Mission Peak UU Congregation

M i s s i o n P e a k U n i t a r i a n U n i v e r s a l i s t C o n g r e g a t i o n

JESUS THE SAGE

A few years ago, I came into the office of the church where I was working and took a very long recorded message off the answering machine. A man's earnest-sounding voice kept repeating the litany "Jesus said," followed by a string of quotes from the New Testament. For example, the man intoned: "Jesus said: 'I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except by me (John 14:6)'" and the voice droned on: "Jesus said: 'Whosoever serves me must follow me, for wherever I am, my servant must be there also. Whoever serves me, the Father will honor' (John 12:26)." The anonymous man took up some 15 minutes of the church's tape with his quotations. Apparently, this man decided to set us wayward Unitarian Universalists straight by quoting scripture. The problem is, every passage that he quoted, although it was from the New Testament, was something that Jesus did not say!

That, at least, is the conclusion of some 200 scholars who are Fellows of the study group called The Jesus Seminar. I once had the opportunity to spend three days at a Unitarian Universalist Ministers Association conference in Malibu with the founder and co-chair of the Jesus Seminar, the late Dr. Robert Funk, who was a Biblical scholar and was the founder of the Westar Institute, an organization whose goal is to promote Biblical literacy. Funk used to say that Biblical literacy is scarce, even though the Bible is widely read and revered.

Few people who use the Bible realize that all of the gospels and letters of the New Testament were compiled decades after Jesus died, by people who did not know Jesus personally, and not by the disciples whose names the gospels bear. Nor do most Bible users know that there were many more gospels circulating in the First and Second Centuries than the four gospels that the church accepted as official - the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John Gospels that we're familiar with. The Egerton Gospel, the Gospel of the Egyptians, the Gospel of the Hebrews, the Gospel of the Cross, and quite a few others were in circulation. Some of these early gospels were lost or are preserved only in fragments. Some were incorporated into the four Biblical gospels.

Another prominent scholar in the Jesus Seminar is John Dominic Crossan, former Professor of Biblical Studies at DePaul University in Chicago. The roster of Fellows of the Jesus Seminar is an impressive list of Biblical scholars from a variety of religious backgrounds, all of whom, when they joined the Jesus Seminar, embraced the monumental task of trying to determine what from the New Testament Jesus actually said, and what was added by those who came to the original writings, stories and sayings with a particular creed in mind, and who then put words in Jesus' mouth which supported their theology.

The Jesus Seminar scholars attempted to distinguish the Jesus of history from the Christ of faith, and they came up with a picture of Jesus that is significantly different from the one that traditional Christianity has offered for centuries. After years of study and debate among themselves, using depth analysis of translations, other ancient gospel fragments, stylistic analysis and their own intuition, they concluded that 82% of the words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were almost certainly things he did not say!

For every phrase, sentence and parable attributed to Jesus, the Seminar scholars cast votes, using colored beads, on whether they thought the historical Jesus said it. Then they published their own red-letter edition, titled The Five Gospels (it includes the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of the sayings of Jesus, which was known about but lost until its discovery at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945.) The scholars used four different colors of beads, according to the following code:

A vote with a red bead means: "Jesus probably said this or something very much like it"
A pink means "Jesus probably said something like this"
A gray bead means "Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own"
A black bead means "This is not Jesus speaking; it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition"

As you flip through their book, The Five Gospels, which I have here, you can easily see from the colors that there is very little that the scholars agreed Jesus actually said.

The idea of approaching scripture critically in this way in an attempt to decide which sayings in the New Testament are the authentic sayings of Jesus is not new. Thomas Jefferson did it with scissors and paste in the early 1800's. He created what came to be known a The Jefferson Bible, which has recently been re-published by Beacon Press, the Unitarian Universalist publishing house.

Why did Jefferson bother? Theologically, he was a Unitarian, believing Jesus to be 100% human, and not God incarnate. But he considered himself to be nonetheless a true Christian; he deeply revered the man Jesus. As Jefferson put it, "To the corruptions of Christianity, I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian in the only sense in which he wanted anyone to be: sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; and believing he never claimed any other... Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being."

Jefferson was on to something. When you sift through the sayings of Jesus in the Gospels with a critical eye, you can't help but notice the contradictions: Jesus says that God makes the sun and rain to shine alike on the wicked and the just (Matthew 5:45), that God is a loving father to all alike (Luke 15:11-32), yet elsewhere he says that this same God will cast the wicked into everlasting flames (Luke 12:4-5). Jesus says we should love our enemies (Luke 6:27), but then he calls his enemies "children of the Devil" (1 John 3:10). Jesus speaks of God's unconditional forgiveness (Matthew 18:22), but elsewhere he asserts: "whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit is never forgiven, but is guilty of an eternal sin" (Mark 3:29). Will the real Jesus please stand up?

Actually, it is scholars like those in the Jesus seminar, who are trying to raise up the real Jesus from the dust of centuries of misunderstanding. This is today's resurrection, and it is bringing out of the dust a rather remarkable and more consistent Jesus. The magazine Christianity Today called this the "new, unimproved Jesus."

This newly resurrected Jesus, according to Jesus seminar scholars and others, was a gentle yet charismatic person. He had no illusions about himself being the expected Messiah, and he preferred the company of people who had no illusions of grandiosity about themselves, either! He dared to be seen in public with women, and he especially loved the innocence and guilelessness of children. He sometimes boldly flaunted Jewish religious laws when people were too dogmatic and soulless in following them. He was one who would rather congregate with the outcasts of his society than with those in high places - he hung out with tax collectors, gentiles, lepers, sinners, paupers and prostitutes. He even ate with such "riff-raff " although he would also eat with the learned and wealthy. And he wasn't too concerned about eating Kosher! With all the scrupulous religious laws about defilement, if you ate the wrong thing or touched the wrong person, Jesus dared to say, "It's not what goes in your mouth but what comes out of it that defiles you" (Matthew 15:11).

This real Jesus was an itinerant preacher who did not worry over when his next meal would come or what he would wear, who called no specific place home but who was spiritually at home wherever he went, feeling himself and all humankind to be wrapped in the arms of a loving God. He was witty and sometimes taught through laughter, like a Zen Master. He joked, for instance, that when someone asks you for your coat, just go ahead and give him your shirt as well (Luke 6:29). At a time when folks wore only these two garments, you'd be left naked if you took this advice literally.You can almost hear his listeners chuckling. He quipped that before you go looking for the sliver in a friend's eye, you'd better first remove the timber from your own eye (Matthew 7:5), so you can see - a gentle, humorous way to caution against hypocrisy.

Jesus Seminar founder Robert Funk also characterized Jesus as a "party animal," and for this terminology Funk came under intense criticism by some fundamentalist Christians. But in the New Testament, it appears that Jesus was one who believed in celebration and the enjoyment of life. Many of his stories include parties, and he did not condemn celebration, nor did he himself hesitate to eat and drink heartily when given the opportunity.

This resurrected Jesus was a storyteller par excellence. He told parabolic stories, parables, that often had a twist, a reversal of expectation, like a Sufi story or a Zen koan. And he would not tell his listeners what these symbolic stories meant, but would let the story speak for itself. The parable of the laborers in the vineyard (Matthew 20: 1-16) is a good example of a story with a twist. You may recall it: The proprietor of a vineyard went out one morning and hired laborers to work for one silver coin, and then he went out at noon, in mid afternoon and in late afternoon to hire more. When it came time to pay, he paid the ones he hired last first, and paid them each one silver coin. When the ones who worked all day came to be paid, they expected that they'd be paid more for working longer, but they too got one silver coin. Naturally, they were dismayed that they got the same pay as those hired at the end of the day who only worked an hour. This seems unfair by normal standards of justice, but it is consistent with Jesus' style. All the laborers got a surprise: those who worked all day got less than they expected, and those who worked an hour got more. As the Jesus Seminar explains it, this reversal of expectation and cutting against the social grain is typical of Jesus, and it also is consistent with his reversal of the expectations of the poor and the rich. Jesus told the poor that God's domain belongs to them, but he cautioned the rich that it is easier for a camel to squeeze through the eye of a needle - a rather humorous image - than for a rich person to get to God's domain (Matthew 19:24).

Regarding God's domain, or "the kingdom of God," as it is traditionally called: contrary to the widely held idea that Jesus believed that this kingdom would arrive in the future, with himself returning as its anointed messiah, the scholars of the Jesus Seminar and many other modern Biblical scholars have concluded that Jesus believed and taught, that God's domain is not some perfect realm to come; it is right here on earth, right now, obvious to those who have the eyes to see it, yet regrettably people miss it.

This reminds me of the Zen saying about trying too hard to find enlightenment: "It's like looking for an ox when you are riding on one," or the statement from the Hindu Upanishads that the Ultimate, the luminous presence of God, is "nearer than breath, than heartbeat." God's domain, Jesus was saying, is a present state of mind, an enlightened awareness. In this and other ways, the new Jesus comes across not as a fiery Messiah, or a political reformer, or a revolutionary prophet of things to come, as he is often pictured, but as a sage in the tradition of Lao Tsu, Gautama the Buddha, and Zen, Hindu and Sufi Masters throughout the ages.

Jesus the sage, the man of peace, the God-intoxicated wanderer and teacher, who consorted with all kinds of people, who enjoyed stories, laughter and celebration, who was unconcerned about the future and unburdened by possessions, who cared for the poor and the outcast but hated hypocrisy and social posturing, who loved all and condemned none - this is the Jesus who has been resurrected by the scholars. Though we will probably never be able to fill in many of the details of his life, a clearer picture of who he was and what he tried to teach is emerging. This may not be the Jesus that our anonymous evangelist on the church answering machine would like us to accept, but this new, unimproved Jesus is more than good enough for me!