In Search of Jesus
Some scholars seek answers in history and redefine the meaning of his life and deeds
At Union Theological Seminary in New York and then at Oxford University, where he received his doctorate, Borg found himself on a less traveled path. "The news that the 'Jesus of history' was very different from the Jesus I had heard about growing up in church seemed important to me," he writes in his 1994 book Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. He was on the road to discovering a Jesus who was more concerned about this life than the afterlife, who taught subversive wisdom and who was intent on revitalizing Israel. He was also a "healer or holy person"--something of a Jewish mystic. "It seemed vaguely scandalous, and something I shouldn't tell my mother about," Borg wrote. "But I was hooked."
After studying sources as varied as the mystic novelist Carlos Castenada, the psychologist and philosopher William James and the Buddha, Borg concluded that there were two Jesuses. One was the "pre-Easter Jesus, a powerful witness to the reality and character of God" and a radical cultural critic who preached the politics of compassion. The other was the "post-Easter Jesus, a living spiritual reality, God with a human face." Taken together, says Borg, these two Jesuses "made it possible for me to be a Christian again."
He alloyed conventional research, including sessions with the Jesus Seminar, with four-day fasts and excursions into the works of those seeking alternate realities (such as Castenada's Indian seer, Don Juan). Sometimes, he contemplated his "big thoughts" during pipe-puffing sessions with his notebook and a pint of Full Sail Ale at Bogart's pub in Portland, Ore.
Partly because of new archaeological evidence contained in things like the Dead Sea Scrolls, but mainly because of new methods to interpret centuries of previous studies, Borg believes that contemporary scholars understand "the world of Jesus better than any generation since perhaps A.D. 200." He has argued that the onset of the millennium will intensify the already burgeoning international interest in the historical Jesus and "a lot of 'Second Coming' talk."
Borg lives with his wife, Marianne, a priest at Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, in Portland. He describes his children from his first marriage: "My son is gay and my daughter, who's adopted, is black. I never thought I'd be so politically correct." That may be the only thing about Borg and his work that is.
A ROUGH SKETCH The small book on the historical Jesus that John Meier set out to write in 1989 was supposed to have been a brief warm-up for a much weightier project he had long anticipated--a definitive, multivolume explication of the gospel of Matthew. The brief diversion turned into A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, a two-volume work in 1,600 pages. Now, Meier is working on a third volume, and he's not certain it will be the last. Matthew is still waiting. That, says Meier, a professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., is the compelling nature of the historical-Jesus quest. "It seems to have a life of its own."
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