The Case For Christ

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."
GIVING EVIDENCE A FAIR HEARING
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