Criticism-Part 1

By: Dr. John Ankerberg, Dr. John Weldon; ©2000

Does it matter what you think about Jesus? Does it matter whether or not he was God in human flesh? Does it matter whether or not you believe your Bible to be the Word of God to man? Drs. Ankerberg and Weldon say “Yes,” and in this article they begin to explain why these are important matters especially for Christians.

The Jesus Seminar, Jesus, and Higher Criticism

“In modern times many enlightened types have become skeptical and we look down on the uneducated types who believe. It’s sort of a pity that all most of us know about Jesus is from the creeds, which we can’t believe.” James Robinson, of the Jesus Seminar and the International Q Project, cited in The Atlantic Monthly, December 1996

As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it. There is a judge for the one who rejects me and does not accept my words; that very word which I spoke will condemn him, at the last day. For I did not speak of my own accord, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and how to say it. I know that his command leads to eternal life. So whatever I say is just what the Father has told me to say. Jesus, John 12:47-50

Introduction

In April of 1996 something unique happened in the history of publishing. In their April 8, 1996 issues, all three major news magazines carried cover stories on Jesus Christ. (Time, “The Search for Jesus”; Newsweek, “Rethinking the Resurrection”; U.S. News and World Report, “In Search of Jesus”). Even two thousand years after Jesus died, He continues to impact the secular world more than any person in history. Certainly, the world seems to continue to be fascinated by Him, and, naturally, so are His followers.

However, if recent poll results are valid, Christians, ironically, are also confused about Jesus and biblical authority. Before we proceed, consider several illustrations. At the Evan­gelical Ministries to the New Religions National Conference, September 12, 1996, Dr. John Ankerberg stated the following in his lecture, “Characteristics of the People and False Religion of the Last Days”:

According to the recent polls of George Gallup, George Barna and James D. Hunter, 35% of America’s Evangelical seminarians deny that faith in Christ is absolutely necessary. What’s even more alarming is that 35 per cent of the entire adult Evangelical population agrees with the statement: “God will save all good people when they die, regardless of whether they have trusted in Christ”…Pulpit

Helps [revealed that] a survey of 7,441 Protestant pastors [51 per cent of Methodist; 35 per cent of Presbyterian; 33 per cent of Baptist; 30 per cent of Episcopalian] did not believe in the physical resurrection of Jesus.

Another alarming statistic is that 77 per cent of America’s Evangelicals believe that human beings are basically good by nature, whereas, the Scripture says man was created good but fell and now has a sinful nature. Instead of Evangelical preaching that man is utterly condemned and helpless as a result of his sin and can do nothing to save himself, recent surveys have shown that 87 per cent of American Evangelicals hold to the idea that “God helps those who help themselves….”

Today, the doctrine of justification is widely ignored, rarely central, and not infrequently denied outright by Protestant and, tragically, Evangelical theologians and pastors…. One of my old professors, Dr. Clark Pinnock, is so uncomfortable with an objective justification that he favors the “possibility of a doctrine of purgatory.”

Consider other polls by the George Barna organization. These are even more discon­certing. In one poll in 1991, “53 per cent of those claiming to be Bible-believing conserva­tive Christians said there is no such thing as absolute truth.”^[1] In another poll, 43 per cent of born-again Christians claimed that it did not matter what religion a person belonged to because all religions teach similar lessons about life.^[2] According to Newsweek, April 8, 1996, “A survey conducted last month by the Barna Research Group, a conservative Chris­tian organization in Glendale, California, finds that 30 per cent of ‘born-again’ Christians do not believe that ‘Jesus came back to physical life after he was crucified.’”^[3]

Obviously, something is wrong since these beliefs are wrong. Either these results are incorrect, or people are claiming they are genuine Christians when they are not, or many people in the church have bought a bill of goods. But why? And how did Christians ever get such blatant misinformation in the first place?

Given the declining moral and intellectual trend in our culture in the last generation and its influence in the church, these results are not necessarily unexpected. But for all the places one may look to explain such results, one often overlooked is liberal theology and its “higher critical” approach to the Bible. This critical approach is widely endorsed by main­stream theologians and denominations, critics of the Bible generally, and by cults like Mormonism and world religions like Islam, which have a vested interest in seeking to dis­credit biblical Christianity. Strangely, those destructive methods are increasingly used even by some Evangelical scholars.

How Do Liberal Theologians See Jesus?

There is no denying the fact that once trust in the Bible as an authoritative source is undermined, its teachings will either be doubted or, especially if unpopular, considered irrelevant. Yet, we don’t think that most Christians, especially the average American, has any idea of the great weight of blame that can be laid at the feet of liberal theology and higher criticism generally for destroying America’s faith in the Bible—or the terrible conse­quences that must logically flow from it.

To illustrate this liberal approach to the Bible, and some of its problems, we will cite the all too common view of Scripture seen in popular news magazines such as those cited above, Time, U.S. News and World Report, and Newsweek.

Almost every year, especially at Easter, these magazines comment about all the books written by liberal theologians in the search for the “historical Jesus,” the alleged enigmatic “real” Jesus of history as opposed to the so-called “Christ of faith” that Christians believe in. Indeed, as an illustration of the number of works on Jesus, consider that one general bibli­ography, Life of Jesus Research (Leiden Brill, 1989) has 1,300 entries.

In fact, in recent years, literally dozens of books have been written by liberal and non-evangelical theologians rejecting or attacking the very foundation of the Christian faith: the biblical Jesus Christ. Among these books are John Dominic Crossan’s, Jesus: A Revolu­tionary Biography; The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant and Who Killed Jesus?; Burton Mack’s, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins and The Lost Gospel: the Book of Q and Christian Origins; the book published by the notorious “Jesus Seminar,” The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus; Geza Vermes’, Jesus the Jew; Barbara Thiering’s, Jesus the Man: A New Interpretation of the Dead Sea Scrolls; A. N. Wilson’s, Jesus: A Life; John Shelby Spong’s, Born of a Woman: A Bishop Rethinks the Birth of Jesus; Ian Wilson’s, Jesus: the Evidence; John Allegro’s, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross; David Spangler’s, Reflections on the Christ; S. G. S. Brandon’s, Jesus and the Zealots; Robert Funk’s, Honest to Jesus; Marcus Borg’s, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, and Morton Smith’s The Secret Gospel and Jesus the Magician.

In books like the above, we find Jesus portrayed in a diverse manner—as a Jewish holy man, an occult magician and mystic, a personification of a psychedelic mushroom cult, a twice married divorce’ with three kids, a homosexual, a wicked priest, a social cynic, a political revolutionary and just about any other view one might wish to take. Indeed, accord­ing to Gregory Boyd, theology professor at Bethel College in St. Paul, Minnesota, and author of Cynic, Sage or Son of God?: Rediscovering the Real Jesus in an Age of Revi­sionists Replies, in the words of U.S. News and World Report,

Perhaps the most intriguing part of this modern quest [for the historical Jesus] is how the interests and personalities of scholars intersect with their work. The “control-beliefs of a scholar,” writes Gregory Boyd…. “determine what kind of Jesus he or she is looking for by defining what kind of Jesus is and is not possible.” That is why examining the lives of leaders in the historical-Jesus movement is a key to understanding their findings.^[4]

In other words, these scholars are more concerned with writing about a Jesus they are personally comfortable with than the Jesus we find in the Gospels.

Consider that many of these books have received wide publicity, not only from maga­zines like Time and Newsweek, but TV specials also. No wonder they are having such an impact. As Time magazine points out, citing one scholar “There’s an enormous appetite among ordinary churchgoers” who, he adds, “are very puzzled about what’s going on.” Reading these books, one can understand why so many people are puzzled.

But puzzled isn’t quite the appropriate word; we think that Christians who are not grounded in theology and apologetics and aware of the problems of historical criticism and the so-called search for the historical Jesus are having their faith damaged, often greatly, by exposure to these materials. It’s a much more serious issue than merely being puzzled. The poll results cited above are proof enough.

Luke Timothy Johnson, a Roman Catholic scholar who is critical of the Jesus Seminar, comments correctly, “People have no idea how fraudulent people who claim to be scholars can be.”^[5] Further, citing another problem:

Americans generally have an abysmal level of knowledge of the Bible. In this world of mass ignorance, to have headlines proclaim that this or that fact about Jesus has been declared untrue by supposedly scientific inquiry has the effect of gospel. There is no basis on which most people can counter these authoritative-sounding statements.”

Unfortunately, Johnson’s own book, The Real Jesus, retreats into subjectivism as well, probably due to his Catholic background and its own infection with higher criticism. Here is an illustration of Johnson’s problematic methodology: “Christianity has never been able to ‘prove’ its claims except by appeal to the experiences and convictions of those already convinced. The only real validation for the claim that Jesus is what the creed claims him to be, light from light, true God from true God, is to be found in the quality of life demonstrated by those who make this confession.”^[6] But what about the resurrection and fulfilled Messianic prophecy? These prove, objectively, that Jesus is God (Rom. 1:4; Lk. 24:44). In the words of biblical scholar N. T. Wright, Johnson’s approach is “poppycock.” “He kicks the ball back into his own net by mistake.”^[7] In other words, Johnson himself falls into a similar quagmire of subjectivism that the Jesus Seminar has been reveling in all along. Thus, it is just as much nonsense to say that the only thing that proves Christianity true is subjective experience and lifestyle as it is to say that nothing in the Gospels is his­torically credible. If we argue that the only proof of Christianity is found subjectively, then it makes no difference whether or not the Gospels are historically reliable.

If what Johnson says is correct, that “the faith of most Christians is sustained princi­pally by the witness of the Holy Spirit in their daily lives,” then how can we know what the Holy Spirit witnesses to if we can’t even know who Jesus is or that the New Testament records are accurate? “Christianity,” says Johnson, “is an organic, evolving religion based, above all, on personal leaps and tests of faith.” Johnson, who received his Ph.D. at Yale University in 1976, says his own most sacred religious beliefs are confirmed in experience, not in texts.”^[8] Wright is correct: this is poppycock.

Notes

1. ↑ George Barna, What Americans Believe (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1991) from Adjith Fernando, The Supremacy of Christ (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1995), p. 20.
2. ↑ In Christian Research Journal, Winter 1995, p. 50.
3. ↑ Newsweek, April 8, 1996, p. 62.
4. ↑ Jeffrey L. Sheler, “In Search of Jesus,” U.S. News and World Report, April 8, 1996, pp. 47-48.
5. ↑ David Van Biema, “The Gospel Truth,” Time, April 8, 1996, p. 57.
6. ↑ Cited in Van Biema, p. 58.
7. ↑ V.an Biema, p. 58
8. ↑ Sheler, p. 53.

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