 From the introduction to The Five Gospels
The Five Gospels represents a dramatic exit from
windowless studies and the beginning of a new venture for gospel scholarship. Leading scholars—Fellows of the Jesus Seminar—have decided to update and then make the legacy of two
hundred years of research and debate a matter of public record. In the aftermath of the controversy over Darwin's The Origin of Species
(published in 1859) and the ensuing Scopes "monkey" trial in 1925, American biblical scholarship retreated into the closet. The fundamentalist
mentality generated a climate of inquisition that made honest scholarly judgments dangerous. Numerous biblical scholars were subjected to heresy
trials and suffered the loss of academic posts. They learned it was safer to keep their critical judgments private. However, the intellectual ferment of
the century soon reasserted itself in colleges, universities, and seminaries. By the end of World War II, critical scholars again quietly dominated the
academic scene from one end of the continent to the other. Critical biblical scholarship was supported, of course, by other university disciplines which
wanted to ensure that dogmatic considerations not be permitted to intrude into scientific and historical research. The fundamentalists were forced, as a
consequence, to found their own Bible colleges and seminaries in order to propagate their point of view. In launching new institutions, the
fundamentalists even refused accommodation with the older, established church-related schools that dotted the land. One focal point of the raging controversies was who Jesus was and what he
had said. Jesus has always been a controversial figure. In the gospels he is represented as being at odds with his religious environment in matters like
fasting and sabbath observance. He seems not to have gotten along with his own family. Even his disciples are pictured as stubborn, dense, and
self-serving—unable to fathom what he was about. Herod Antipas, in whose territory he ranged as a traveling sage, had him pegged as a troublemaker, much like John the Baptist, and the Romans regarded him as
a mild political threat. Yet much about him remains obscure. We do not even know for sure what language he usually spoke—Aramaic or
Greek—when instructing his followers. It is not surprising that this enigmatic figure should be perpetually at the center of storms of controversy.
The contemporary religious controversy, epitomized in the Scopes trial and the continuing clamor for creationism as a viable alternative to the theory of
evolution, turns on whether the worldview reflected in the Bible can be carried forward into this scientific age and retained as an article of faith.
Jesus figures prominently in this debate. The Christ of creed and dogma, who had been firmly in place in the Middle Ages, can no longer command
the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo's telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable
glass. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens.
The profound change in astronomy was a part of the rise of experimental science, which sought to put all knowledge to the test of close and repeated
observation. At the same time and as part of the same impulse, the advent of historical reason meant distinguishing the factual from the fictional in
accounts of the past. For biblical interpretation that distinction required scholars to probe the relation between faith and history. In this boiling cauldron the quest of the historical Jesus was conceived.
Historical knowledge became an indispensable part of the modern world's basic "reality toolkit." Apart from this instrument, the modern inquirer could
not learn the difference between an imagined world and "the real world" of human experience. To know the truth about Jesus, the real Jesus, one had
to find the Jesus of history. The refuge offered by the cloistered precincts of faith gradually became a battered and beleaguered position. In the wake of
the Enlightenment, the dawn of the Age of Reason, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, biblical scholars rose to the challenge and launched a
tumultuous search for the Jesus behind the Christian facade of the Christ. Copyright
© 1993 Polebridge Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.Top of page
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