Comments on: Evidently the Jesus Seminar is too Religious

By: Pages tagged "religious"

Pages tagged "religious" — Sat, 13 Dec 2008 09:21:45 +0000

[...] bookmarks tagged religious Threads from Henry�s Web � Evidently the Jesus … saved by 2 others kaka1214 bookmarked on 12/13/08 | [...]

By: molly

molly — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 21:10:23 +0000

What’s an atheist in the Richard Dawson style? One who asks for answers by pitting teams of related theologians against each other in a rollicking Family Feud setting?

“Name a major Christian holiday that was stolen wholesale from an earlier local pagan celebration. You said ‘Christmas.’ Survey SAID?! Show me Christmas?!”

**Ding! Ding! Ding!**

Don’t feel bad. I’m sure Prof. Dawkins has to deal with that all the time.

By: Frank Hagan

Frank Hagan — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 15:54:05 +0000

I have dialoged with members of the Center for Inquiry, and they are skeptics. A few of the ones I dialoged with are atheists in the dogmatic, Richard Dawson style. I don’t hold out much hope for this new effort.

It will be interesting to see if they come to the conclusion that Jesus did not exist on the basis that only texts devoted to a particular religious view mention him.

By: Craig L. Adams

Craig L. Adams — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 13:36:10 +0000

Re: the Historical Jesus I personally kinda like Sanders” The Historical Figure of Jesus & John P. Meier’s ongoing A Marginal Jew project. I do tend to be more conservative than they are. I like what N. T. Wright and Richard Baukham are saying. I like what Ben Witherington has been saying. But, I give Sanders and Meier credit for honestly attempting to give a purely historical account. (And, actually Bart Ehrman is not as radical as he pretends to be, either.) The Jesus Seminar was strongly influenced by a particular interpretive agenda � to remove the apocalyptic element from Jesus teaching & present a more Gnostic and social activist Jesus. In that regard, I think criticizing the “faith commitment of it’s members” is in order. Read Funk sometime. His goal was “a new Reformation.” While being anti-Christian-orthodoxy, they still had strong faith commitments. The Jesus of the Gospel of Thomas seemed to them more congenial to their faith commitments than the Jesus of traditional Christianity. This is also why the Jesus Seminars conclusions have not found wide acceptance.

Tabor’s ready embrace of “The Jesus Tomb” has destroyed his credibility for me.

Yes, Meier’s books are long. But, he’s not hard to read. He lays out his historical methodology in Volume One. It’s well worth reading.

By: Larry B

Larry B — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 03:19:49 +0000

Personally, I don’t understand why this is even being considered. Studying the historical Jesus and the methodologies that go along with that make sense in the context of studying Christianity as the Jesus Seminar tried to do.

I don’t understand though, what applying scientific methodologies to the sources of tradition has to do with studying Christianity in a way that would illuminate a historical understanding of Jesus. I might misunderstand historical methodologies, but I thought it involved using the known historical evidence to build a picture of what the person might have been. Are they just saying that the Jesus Seminar’s historical evidence was flawed because it wasn’t tested by scientific methodologies? How do you even test something like an historical account of Jewish Traditions for example?

It sounds suspicious to me.