In Search of Jesus
Some scholars seek answers in history and redefine the meaning of his life and deeds
It is Funk's evangelistic zeal, as much as his unorthodox views, that has placed him and his California-based seminar at the forefront of the modern historical-Jesus quest and at the center of the scholarly storm. They have drawn criticism both from mainstream academia, where Funk is viewed as something of a publicity hound, and from conservative scholars who consider him an enemy of traditional Christianity and of the Bible.
Schooled in biblical studies at Vanderbilt University, he taught at Texas Christian, Harvard and Emory universities, among other places, and became a leader in the Society of Biblical Literature, an organization of some 6,000 biblical scholars. But he split from the group in 1980, frustrated in his attempts to prod his colleagues into bridging the gap between the insulated world of biblical academia and real-world religious practice. "I tried to get them to go public with what we were doing to raise the literacy level of the public," he explains. "Without that, our religious traditions become crass, unhealthy and even demonic."
Funk organized the seminar in 1985 and set it to work examining the historicity of words and deeds of Jesus from the gospels and then reporting the results in press releases and in books published by its own Polebridge Press. Applying some conventional methods of textual analysis and other more disputed rules of evidence, the seminar, made up of about 50 religion professors, concluded that no more than 20 percent of the sayings and even fewer of the deeds attributed to Jesus are authentic. Among the castoffs: the Lord's Prayer, the sayings from the cross and any claims of Jesus to divinity, the virgin birth, most of his miracles and his bodily resurrection.
The Jesus that remains, which Funk describes in his forthcoming book Honest to Jesus, is a secular sage and a social critic who satirized the pious and championed society's poor and marginalized. He spoke in parables and aphorisms, often using humor or irony to make a point. "Jesus was perhaps the first stand-up Jewish comic," says Funk. He was "not political, not programmatic" and offered no detailed prescriptions for dealing with the issues of the world. Starting a new religion, says Funk, "would have been the farthest thing from his mind."
Funk now sees the seminar's role as laying the foundations for a new Reformation. "Christianity as we have known it is anemic and wasting away," Funk told a California audience at a recent seminar meeting. It is time, Funk said, to "reinvent Christianity," complete with new symbols, new stories and a new understanding of Jesus. "I don't know whether the churches will wake up to this," he says. "Most church officials regard us as a threat. But then, the Roman [Catholic] church regarded Luther as a threat. That's the way it is with reformers."
THE MYSTICAL TOUR A long and winding road has led Marcus Borg to his conclusion that the historical Jesus was a "spirit person, subversive sage, social prophet and movement founder."Born and raised of Scandinavian stock in North Dakota, Borg began his journey with childhood Lutheran hymns and, eventually, through study in college in Minnesota. His spiritual evolution, which he sometimes calls "tao" after Buddhist philosophy, included bouts of serious skepticism. At times, he says, he was a "closet agnostic" and a "closet atheist." He wrote of that period: "The bottom line was that I finally did not know what to do with the notion of God. On the whole, I thought there probably was no such reality."
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