Magic Statistics

There's a word missing in the second line. It's probably "like" or something similar. This is from the same website that Rebecca noticed had a spelling error in another of their quizzes.

Alasdair MacIntyre, one of the most controversial moral philosophers of our day, reviews a book on ethics by the late Dominican theologian Herbert McCabe. Prof MacIntyre recommends the book because Fr McCabe does not take the usual approach to an introduction to ethics, which would be to describe each school of moral theory–deontological, consequentialist, etc.–and then to list the assumptions and arguments pro and con for each.

McCabe begins differently. Or rather he suggests to his readers that, if they are to discover what it would be to lead a good life, they will have to begin with what they already learned from the particular society and tradition in which they were brought up: not a set of theoretical truths, but a set of habits of judgement, perception and desire. What they then need to recognise are the various ways in which these habits may be defective, so that they do not as yet understand what friendship is, what happiness is, or what justice requires of us, as good people understand these things. How are we to acquire the understanding of a good person? Only by becoming good persons ourselves. And how is this to be achieved?

McCabe compares the way in which we may bring someone to a point at which they find justice desirable, so that they value it for its own sake, to the way in which parents may bring children to a point at which they no longer read in order to please those parents, but because they now enjoy reading. To move towards goodness is to find one’s enjoyment, one’s happiness, in activity informed by such virtues as justice and courage, and by engaging in practices that we find worthwhile – among which family life has a central place. The exercise of those virtues is not always to our interest, but without them adult happiness will be beyond our reach. Happiness is, McCabe says, constituted by virtuous action. And so is goodness.

MacIntyre also shows that this view of philosophical ethics leads to a theological ethics, "in which the narrative of our lives is understood in relation to the narrative of God’s self-giving".

Read the whole thing.

via Mere Comments.

I would have thought this news item would garner wider coverage, both in the popular media and in the Christian blogosphere, but apparently it’s not considered big news. That lack of coverage could be a sign that the Jesus Seminar has proved to be a passing fad. As one who opposed the Seminar's work, I would be pleased if that were the case.

Robert Funk (1926-2005) founded the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar in 1986, following his retirement from the University of Montana. His illustrious academic career was actually based not on New Testament studies but on his important mainstream scholarship in New Testament Greek. Strangely, I think, the obituary posted at the Westar Institute’s website barely mentions the field in which he made his reputation as a biblical scholar.

Prof Funk's Jesus Seminar had an inflated image of its own importance from the get-go, and this shows up in the obituary: "Westar's first project, the Jesus Seminar, renewed the quest for the historical Jesus begun by David Friedrich Strauss in the nineteenth century and later taken up by Albert Schweitzer at the beginning of the twentieth." This is a misrepresentation: Westar did not "renew" anything. In the mid-1980s, many biblical scholars had been and were continuing to pursue serious historical research into the life of Jesus of Nazareth. If anything, the work of the Jesus Seminar was a detour—a distraction—from credible research into New Testament history.

I wrote an article for the monthly newsletter of my church, Riverdale Baptist Church, in early 2003 on the Jesus Seminar. For anyone wanting a summary and critique of the Seminar’s methods and findings, I hope this is useful:
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The Jesus Seminar

1. Introduction

The Jesus Seminar is made up of seventy-four scholars, mainly from North America, who began meeting in the 1980s to discuss the words and deeds of Jesus and vote on their authenticity. The seminar presents itself as a group of impartial, independent, and objective Bible scholars, and their findings as "the assured results of critical scholarship." Their findings embody a ‘minimalist’ view of Jesus: they contend that Jesus said and did very little of what is recorded in the four gospels.

The seminar’s pronouncements about the historical accuracy of the words and deeds of Jesus recorded in the New Testament gospels and other writings have garnered much publicity in the popular media. These claims seem to have been accepted and, in some cases, promoted by newspapers, magazines, and television. At the same time, the seminar’s views have been subjected to intense criticism by Bible scholars of virtually all theological outlooks. Even many liberal scholars and clergy have not accepted these views because the methods the seminar used in reaching their conclusions are so obviously biased.

2. What Does The Seminar Say About Jesus?

The Jesus Seminar’s work has resulted in the publication of two books: The Five Gospels: The Search For the Authentic Words Of Jesus (1993) and The Acts of Jesus: The Search For the Authentic Deeds Of Jesus (1998). Both of these books include a new translation of the gospels, which is colour-coded in accordance with the results of the seminar’s voting procedure. Sayings or deeds of Jesus considered historically authentic—that is, Jesus really said or did them—are coloured red; passages considered probably or mostly authentic are coloured pink; passages considered doubtful are coloured grey; passages considered fictional are coloured black. Each of the two books contains more black text than the other three colours combined. Only 18% of the words attributed to Jesus in the gospels, and only 16% of the deeds of Jesus, are coloured red or pink. Virtually the entire Gospel of John is black.

The Jesus of the Jesus Seminar simply did not say or do most of the things that the gospel-writers ascribe to him. This Jesus never spoke about himself; all the passages in which Jesus is reported as saying, "I am . . ." or "I have come to . . ." are inauthentic, as are all references to the "Son of man." He never spoke about the future, his death or its significance, or God’s final judgment. He rarely spoke in parables (only five are judged authentic), and he never explained them. He never preached sermons or engaged in extended dialogues or debates with anyone. The Jesus Seminar claims that Jesus’ habitual way of speaking was to utter short, pithy sayings, such as "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemies."

Of the 176 deeds of Jesus considered by the Seminar, only ten are judged authentic, and another nineteen probably authentic. Predictably, all events involving overt supernatural intervention are ruled out. According to the seminar, Jesus did not change water into wine, walk on water, feed the multitudes, or raise Lazarus from the dead. He was crucified–not for claiming to be the Messiah, but rather for being a public nuisance. Jesus’ death was unfortunate, but neither he nor his earliest disciples regarded it as having any particular significance. His body was never raised from the grave, so all the words and actions attributed to the risen Christ are fabricated.

According to the Jesus Seminar, the words and deeds that they have coloured grey or black were inserted later by the gospel writers. So, the New Testament Gospels are mostly works of fiction, full of words and stories invented by the church. By implication, the Book of Acts and the New Testament letters are also extremely unreliable sources, since they agree with what is written in the Gospels. The clear inference is that the Christian church has been worshipping a lie for almost 2,000 years.

3. How Did The Jesus Seminar Reach These Conclusions?

The methods used by the Jesus Seminar to assess the authenticity of the gospels are highly problematic. First, as implied by the title of their first book (The Five Gospels), they place a high value on writings about Jesus that are not included in the New Testament canon, in particular, a text known as the Gospel of Thomas. This document consists of 113 brief proverbs or aphorisms attributed to Jesus, some of which also appear in the New Testament gospels, most of which do not. (Many of the latter reflect the influence of an early heresy known as Gnosticism.) No reputable scholar has dated this document earlier than the second century, yet the Jesus Seminar, with no supporting evidence, maintains it was written between AD 50 and 70—earlier, and therefore more authentic, than the four canonical gospels. The seminar gives no hint that this is a controversial claim among biblical scholars; indeed, no other Bible scholar—evangelical or otherwise—has accepted such an early date for this document. Assuming that Thomas predates Mark well serves the seminar’s purposes, however: it bolsters the supposition that Jesus usually uttered short pithy sayings. Making this assumption also allows the seminar to reject the priority of Mark’s gospel with its miracle-working Jesus. Thus, the seminar contends that the early Christians falsified Jesus’ message by incorporating made-up stories about miraculous works and messianic claims.

The second major problem is the seminar’s strict application of what is known as the criterion of dissimilarity to determine which sayings of Jesus are authentic. This criterion asserts that a saying is authentic only when it is dissimilar both to preceding Jewish tradition and subsequent Christian writings. Thus, if a saying attributed to Jesus in the gospels has discernible antecedents in earlier Jewish literature, or if it is echoed in later Christian teaching (including, e.g., Paul’s letters), then the seminar judged it inauthentic. It is this that accounts for the rejection of 82% of the words of Jesus recorded in the Gospels. Only sayings that are completely unique or distinctive can be accepted; the rest are rejected as too Jewish or too Christian. The Jesus of the Jesus Seminar is an enigmatic, idiosyncratic philosopher-sage with no obvious connection to his Jewish heritage or his later Christian followers.

Predictably, what has emerged from the seminar’s use of the criterion of dissimilarity is a Jesus who never cites or interprets Old Testament Scripture, has little or nothing to say about the kingdom of God, and never makes apocalyptic statements about God’s future intervention in history. The seminar never comes to grips with the fact that first-century Palestinian Jews were deeply concerned with interpreting Old Testament apocalyptic passages—especially the book of Daniel—and applying them to the contemporary situation. Based on their understanding of those passages, Jesus’ contemporaries eagerly awaited divine intervention to liberate them from the pagan oppressors who governed them; they longed for God’s decisive act of deliverance that would inaugurate his kingdom. As the New Testament Gospels and other historical sources tell us, Palestine in Jesus’ time was a breeding ground for messianic pretenders and revolutionary outlaws motivated by hatred toward the Romans. First-century Jews anticipated that God would quickly send a holy leader to instigate a violent revolution against the foreign occupiers. And yet, the Jesus Seminar would have us believe that Jesus cared nothing about any of this.

4. Summary

The Jesus Seminar portrays a man who would have been simply irrelevant to the people he came in contact with. Certainly, this Jesus would have posed no threat to the religious and political authorities of his day. There would have been no reason to impose any legal sanction against him, much less put him to death by nailing him to a cross. This is the fundamental flaw in all the well-publicized study and analysis of the Jesus Seminar: it cannot account for the most obvious and widely accepted fact about the controversial life of Jesus of Nazareth—his crucifixion.

Even if one were to accept the seminar’s suggestion that Jesus was crucified because he happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, there is a further problem which the seminar cannot explain: the willingness of his disciples to suffer and die for the cause of the gospel because they believed that Jesus was resurrected. Because of this elementary failure, the pre-eminent British New Testament scholar N. T. (Tom) Wright regards the seminar’s findings as a "freshman mistake".

5. Conclusion: The Rhetoric of the Seminar

An especially unfortunate aspect of the Jesus Seminar’s public relations is the disdain their leaders so obviously feel toward those who disagree with their pronouncements. Typically, the seminar and its advocates contemptuously dismiss any negative comment, however well reasoned and affably expressed, as the work of small-minded and ignorant fundamentalists whose sole motivation is a reactionary desire to protect the church and its traditions. By following this tactic of attacking the critic rather than the criticisms, the seminar neatly avoids dealing with the substance of the counter-arguments. This, coupled with the seminar’s arrogant self-proclamation as the leading edge of ‘scientific’ academic wisdom, accounts for the widespread rejection of the seminar’s work among Bible scholars and clergy. The founders of the Jesus Seminar made no secret of their ultimate agenda—to undermine orthodox Christianity and the Christian church. They have allowed this goal to shape their work to such an extent that the resulting portrait of Jesus is transparently tendentious and utterly unconvincing.

Further Reading on the Internet:

1. The Corrected Jesus by Richard B. Hays, First Things 43 (May 1994)

2. The Seventy-Four ‘Scholars’: Who Does the Jesus Seminar Really Speak For? by Craig L. Blomberg, Christian Research Journal, Fall 1994
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Robert Funk is in God’s hands. May our Lord have mercy on his soul.

The police departments of Gretna and other suburbs west of New Orleans shut down a major bridge leading out of N.O., preventing people from evacuating themselves from the devasted and flooded city. "We shut down the bridge," Arthur Lawson, chief of the City of Gretna Police Department, confirmed to United Press International . . .

"There was no food, water or shelter" in Gretna City, Lawson said. "We did not have the wherewithal to deal with these people."

"If we had opened the bridge, our city would have looked like New Orleans does now: looted, burned and pillaged."

But — in an example of the chaos that continued to beset survivors of the storm long after it had passed — even as Lawson's men were closing the bridge, authorities in New Orleans were telling people that it was only way out of the city.

Read the whole story.

via Damian Penny. For more info, see Instapundit.