Have They Lost Their Marbles? Making New Gospels and New New Testaments

 Yesterday I gave you some background on the motive behind the Westar Institute and Jesus Seminar.  Today my focus is on the highly questionable methods that the institute uses to undermine the Bible, refashion the Jesus of the Bible, and create a faith-destroying message that they are peddling, for a fee, in Estes Park.

As I mentioned yesterday the first task of the Westar Institute was to undermine the Jesus of the Bible.  The thinking was that if we can hollow out Jesus then the faith based on His person and work will collapse.  To accomplish this, they put together the Jesus Seminar.  The Jesus Seminar was built on two assumptions.  The first is that the New Testament gospels are very, very unreliable sources of historical information about Jesus.  What does that mean? It means that you can’t rely on the Bible for an accurate account of what Jesus either did or said.  It means, according to the pronouncements of the Jesus Seminar,  that Jesus only said two words of “The Lord’s Prayer” recorded in Matthew 6, “Our Father”, that’s it.  Imagine what happens to the Gospel accounts of Jesus when this skepticism is applied to all of the Gospels! Actually, you can do more than imagine, you can know.  They have rejected Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, virgin birth, miracles and 82% of His teaching.

The other assumption of the Jesus Seminar was that if the Gospels recorded something Jesus said, and it didn’t sound like anything anyone said in the Old Testament, or in first century Judaism, or in the early church, then He almost certainly said it.  They labeled this assumption the criteria of dissimilarity.  Imagine the impact of this.  If you eliminate anything Jesus said that was a continuation of the Old Testament, toss out whatever he has in common with His contemporaries, then excise anything He said that the early church might have taken seriously enough to preserve what will you be left with?  You are left with a Jesus who is unrecognizable to any of the eyewitnesses of His life.  A Jesus that the first century church never knew.

Note carefully that the 150 members of the Jesus Seminar approached the gospels with these two assumptions already in mind.  You might expect that the next step was that there would be a lot of rigorous discussion among the Jesus Seminar members.  The sort of peer review and intellectual give and take that happens in every discipline.  You might have expected this but you would be disappointed, or maybe amused, at what really happened.

Each member of the seminar was given their own set of four marbles (really, you can’t make this up).  Each set of four marbles had four different colors.  A red one means “Heck yeah! Jesus said that”; pink: “Sort of sounds like Him”; gray means “It sure might be Him”; black: “Are you kidding me? No way that’s Jesus”.  They used these marbles to cast a secret vote on each saying of Jesus.  Then the seminar simply counted up the votes applied a weighted average and like an imperial council held forth on what the Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Eastern Orthodox churches had received as the words of Jesus for over 2000 years.  They published their results in a book called The Five Gospels.  The title comes from the fact that they not only pronounced judgment on what Jesus did or did not say, but they also added another gospel, the Gospel of Thomas to the mix. Never heard of the Gospel of Thomas? It is a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus, here is one of them: “But I say to you every woman who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”  Lovely, only an academic would think that Jesus said something like that!

The secret voting thing really bothers me.  Academia flourishes where there is discussion and peer review.  Scholars share their conclusions and how they reached their conclusions in journals, and books so that their thinking can be reviewed, criticized, and then refined.  When these are lacking the results are immediately suspect.  I mean if a person is not willing to openly share their opinion with their peers and get their feedback and critique then all they have is their opinion.  Not only that but the way the votes were tallied masked considerable disagreement among the Jesus Seminar members and created the false impression that there was broad consensus among Robert Funk’s hand-picked team. 

Here is an example that Dr. Mark Roberts provided in his helpful review of the Jesus Seminar:

In certain instances, the final color of a saying seems to be more the result of the bias of the Seminar than its actual numerical vote. Concerning the parable of the two sons in Matthew 21:28-31, here’s what The Five Gospels says, “Fifty-eight percent of the Fellows voted red or pink for the parable, 53 percent for the saying in v. 31b. A substantial number of gray and black votes pulled the weighted average into the gray category” (p. 232). So, even though a solid majority of the Fellows believed that the parable was probably or certainly from Jesus, the parable is colored in gray. The power of the minority voting with black beads could obscure the judgment of the majority.

Of course, the Jesus Seminar did their work in the late 80’s and 90’s.  What about now?  Well one of the people invited to Estes Park by The Presbyterian Community Church of the Rockies is Hal Taussig.  He is the editor of A New New Testament: The Bible for the 21^st Century Combining Traditional and Newly Discovered Texts.  Taussig was the leader of a group of nineteen scholars and spiritual leaders who have decided that the church has had it wrong for 2000 years.  They have decided to correct this oversight by identifying 13 new books that they think should be part of the New Testament.  Sounding familiar?

Those visiting Estes Park at the invitation of The Presbyterian Community Church of the Rockies share both the goal and most of the method of their predecessors in the Jesus Seminar.  Their goal is to undermine the faith that has been handed down from the apostles to the church (2 Timothy 2:2, Jude 3).  Their method has moved on from hollowing out Jesus to attacking the sufficiency of the scriptures that has sustain the church through murderous onslaughts from 1^st century Rome to 21^st century Iraq and Syria.  One can only conclude that by inviting them the Presbyterian Community Church shares their goal.

Do yourself a favor and do anything but attend the upcoming Jesus Seminar in the Rockies.  Instead of lining the pockets of the Westar Institute with your $75 use it instead to support faithful missionaries serving in battle ravaged countries or contribute it to our local crisis pregnancy center LifeChoices.  They could use the money and put it to more Christ honoring productive work than the Westar Institute.   Use the time you save to read the real Gospels.