Two Religious Historians Discuss the Historical Jesus

First, Robert Funk. He's the founder of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars led by Funk and John Dominic Crossan, who examined every word attributed to Jesus in the four Canonical Gospels and the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of sayings that was unearthed in 1945. The result is their book, The Five Gospels - What Did Jesus Really Say?

ROBERT FUNK: The Apostles' Creed that we all recite on Sunday mornings in our various churches has an empty center. It skips from the birth of Jesus to his death and resurrection without saying anything about his life, and yet the Canonical Gospels connect the birth and the death and resurrection of Jesus with things that he did and said during his lifetime. So it's that middle part that we tend to forget if we concentrate solely on the creed. So it is really relearning what's in the Gospels about this man between the time he was born and the time he died.

HANSEN: Now, what would be the difference, then, between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith?

FUNK: Well, the big difference for many of us is whether the incarnation, as theologians call it - God sending this person into the world - whether his Earthly life has any significance for the religion that bears his name. One way to put the question is to ask whether Jesus has a peremptory right to be the critic of the religion which he presumably founded. So, what we have tried to do, I think, is to rediscover his voice, or hear again the kinds of things he had to say and the kinds of things he did, and ask whether the tradition that grew up around him is commensurate with his own aspirations and his own hopes.

HANSEN: In the Gospels that you have retranslated and printed in your book, you make distinctions between those things that Jesus actually said, those that he might have said, those that he didn't say; and the words that he almost certainly said, you highlight in red. And I was surprised to find out that there were very few red passages in this book.

FUNK: Well, it's not surprising to scholars. The reason it's surprising to you, and perhaps many people in the public, is that we have not really been very good at communicating what we think we know about this tradition. Even though we trained priests and pastors over the years in theological schools to know all of these things, they apparently thought it the better part of wisdom not to pass them on to their congregations. We have tended, as - I think as a result of the controversies in the early part of this century surrounding religion, particularly surrounding Darwinism, evolution, and that sort of thing, just to remain silent.

HANSEN: Some of the things that I read - that he actually did not say - now, this - this really surprised me - the "Lord's Prayer."

FUNK: Well, that's not quite accurate. We agreed that he said four of the petitions that are in the `Lord's Prayer' but did not put it all together to form a prayer.

HANSEN: What were the four?

FUNK: Calling God "Father", and the sanctity of the divine name. He asked God, or he taught his disciples to ask God for bread for the day, for example. Those are the principle ones. And to be forgiven to the same extent that we are willing to forgive others. I think that's a - that's a marvelous condition, by the way, of Divine forgiveness, is to make it dependent upon the forgiveness of others.

HANSEN: I was also, I guess, surprised to find out that he did not say "I am the Way, the Truth and the Life."

FUNK: Well, he said virtually nothing that we find in the fourth Gospel - that's from the Gospel of John, of course. The "I am" sayings are expressions of Christian faith that the evangelists put on his lips. But that was common in those days, to make these great heroes say the sorts of things that their followers first confessed.

HANSEN: Tell about - briefly, how the process worked. How did the scholars - how did you all vote on what was authentic and what was, perhaps, not?

FUNK: Well, we inventoried everything. That's the first time that has been done, as far as we know, in the history of the tradition. Every - all the words ascribed to Jesus and all extant documents for the first 300 years. We had papers prepared on each of these items by specialists. They were circulated to the members of the Seminar in advance. We had a specific agenda for each meeting. We met twice a year. We came together and debated the issues raised by those papers. And then we decided, at the end of our debates, that we should see whether there was a consensus. And we did that by casting ballots. We did it in four colors, to make it easy or simple, and also to give us a way to report. So, if the item under scrutiny was something we thought Jesus really said, or said in some proximate form, we were - we were supposed to vote red. If we think he did not said - say it, we were supposed to vote black. I proposed originally just to leave it that way. But, of course, scholars don't understand binary code. So, we had to add two intermediate categories for people who couldn't quite make up their minds.

HANSEN: Have you been criticized for sort of casting lots about the authenticity of Jesus' words?

FUNK: Of course we have. And some of our colleagues know better, of course, when they say that we're voting to decide what is true. We're not doing that at all. We're voting just to see what people sitting around the table who've participated in this conversation and this review really think about these matters. We're in the habit, in academic circles, of debating these issues and then going home, waiting for another year, coming back together and debating them all over again without ever coming to any resolution or decision. We tried to rectify that in the Jesus Seminar by asking our members to decide what they thought on the basis of the knowledge they had at that moment. And I think that's had a salutary effect on all of us. It has caused us to think about many of these problems in a little different way. Not as issues that we have the next thousand years to review and decide about, but issues that are of interest to people right now. And we ought to be able to say what we know using the best knowledge we have. At this moment, at least give some intermediate - some tentative response to what we think about this person.

HANSEN: Robert Funk, founder of the Jesus Seminar. Any discussion of the historical Jesus begs the question - if Jesus didn't do or say what Christians believe he did, what does that mean to their faith? For an answer on this Christmas Day, we turn to John P. Meier. His book, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, is a massive examination of the life of Jesus. The second volume Mentor, Message and Miracles has just been published. John Meier is a Catholic priest and a professor of new testament at the Catholic University of America. We began our conversation with the same question we posed to Robert Funk. What is the difference between the historical Jesus and the Jesus of faith?

FATHER JOHN P. MEIER: The Jesus of faith is that Jesus who has been believed in, who is believed in now, who will be believed in throughout the history of Christianity. I think there can be no elitism when it comes to the basic proclamation of faith. It's meant for everybody equally - educated, uneducated alike. Therefore, I think, contrary to some claims, that the "historical Jesus' can never be put in place of the Christ of faith as the object of faith. Why? First of all, as I say, it would make Christian faith a very strange thing, available only to very educated, Western people, because, of course, perhaps a lot of people from Asia, Africa or South America might neither understand, nor especially be interested in this little European American phenomenon of the historical Jesus. Secondly, if we were to put the historical Jesus in the place of the Christ of faith and say "This is the object of belief. This should be the object of proclamation," OK, whose historical Jesus is going to be the object of faith? John Meier's or Dominic Crossan's or Robert Funk's? Albert Schweitzer's at the beginning of the century? Albert Schweitzer's today? Whose historical Jesus among the hundreds, if not thousands, of modern reconstructions, is going to have that place as the object of Christian faith? I think it's absurd, on the face of it.

HANSEN: But on the other hand, the Christ of faith has basis in the real Jesus - the man who lived and walked the earth for 33 years.

MEIER: You put it very - you put it very well. Obviously, there is not a neat identification. On the other hand, there obviously is some sort of relationship - there is some sort of grounding of the Christ of faith in an objective historical event. You might say one of the differences between Christianity and some of the great religions of the world is precisely this inevitable anchoring of faith and the object of faith in certain historical events that took place in the First Century A.D. I was just reading the work of a professor of Buddhism, and he very quickly sketched what might be said about the original historical Buddha. But he said, "Well, you have to admit that most of this may very well be legend, and if you press the point, probably most Buddhists would say, "Well, it makes no difference anyway because that historical figure is of no great importance for the gift of enlightenment that is available to anyone." This professor felt that Buddhism is in no way necessarilly inextricably grounded in the historical person Buddha.

And I think there you have a basic difference between a number of the great religions of the world and Christianity. Christianity rises or falls with its basic object, namely Jesus of Nazareth. If indeed it were to be proven, which I think it could not be proven, but let us say - let us just grant for the sake of argument, if it could be proven that Jesus of Nazareth never lived, or if it could be proven that he really was never crucified, I think you would have to say Christian faith as understood by most Christians would simply be proven false or would evaporate. There is a perilous romance here. It is most exhilarating to say Christian faith is grounded in a particular person who actually lived and walked the roads of Palestine in the First Century A.D., but you notice it therefore becomes very vulnerable and exposed to attack in a way that a religion that just revels in timeless truth or myth or Jungian archetypes would not be vulnerable.

HANSEN: You've done an extraordinary amount of research - academic research, scholarship, studying this, writing about it; on the other hand, you are a Catholic priest. When you stand up on the pulpit and preach the Gospel of Luke and read the story of the birth of the Christ child in Bethlehem, the story that all Christians gravitate to on Christmas Day, what goes through your mind? How do you reconcile your faith with everything that you have discovered academically?

MEIER: Actually, it's interesting you mention Christmas Day because there's a little interesting liturgical fluke at this point. If I were preaching at the midnight mass, of course I'd be reading Luke's story in Luke II of the decree went forth from Caesar Augustus and they go to Bethlehem and he's born. On Christmas Day, however, the Gospel I'd be reading is the beginning of John's Gospel - "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God and the Word was God," in verse 14, "and the Word became flesh and dwelt among us." And I've often preached on that point - that indeed, we may not always be sure about the details of the individual stories, and the individual circumstances of Jesus' birth.

The essence of the Christian faith, however, is precisely that God's eternal message of love to us, the Word, that personal Word of love, has definitively become flesh in one particular historical person in one time and place. The Word became flesh in Jesus. And the - the terrible importance for Christian faith, therefore, that Jesus of Nazareth is not some mythical, eternal, timeless figure, but a Jew of Palestine of the first century - the essence of our faith lies rather in that core affirmation - not whether - was it in Bethlehem or was it in Nazareth or was it 7 B.C. or 6 B.C. Those details are not of the essence of faith. What is the essence of faith that I will often preach on on Christmas Day is, "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us in Jesus of Nazareth, and we have seen the Father's love in the Son."

HANSEN: John P. Meier. Volume II of his work, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, subtitled Mentor, Message and Miracles, has just been published. You're listening to Weekend Edition.