Some 2000 years after He died, Jesus is still a very newsworthy person. Google news on the internet has over 12000 links to Jesus as a keyword in the last 30 days. Mel Gibson just released a new version of his movie called “The Passion: Recut” this past Friday, praised by some, condemned by others. Jesus is controversial, different people have diametrically opposed views on him. Who was this Jesus? How should we think about Him? How can we sort out the conflicting opinions that people have of Him?
Many people think that Jesus was a good teacher, but he never claimed to be God. They think that he is just one of many religious leaders that point us toward the truth about God. Where does that kind of thinking come from? Well, it comes from thinking without accurately considering the evidence.
The classic example of this in the last few years is illustrated by the Jesus Seminar. The Jesus Seminar is a small group of biblical scholars who joined together to discover who the historical Jesus really was and what the historical Jesus actually said. The scholars got together and went through the historical accounts of Jesus, the four Gospels plus the gospel of Thomas, and voted on whether the things that Jesus said were actually spoken by Jesus. At the conclusion of the voting, only 20% of Jesus’ sayings remained. What was the scholar’s criterion for voting? Simply their opinions, what they thought Jesus would say.
Just this month, March 2-5, the Jesus Seminar held their yearly conference in Santa Rosa, CA. The keynote speaker was the Rev. Jerry Stinson. Here’s a quote from Rev. Stinson:
“I think that the life of the historical Jesus, in which Jesus is a very human figure, points us in the direction of God. I don’t think Jesus was God, but I think that when we look at the life of the historical Jesus we can get some incredible insights into the nature of the divine … I think Jesus is one of a number of lights that illuminate the divine for us.”
What stands out for me in that quote is that Rev. Stinson uses the phrase “I think” four times in the space of a couple of sentences. Truth is not the matter of opinion, truth is what is real, truth is determined by evidence. Our understanding of who Jesus was and what He said is not a matter of opinion, we can know what Jesus said by reading the historical documents that record what He said. Those documents are the four Gospels, reliably translated in your Bibles.
In my message “Why Jesus’ Words Matter,” we’ll answer the questions: Why do the words that Jesus spoke thousands of years ago matter? How are they relevant to our lives? What can we learn from them? Did Jesus claim to be God or not?
To hear more about this topic, listen to my March 13, 2005 message entitled Why Jesus’ Words Matter
Since the gospels were written decades after the death of Jesus, by people who never met him, they contain ideas that would have been foreign to Jesus. Why should we not strive to identify what Jesus actually said?
Not sure where you got your assumptions, but the facts are that Matthew and John were written by the disciples of Jesus by the same name. They were eyewitnesses. Mark and Luke were not eyewitnesses, but personally knew eyewitnesses as their sources. Matthew, Mark and Luke were probably written by 55 AD and John not long thereafter.
Since these Gospels began to circulate when contemporaries of Jesus were still alive, they would have been rejected if they contained ideas “foreign to Jesus.” Other psuedo gospels were rejected by the early church as being non-authentic.
To propose that we scrap documents written by eyewitnesses and accepted by other eyewitnesses and try to reconstruct Jesus’ actual sayings 2000 years later with no additional evidence doesn’t make much sense. Yet that is what the Jesus Seminar tried to do. They really aren’t taken seriously by historians or biblical scholars. We do know what Jesus actually said, we have multiple documents authenticating his words. No need to speculate or to rewrite history based on the theology of 21st century people.