Jesus Christ, Plain and Simple

By Richard N. Ostling

"Who do you say that I am?"

When Jesus posed this question to his disciples in Matthew's Gospel, Peter emphatically and faithfully replied, "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God." And what might the answer be today? Three newly published scholarly books put forward a startlingly revisionist reply. While Jesus may have been a carpenter, that probably meant he was illiterate and belonged to a low caste of artisans. He did not preach salvation from sin through sacrifice; he never said "Blessed are the peacemakers for they shall be called sons of God"; neither did he say "Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall see God." For that matter, he probably never delivered the Sermon on the Mount. As for the question posed to Peter and the disciples, Jesus never asked it. And he never cured any diseases. As for the other miracles? No loaves and fishes, no water into wine, no raising of Lazarus. And certainly no resurrection. What happened to his body then? Most likely it was consumed by wild dogs.

Until now, this sort of Bah, humbug! approach to the Scriptures was in full display largely in the rarefied and theologically correct atmosphere of seminaries and elite universities. John Dominic Crossan, a Bible scholar at DePaul University, notes that there was an "implicit deal -- you scholars can go off to the universities and write in the journals and say anything you want." Now, he says, "the scholars are coming out of the closet," demanding public attention for the way they think. Among the latest such works are Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (HarperSanFrancisco; $18), Burton Mack's The Lost Gospel (HarperSanFrancisco; $22) and The Five Gospels (Macmillan; $30).

For Crossan, Jesus' deification was akin to the worship of Augustus Caesar -- a mixture of myth, propaganda and social convention. It was simply a thing that was done in the ancient Mediterranean world. Christ's pedigree -- his virgin birth in Bethlehem of Judea, home of his reputed ancestor King David -- is retrospective mythmaking by writers who had "already decided on the transcendental importance of the adult Jesus," Crossan says. The journey to Bethlehem from Nazareth, he adds, is "pure fiction, a creation of Luke's own imagination." He speculates that Jesus may not even have been Mary's firstborn and that the man the Bible calls his brother James was the eldest child. Crossan argues that Jesus did not cure anyone but that he did "heal" people by refusing to ostracize them because of their illnesses.

While Jesus may have had some ability to use trancelike therapies to "exorcise" demons, Crossan says, he used the incidents themselves chiefly to characterize "Roman imperialism as demonic possession." Both Crossan and Mack say Jesus' ideas are similar to those of the Cynics of the age. These were men who believed not in nothing, as the word now implies, but in the rejection of the standard beliefs and values of society. And so, contrary to the times, Jesus taught radical egalitarianism. He also demanded itinerancy of his disciples. Believing that such wanderlust subtly spread subversion, the Romans had him crucified. Jesus -- a peasant nobody -- was never buried, never taken by his friends to a rich man's sepulcher. Rather, says Crossan, the tales of entombment and resurrection were latter-day wishful thinking. Instead, Jesus' corpse went the way of all abandoned criminals' bodies: it was probably barely covered with dirt, vulnerable to the wild dogs that roamed the wasteland of the execution grounds.

Mack agrees with most of Crossan's reconception of Jesus' life. But the main purpose of The Lost Gospel is to propagate The Book of Q, a back-to-basics teaching of the original Christians that was teased out of ancient texts by scholars who believe that it predates the Gospels. (Q stands for the German Quelle, which means "source.") The Book of Q has no narrative; rather it is a collection of sayings and aphorisms. Mack says the "Jesus people" were attracted to his teachings because he preached the holiness of the simple life. Thus verses like "Turn the other cheek," "Love your enemies" and "Rejoice when reproached," all part of Q, embody the practices of a community of charity, hope and neighborliness. Mack writes, "The narrative Gospels have no claim as historical accounts. The Gospels are imaginative creations."

If Jesus amounts to only his words in The Lost Gospel, he barely holds on to them in The Five Gospels. The book is the product of the 74 biblical scholars (including Crossan) who belong to the Jesus Seminar. Meeting twice a year, the group votes with purposeful theatricality on the authenticity of each gospel saying, casting colored-coded beads into a box to indicate which lines of Christ were holier than others. The latest round appears in The Five Gospels, which, parodying the red-letter Bibles that display the words of Jesus in red type, prints the supposedly authentic words in red and prints the rest, in descending order of credibility, in other colors. The text is a breezy new colloquial translation (see box). Precisely 82% of Jesus' words are judged inauthentic.

And what is the fifth gospel? It is the Gospel of Thomas, which church fathers deemed unacceptable because it contained ideas of the heretical Gnostic sects. Indeed, the book ends with Jesus rebuking Peter for trying to oust a woman named Mary from the company of disciples. "Females are not worthy of life," says Peter. Jesus replies, "Look, I shall guide her to make her a male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter heaven's kingdom." Three sentences in Thomas survive the seminar's judgment as likely statements of Jesus'. (The members of the seminar voted down the Mary passage.)

Not surprisingly, the new books are controversial. Jacob Neusner, professor of religious studies at the University of South Florida, calls the Jesus Seminar "either the greatest scholarly hoax since the Piltdown Man or the utter bankruptcy of New Testament studies -- I hope the former." Other scholars question the use of the Thomas and the hypothetical Q. The effect is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope at a vanishing Jesus. In his forthcoming The Gospel of Jesus (Westminster), William R. Farmer, professor emeritus of the New Testament at Southern Methodist University, decries the latest Q theory because it leads to the bizarre conclusion that "the death and resurrection of Jesus was . . . of little or no importance" to his disciples. Meanwhile, N.T. Wright, an Oxford University teacher and newly named cathedral dean in Lichfield, England, says it is a "freshman mistake" to suppose that the Gospels do not refer to actual events simply because the writers of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John have clear points of view. One of the most formidable of traditionalist Bible scholars, Wright, whose conservative rejoinder Jesus and the Victory of God (Fortress) is forthcoming, says the skeptical theories also fail to provide any credible explanation for how a faith founded by their pared-down Jesus could spread so rapidly after his Crucifixion. Wright's explanation: the resurrection.

As Wright sees it, playing the game of deconstructing the New Testament nowadays "is like finding yourself in the middle of a rugby field with five teams and 10 balls. There is all kinds of excitement: everybody is tackling everybody, and everyone thinks he's on the winning team." For the moment, it is impossible for ordinary churchgoers to follow the action, much less determine which of the competing Jesuses will win.