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Jesus Reconsidered
Questions for Discussion
Chapter 1
Robert W. Funk, The Issue of Jesus
1. Why will this project of discovering what Jesus actually said strike some as dangerous or even blasphemous? Why does this continue to be so?
2. Why is it important to really know what Jesus said and did?
3. Why does Funk think scholarship needs to be cumulative, reciprocal and public?
4. Funk calls for a new fiction about Jesus. What do you think he means by “fiction” and what might that new fiction be?
Chapter 2
Roy W. Hoover, The Work of the Jesus Seminar
1. What kind of new evidence was available to scholars at the beginning of the Jesus Seminar that had not been available previously?
2. Why had scholarship in the past not gone public, and what is the significance of making scholarship public?
3. How does voting affect the decisions of the Seminar? Does it create confidence in the Seminar’s work or is it catering to democracy?
4. If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, is the collaborative work of the Seminar only a committee effort or does collaboration produce a better way of sorting the evidence.
5. What criteria do you think are most important in deciding what comes from Jesus?
6. If something does not come from Jesus, what theological authority does it have? Likewise, if something does come from Jesus, what theological significance does it have?
Chapter 3
Marcus J. Borg, The Making of The Five Gospels
1. What makes the Jesus Seminar “unprecedented”?
2. What is the difference between, “Red means Jesus said it” and “Red means a very strong scholarly consensus that Jesus said it”?
3. Why is the discovery of the Gospel of Thomas important for the study of the historical Jesus?
4. The most controversial finding of the Jesus Seminar is that Jesus did not predict the end of the world or his own second coming. Rather the Kingdom of God is present. What is the basis for this statement?
5. Borg gives three reasons for rejecting the Lord’s Prayer as coming directly from Jesus. How do you evaluate this decision?
Chapter 4
Perry V. Kea, The Road to the Jesus Seminar
1. Miracles (divine intervention) are a normal expectation for a pre-Enlightenment mentality, but impossible for the post-Enlightenment mentality. Why?
2. The earliest stage of the quest (pre-WWI) sought the earliest written source for a life of Jesus. But Form Critics showed that the earliest tradition was oral. How does this affect the effort to write a life of Jesus?
3. How something is expressed is an important contributor to its meaning, that is, you cannot separate the “message” from its container. How does this change the view of Jesus’ parables and aphorisms?
4. If the future/apocalyptic Son of Man sayings are the product of the early church, how does this affect the view of Jesus as a prophet?
5. When the Jesus Seminar claims a historical core for the exorcisms, what is it claiming?
Chapter 5
Bernard Brandon Scott, How Did We Get Here?
1. How does the criterion of dissimilarity determine what comes from Jesus? What in your judgment is its strength(s) and weakness(es)?
2. Why was the layering of Q into, first, wisdom and, then, apocalyptic levels important for understanding the historical Jesus?
3. Why is the Gospel of Thomas important in our reconstruction of the historical Jesus?
4. Why are Luke 17:20‒21 and Gospel of Thomas 113 important in determining whether Jesus’ view of the Kingdom is apocalyptic or wisdom? What is the significance of this decision?
5. If you were constructing a collection of Gospels, what would you include, in what order and why?
Chapter 6
Ruth Schweitzer-Mordecai, The Jesus Intervention
1. What do you think are the chief “family secrets” of the church?
2. Is scholarship about Jesus, done in the public eye, healthy and proper or is it part of the TV age seeking after fifteen minutes of fame?
3. What is the crisis provoked by the quest for the historical Jesus? Where do you see it leading you? The church?
4. Does the model of family systems help illuminate the church’s crisis?
Chapter 7
Roy W. Hoover, Answering the Critics
1. For Brock the authentic words of Jesus are the confessions of the later Christians. Why does he take this position? What then is Jesus’ function?
2. The view of the task of history has shifted. Traditionally, the task of history was to support the reliability of the gospels. Then it shifted to evaluate the reliability of the gospels. What caused this shift?
3. What is the task of the historian? What is the task of the theologian? What in your judgment is the relation between these two?
Chapter 8
Robert J. Miller, The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics
1. What are the primary criticisms of the Jesus Seminar? Does Miller answer them adequately?
2. Is there a common thread to these criticisms?
3. What is your critique of the findings of the Jesus Seminar?
4. What is the value of the Jesus Seminar?