to me, 'Well, Greg, it looks like the scholars disagree with you,' and he threw the magazine at me!" Boyd shook his head in both sadness and disbelief. "You see, that article gave him the reason to stop taking me seriously. Even though he knew I was a scholar, he interpreted this article as saying that the majority of scholars-at least, those who aren't wacko fundamentalists-hold these views." I could empathize with Boyd's story, having heard too many people equate the Jesus Seminar with all scholars. "Do you think that impression is an accident?" I asked. "Well, the Jesus Seminar certainly portrays itself that way," Boyd replied. "In fact, this is one of its most irritating facets, not just to evangelicals but to other scholars as well. If you look at their book The Five Gospels, they give 'seven pillars of scholarly wisdom,' as if you must follow their methodology if you're going to be a true scholar. But a lot of scholars, from a wide spectrum of backgrounds, would have serious reservations about one or even most of these pillars. And the Jesus Seminar calls its translation of the Bible 'The Scholars Version'-well, what does that imply? That other versions aren't scholarly?" He paused for a moment, then cut to the core of the issue. "Here's the truth," he said. "The Jesus Seminar represents an extremely small number of radical-fringe scholars who are on the far, far left wing of New Testament thinking. It does not represent mainstream scholarship, and ironically, they have their own brand of fundamentalism. They say they have the right way of doing things, period." He smiled. "In the name of diversity," he added with a chuckle, "they can actually be quite narrow."
"At least," I said, "the participants in the Jesus Seminar have been very up-front about their goals, haven't they?" "Yes, that's right. They're explicit in saying they want to rescue the Bible from fundamentalism and to free Americans from the 'naive' belief that the Jesus of the Bible is the 'real' Jesus. They say they want a Jesus who's relevant for today. One of them said that the traditional Jesus did not speak to the needs of the ecological crisis, the nuclear crisis, the feminist crisis, so we need a new picture of Jesus. As another one said, we need 'a new fiction.' One of the twists is that they're going directly to the masses instead of to other scholars. They want to take their findings out of the ivory tower and bring them into the marketplace to influence popular opinion. And what they have in mind is a totally new form of Christianity." The idea of a new Jesus, a new faith, a new Christianity, was intriguing. "So tell me about this Jesus that people from the Jesus Seminar have discovered," I said. "What's he like?" "Basically, they've discovered what they set out to find. Some think he was a political revolutionary, some a religious fanatic, some a wonder worker, some a feminist, some an egalitarian, some a subversive-there's a lot of diversity," he said. Then he zeroed in on the key issue. "But there is one picture that they all agree with: Jesus first of all must be a naturalistic Jesus. In other words, whatever else is said about him, Jesus was a man like you or me. Maybe he was an extraordinary man, maybe he tapped into our inherent potential as nobody else ever has, but he was not supernatural. So they say Jesus and his early followers didn't see him as God or the Messiah, and they didn't see his death as having any special significance. His crucifixion was unfortunate and untimely, and stories about his resurrection came later as a way of trying to deal with that sad reality."
I stood and strolled over to his bookshelf as I formulated my next question. "OK, but you personally have faith that Jesus was resurrected, and maybe your faith taints your viewpoint too much," I said. "The Jesus Seminar paints itself as being on an unbiased quest for truth, as compared with religiously committed people-people like You-who have a theological agenda." Boyd turned in his seat to face me. "Ah, but that's not what's really going on," he insisted. "The participants of the Jesus Seminar are at least as biased as evangelicals-and I would say more so. They bring a whole set of assumptions to their scholarship, which of course we all do to some degree. Their major assumption-which, incidentally, is not the product of unbiased scholarly research-is that the gospels are not even generally reliable. They conclude this at the outset because the gospels include things that seem historically unlikely, like miracles - walking on water, raising the dead. These things, they say, just don't happen. That's naturalism, which says that for every effect in the natural or physical world, there is a natural cause." "Yeah, but isn't that the way people typically live their lives?" I asked. "Are you saying we should be looking for supernatural explanations behind everything that takes place?" "Everyone would agree that you don't appeal to supernatural causes if you don't have to," Boyd said. "But these scholars go beyond that and say you don't ever have to. They operate under the assumption that everything in history has happened according to their own experiences, and since they've never seen the supernatural, they assume miracles have never occurred in history. Here's what they do: they rule out the possibility of the supernatural from the beginning, and then they say, 'Now bring on the evidence about Jesus.' No wonder they get the results they do!" I wanted to turn the tables a bit. "All right, then how would you proceed?" I asked. "I would grant that you shouldn't appeal to the supernatural until you have to. Yes, first look for a natural explanation. I do that in my own life. A tree falls-OK, maybe there were termites. Now, could an angel have pushed it over? Well, I wouldn't go to that conclusion until there was definite evidence for it. So I grant that. But what I can't grant is the tremendous presumption that we know enough about the universe to say that God - if there is a God-can never break into our world in a supernatural way- That's a very presumptuous assumption. That's not a presumption based on history; now you're doing metaphysics. I think there should be a certain amount of humility in the historical investigation to say, 'You know what? It is just possible that Jesus Christ did rise from the dead. It's just possible that his disciples actually saw what the gospels say they saw.' And if there's no other way of accounting adequately for the evidence, let's investigate that possibility.' That, I think, is the only way to give the evidence a fair hearing."
To come up with their conclusion that Jesus never spoke most of the words in the gospels, members of the Jesus Seminar used their own set of assumptions and criteria. But are these standards reasonable and appropriate? Or were they loaded from the outset, like dice that are weighted so they yield the result that was desired all along? "There are multiple problems with their assumptions and criteria." Boyd began in analyzing the group's approach. "For instance, they assume that the later church put these sayings into the mouth of Jesus, unless they have good evidence to think otherwise. That assumption is rooted in their suspicion of the gospels, and that comes from their assumption that the supernatural can't occur. Historians usually operate with the burden of proof on the historian to prove falsity or unreliability, since people are generally not compulsive liars. Without that assumption we'd know very little about ancient history. The Jesus Seminar turns this on its head and says you've got to affirmatively prove that a saying came from Jesus. Then they come up with questionable criteria to do that. Now, it's OK for scholars to use appropriate criteria in considering whether Jesus said something. But I'm against the idea that if Jesus doesn't meet these criteria, he must not have said it. That kind of negative conclusion can be a problem." Dealing in this theoretical realm was starting to bring more murkiness than clarity for me. I needed some concrete examples so I could follow Boyd's point. "Talk about some of the specific criteria they used," I said. "One is called double dissimilarity," he replied. "This means they can believe Jesus said something if it doesn't look like something a rabbi or the later church would say. Otherwise they assume it got into the gospels from a Jewish or Christian source. The obvious problem is that Jesus was Jewish and he founded the Christian church, so it shouldn't be surprising if he sounds Jewish and Christian! Yet they've applied this criterion to reach the negative conclusion that Jesus didn't say a whole lot. Then there's the criterion of 'multiple attestation,' which means we can only be sure Jesus said something if it's found in more than one source. Now, this can be a helpful test in confirming a saying. However, why argue in the other direction-if it's only found in one source, it's not valid? In fact, most of ancient history is based on single sources.
Generally, if a source is considered reliable-and I would argue that there are plenty of reasons to believe that the gospels are reliable-it should be considered credible, even if it can't be confirmed by other sources. Even when Jesus' sayings are found in two or three gospels, they don't consider this as passing the 'multiple attestation' criterion. If a saying is found in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, they consider that only one source, because they assume that Matthew and Luke used Mark in writing their gospels. They're failing to recognize that an increasing number of scholars are expressing serious reservations about the theory that Matthew and Luke used Mark. With this line of thinking, you can see why it's extremely difficult to prove multiple attestation." Boyd started to go on, but I told him he had already made his point: loaded criteria, like weighted dice, inevitably bring the results that were desired from the beginning.
One approach taken by naturalistic scholars has been to look for parallels between Jesus and others from ancient history as a way of demonstrating that his claims and deeds were not completely unique. Their goal is to explain away the view that Jesus was one of a kind. "How do you respond to this?" I asked Boyd. "For example, there were ancient rabbis who did exorcisms or prayed for rain and it came, so some scholars have said Jesus was merely another example of a Jewish wonder worker. Do those parallels hold up?" I was about to see Boyd the debater in action as he responded point by point to a complex issue without the benefit of notes. I was glad I was taping our conversation; my note taking would never have kept up with his rapid-fire delivery. "Actually, the parallels break down quickly when you look more closely," he began, picking up speed as he went. "For one thing, the sheer centrality of the supernatural in the life of Jesus has no parallel whatsoever in Jewish history. Second, the radical nature of his miracles distinguishes him. It didn't just rain when he prayed for it; we're talking about blindness, deafness, leprosy, and scoliosis being healed, storms