Searching for the Historical Jesus
In 1985, Robert Funk and John Dominic Crossan made headlines in Berkeley, California by announcing their intentions to “renew the quest for the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to more than a handful of gospel specialists”. Equipped with their trusty red G-2 pens, color-coded beads, and the scientific method, their group of thirty academics sought to reclaim the authentic Jesus from the hands of the Christians who swindled the world with an overly supernatural Messiah. Caricatured by their eccentric voting system and controversial research topic, they soon became dubbed as “The Jesus Seminar”.
Their methodology was simple. Meeting twice yearly for over ten years, the scholars would evaluate, filter, and vote on the historical accuracy of Jesus in the Gospels using modern-day rationalism and historicism. Parodying the “red letters” in the gospels, the group would vote accurate comments as red, slightly accurate as pink, grey as possibly accurate, and black as completely inaccurate. After nearly a decade of cross-examining all available extant evidence and research, the end result was that only about 15% of Jesus in the Bible was judged to be authentic. The Jesus Seminar presented to the world a portrait of Jesus stripped of its superstition or pseudo-science. Not a Jesus Christ who claimed to be Messiah or desired repentance, but a Jesus of Nazareth who went too far in challenging the social and religious structures of his day and was summarily arrested and crucified. With this, The Jesus Seminar concluded that they have finally found and conquered the elusive historical Jesus much like Edmund Hillar and Tenzing Norgay conquered Mt. Everest.
The Church is Always Supernatural
It might be tempting for Evangelicals to dismiss this portrait of Jesus as a product of postmodernism, but our own portraits of Jesus Christ may not be any different. In order to maintain a level of scientific respectability, we push away the supernatural to only extreme circumstances and minimize demonic opposition to just a convenient scapegoat for our problems. Our instinctive disdain for the supernatural allows the world to seep in and dominate our portrait of Jesus, downplaying the supernatural sovereignty of God until He becomes a powerless conversational topic for us to gather, discuss, and vote on periodically, preferably on Sundays.
But in the bible, the spiritual and the supernatural are not superstition or pseudo-science, but a requirement to walk with Christ. In the head of the New Testament canon, Matthew writes of a man brought before Christ in need of healing. Jesus Christ sees the man’s paralytic condition and still determines that his spiritual condition overshadows his physical affliction. Despite the outcries of both Satan and the Pharisees, Jesus turns to the man ravaged with weakness and numbness and says “[t]ake heart, son; your sins are forgiven” (Matt 9:2). It is not hard for us to relate with this narrative because we, as Christians, also experienced the same supernatural resurrection as the paralytic man. Rationalism and science are not incompatible with the Christian faith, but we must come to recognize that Christians who gather in worship of a resurrection are also supernatural people. Christians who praise the dead around them being brought back to life are supernatural people. Christians who recognize their own brokenness and depravity and yet see themselves amongst the family of our God are supernatural people. Only then can we truly behold our God clearly.
Jesus Christ is Always Supernatural
The conclusion of The Jesus Seminar should not surprise us. It is impossible to explore the rooms of the Christian faith in depth, neither their furnishings nor their color palette choices, unless we come face to face with the key supernatural element of our Messiah and enter into the richness of the Christian life. When we strip the supernatural away from the Jesus of Nazareth, we are naturally left with a discorded, curved mirror of our savior that looks nothing like the Lion of Judah in our bibles. Our God moves from being the great “I AM” who walks on water to a failed social revolutionary. From the “Son of Man” who casted out demons to a moral philosopher. If we try to dissect our God with only the scalpel of empirical evidence and the dilator of historical enquiry, we are never going to truly behold the God of David. Instead, all that will be left is a god crafted with our own tools, the Jesus of “The Jesus Seminar”– a man who sought to overthrow the Roman government and was crucified in the process. We need the supernatural.
