Christian exclusivism, religious pluralism, religious experiences, near death experiences and parapsychology

In this post, I'll like to reflect on how the evidence for parapsychology, near-death experience and religious experiences are relevant for discussions on Christian exclusivism and religious pluralism.

Christian exclusivism or particularism is roughly the view that God's particular revelation has been done in Jesus (and only in Jesus). On the contrary, religious pluralism is the view that God's revelation has been done in several (not just one) religious traditions. (This has implications for "salvation": If exclusivism is right, "salvation" is possible in just one source; if pluralism is right, "salvation" is available in more than one source).

Most Christians are exclusivists. But some Christians are pluralists. (Even though I agree with exclusivists that Jesus' self-perception was exclusivist, not pluralist, some disagree). For example Marcus Borg is a Christian religious pluralist, summarizes the difference between Christian exclusivism and pluralism like this: "Imaging Jesus as a particular instance of a type of religious personality known cross-culturally undermines a widespread Christian belief that Jesus is unique, which commonly is linked to the notion that Christianity is exclusively true and that Jesus is "the only way." The image I have sketched views Jesus differently: rather than being the exclusive revelation of God, he is one of many mediators of the sacred. Yet even as this view subtracts from the uniqueness of Jesus and the Christian tradition, it also in my judgment adds to the credibility of both."

The Christian religious pluralist, like Borg, considers that Jesus was not unique, but that he belongs for a kind of "spiritual teachers" known cross-culturally. In other words, God's revelation has not been limited to just a person, but to a whole group of individuals. (Note that Borg is not saying that ALL spiritual teachers are alike; rather his point is that, like Jesus, there are OTHERS who share the same condition as "mediators of the sacred".)

In the case of Borg, I think his own mystical experiences and concept of God have strongly influenced his view about Jesus (see full discussion here). After all, Borg doesn't share the concept of God as a personal being which is trascedent regarding the universe (a concept essential in monotheism). Borg's concept of God is not Christian, but a kind of impersonalistic panentheism rooted in his own mystical experiences which "gave me a new understanding of the meaning of the word God. I realized that God does not refer to a supernatural being 'out there' (which is where I had put God ever since my childhood musings about God 'up in heaven'). Rather, I began to see that the word God refers to the sacred at the center of existence, the holy mystery that is all around us and within us"

The personalistic conception of God as a supernatural (non-natural, non-physical) being "out there" (i.e. ontologically objective and trascendent) is explicitly denied by Borg. In its place, it is put a non-personal, mysterious entity which is inmanent to the world, an entity which is "at the center of existence".

Note that Borg's concept of God makes religious exclusivism almost impossible. After all, why and how so an impersonal entity like that can "choose" a given person as the only intermediary to the sacred? But if you accept a personalistic concept of God, then you cannot rule out that such personal being choose (over all others) a specific person (e.g. his "Son") as the exclusive, unique and ultimate revelation of God. The latter is the Christian exclusivistic view (which coheres with the personalistic conception of God).

But in this post, I won't comment on Borg or panentheism, but in how the evidence from parapsychology, religious experiences and near-death experience is compatible, or not, with Christian exclusivism in the context of 3 typical arguments by pluralists.

3 common arguments from religious pluralists:

1-Jesus' resurrection cannot justify his exclusivism, because many people who have been clinically dead have woke up (i.e. coming to life again), for example in near-death experiences or in other cases (e.g. waking up in the morgue).

This is the worst of the pluralistic arguments, because it is rooted in a very common and egregious conceptual confusion. All the examples known of people who have returned to life (e.g. in NDEs or in the morgue) are examples of RESUCITATIONS AND REVIVIFICATIONS, not of resurrections in the particular ontological sense in which it applies to Jesus.

In the case of Jesus, he rose from the dead in the same body which is transformed into a immortal body (this is why there is not historical evidence of Jesus dying for a second time). In the case of resucitations and revivifications, these people came to life in the same mortal body, so they will die again. And in fact they die again (e.g. Jesus rising Lazarus from the dead was an example of resuscitation, not of resurrection).

On the other hand, the argument by most Chrstian exclusivists is not that Jesus' resurrection (in the above, technical, theologically relevant sense) by itself justifies exclusivism: Rather, such a event has to be interpreted in the context of Jesus' own teachings, which includes references to his divine exclusivity (see discussion and evidence here). (Note that it doesn't exclude that Jesus' nature and the plausibility of his teachins be interpreted in the context of his resurrection too: After all, the resurrection "tells us something" about the nature of Jesus and hence about the possible authenticity of his radical claims about himself).

So, Jesus' authentic exclusivistic teachings + his bodily resurrection (which has not precedent in history) justify the conclusion that exclusivism is true. (Otherwise, we would have to think that Jesus was deluded or was lying, and in both case we wouldn't expect a resurrection of a person like that).

Also, if pluralism is true, then why we don't find good evidence for resurrections (not resuscitations) in other spiritual teachers who supposedly stand in the same level than Jesus? We find in them paranormal deeds (this is something in common with Jesus), but not such an unique event like the resurrection. Precisely, the unique or special nature of the resurrection coheres with the unique and special character, nature and teachings of Jesus, and this is what we would expect if Jesus' exclusivism is true.

2-Near-death experiences and religious experiences suggest that people of all the religions, and even atheists, sometimes tend to experience images, symbols, deities proper of their religions, or the feeling to be in the presence of God. Hence, NDEs refute Christian exclusivism because it shows that non-Christians can be saved too.

Again, I find this argument surprisingly weak and superficial:

a)It misrepresents the Christian doctrine of exclusivism. This doctrine is not incompatible with the fact that non-Christians will feel temporarily "happy", or will feel "God's presence" or "God's love" in the afterlife (According to the Christian doctrine, God loves all of us, even bad people. Judgment by God has to be with God's justice, not with God's inconditional love. Anti-Christian people often conflate this too, because they interpret God's judgment as a denial of God's love, when actually God's judgment has to be considered in light of his perfect justice).

Exclusivism refers to the view that Jesus is the only or unique intermediary between God's particular revelation and human beings, specially regarding salvation. (It has nothing to do with subjective positive or negatve feelings of spirits in the afterlife).

It could be say by the pluralist that these experiences refute exclusivism in the sense that if Christianity were true, we would expect non-Christian people to go to hell, instead of feeling God's intense love and extreme happiness.

But this reply conflates Christian exclusivism with the doctrine of hell. At most, the pluralist's rejoinder (if correct) will show that the doctrine of hell is false, not that pluralism is true. (After all, exclusivism could be true and the doctrine of hell be false. Perhaps nodoby will go to a "hell" in the sense in which traditional Christianity portraits it, but perhaps such non-Christian people won't enjoy fully God's full eternal salvation either).

Note that if "everybody" is saved (regardless of whether they are Hitlers, Ghandi, terrotists, Christians, atheists, etc.) then it is hard to see which is the point of the concept of "salvation" (which has been taught, in different ways, in many religious and spiritual traditions) and the existence of "many spiritual teachers" (who in addition to teaching common doctrines with other teachers, also teach particular doctrines at variance with each other). If our fate were the same for all the people, our current lives and behaviour are ultimately irrelevant and we can freely to be bad and mean, we can kill other people and be selfish, because we know that we will be saved too. This view seems to be very unjust and not fair. If God exists, we would expect in Him to be fully just.

Finally, the afterlife research provides some evidence for something like a "hell" (see this Victor Zammit's article here), so it is not clear that such Christian doctrine (or something like it) is wholly false.

Moreover, there ARE testimonies of people with near-death experiences who have reported to go the "hell" or something like this:

Is going the pluralist to dismiss these experiences and putative afterlife reports because it doesn't fit with his anti-Christian beliefs about the hell? If so, then he's not seeking the truth, but seeking a confirmation of his pluralistic positions, disregarding contrary evidence.

Wishful thinking is not allowed here. If the hell exists or not is a factual question, not a topic that we have to settle on the grounds of our wishes.

b)The pluralist argument also assumes (selectively) that all the relevant NDEs (ore religious experiences) with pluralistic contents are veridical regarding the spiritual/religious content of the experience. Obviously it is far from clear. Current investigation in NDEs has shown, at most, that a materialistic explanation of the experience (specially of the veridical information of the enviroment reported by some NDErs) is weak and insufficient, hence justifying the dualistic interpretation that consciousness survives death as the best explanation. But arguing from there to the conclusion that all the contents (specially the theological contents relevant to the problem of salvation) of these experiences is also veridical is a huge extrapolation without any independent evidence (besides the testimnony of the experiencers).

The problem with this is that it infers from the plurality of the contents of religious experiences in the afterlife to the conclusion that pluralism is truth regarding SALVATION (which is clearly a non-sequitur).

You can have plurality of contents in religious/spiritual experiences and just ONE actual way to salvation. Both of these propositions are not mutually contradictory.

In order to see the problem with this, think carefully about the following: In mystical experiences (like Borg's), many mystics feel "connected to all what exists", or that "the universe is one with me", the "self is an illusion", the "Tao is beyond words and reason", "individuality is an illusion which fuses into pure consciousness", "all are one" or (in Borg's own description) "God is more than everything, and yet everything is in God" and other phrases implying ontological impersonalism. Not surprisingly, these mystics tend to be atheists regarding the Christian God or theism in general (which conceive God as a trascendent person different and ontologically senior to the universe) and often are sympathetic to pantheism (and spiritualitic versions of the impersonalistic worldviews which I've criticized elsewhere).

If the Christian view is right, the fabric of reality is radically PERSONAL (God + a bunch of created spirits and realities created on behalf of these spirits), but if radical impersonalistic-mystical views are true, then the Christian view is false. Note that we know (on purely analytical, logical grounds) that one of them HAVE to be false. They cannot be both true because they exclude each other.

Provided you respect logic, you cannot simply say that the mystical experiences of mystics are "so valid" as the Christian view (and hence that exclusivism is false), because it is logically impossible. The mystic has to argue that the Christian conception of God is false, and the Christian will have to argue or believe that the mystic's experience is either delusional, false or (if true) incomplete. (Some Christian philosophers have argued that mystical experiences are real, but they reveal just some aspects of the self, not of God).

Now, if on a priori grounds we know that both accounts cannot be fully true, then how the hell is it going to change if the experience in question is given in a NDE? Even in the afterlife, both experiences are logically imcompatible (and the fact they're produced in an afterlife doesn't automatically makes them both true) because they imply mutually exclusive propositions (radical ontological impersonalism in some mystical experiences; and radical ontological personalism regarding the self and God in the Christian view).

In summary, since many religious experiences have contents which are logically incompatible with the contents of other religious experiences, it follows as a matter of logical necessity that at least ONE of them is false.

Therefore, the fact that people have different sincere religious/spiritual experiences either in this life (e.g. mystical experiences) or in the afterlife (e.g. NDEs) is not, by itself, an argument for religious pluralism regarding salvation.

3-Jesus performed miracles and according to parapsychology many people can perform amazing deeds which are pretty similar.

Again this misrepresents Jesus' exclusivism. His exclusivism doesn't exclude that OTHER people can perfom amazing paranormal feats (his is not a "paranormal exclusivism"). Rather, Jesus' exclusivism is connected with his ontological nature and teachings about God's kingdom, revelation and salvation, not with particular deeds like mind-reading, blending spongs, moving balls with the mind, or healing some diseases with our hands (presumibly Jesus could do all of these things and many others which, by the way, are far beyond than what an Uri Geller or yogui could do, like walking on the water or multiplying foods or making exorcisms on his own authority).

You have to realize what is at stake here. If Jesus' exclusivism is right, then (like it or not), your salvation depends on Him. If Jesus is wrong, then perhaps salvation is available also in other religions or spiritual doctrines (or perhaps all of them are false).

This theological topic is not a matter to be settle on the grounds of parapsychology and afterlife research alone (which are theologically ambiguous), you have to study with an open and critical mind the evidence for and against Jesus' life, his teachings, his resurrection and other religions too. This is a complex topic, which demands on you hard thinking, constant self-criticism (regarding your bias and wishful thinking), logical thinking and intellectual honesty.

I'm still walking in this journey...

Burton L. Mack, the abuses of the Q document and the negative use of the criteria of authenticity

The Q document is hypothetical collection of sayings of Jesus, assumed by most scholars to be a common source behind the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, but not found in the Gospel of Mark. This hypothetical source, if it exists, is the oldest material regarding Jesus. (Just for the record, being purely hypothetical, that is, no actual manuscript of the document exists, not all scholars agree with the existence of Q. See for example the discussion and critical assesment in the book Questioning Q: A Multidimensional Critique by Mark Goodacre and Nicholas Perrin).

But most scholars tend to agree that Q probably existed and, for the sake of this post, I'll assume this position. You have to keep in mind that all our information about this hypothetical document comes from the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, that is, from these two Gospels themselves (not from Gospels-independent sources).

Since the hypothetical Q document is earlier than the Gospels (hence, it passes the criterion of date), it has been used (or abused) by some liberal scholars in order to create a portrait of Jesus which fits with their anti-Christian ideas about him.

In this post, using the example of Burton L. Mack, I'll show how the Q document is unjustifiably misused by anti-Christian scholars in order to deny the traditional view of Jesus. You'll see that a large part of the belief that "Q" provides an antidote against the traditional view of Jesus is based on bad scholarship, illogical thinking, hidden anti-Christian assumptions, wishful thinking and a negative use of the criteria of authenticity (specially of the criterion of date which is misused as a necessary criterion, not as a sufficient one).

In his book The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and the Christian origins, Q scholar Burton Mack wrote this:

"The first followeres of Jesus did not known about or imagine any of the dramatic events upon which the narrative gospels hinge. These includes the baptism of Jesus; his conflict with Jewish authorities and their plot to kill him; Jesus' instruction to the disciples; Jesus' transfiguration, march to Jerusalem, last supper, trial, and crucifixion as the King of Jews; and finally, his resurrection from the dead and the stories of the empty tomb. All of these events must and can be accounted for mythmaking in the Jesus movements, with a little of help from the martyrology of Christ, in the period adter the Roman-Jewish war. Thus the story of Q demostrates that the narrative gospels have no claim as historical accounts" (p.247)

The above argumentation is a fine example of bad scholarphip and technical incompatence on behalf of an anti-Christian agenda. As a preliminary point, note Mack "negative" conclusions regarding the traditions not found in Q. It is implicitly assumed that whatever is not found in Q (specially the distintives Christian views) are not historical and hence were a later invention.

Obviously, objective truth-seekers will demand that this anti-Christian assumption needs some kind of positive evidence, which is not found in Mack's book.

Let's examine Mack's scholarly mistakes in more detail:

1-One of the criteria of authenticity used by scholars is the criterion of date: All things being equal, we should privilege earlier sources over later sources (because an earlier source is likely to report more accurately the historical facts than later sources).

Note that the correct use of this criterion is the positive one: If a saying is attested in a earlier source, then it increases the probability of that saying being authentic. But if the saying doesn't pass this criterion, you cannot conclude that the saying wasn't authentic (because it could pass OTHER criteria like multiple attestation, embarassment, etc.) So, this criterion provide a sufficient, not a necessary, condition for authenticity and historical credibility.

But note that Mack is using the criterion negatively, that is, as a necessary condition for credibility and authenticity of the facts relative to Jesus. Using the criterion in this wrong way, he can conclude happily and negatively: "Q demostrates that the narrative gospels have no claim as historical documents" and he can freely deny facts multiply attested like the empty tomb.

In other words, using the criterion of date as a necessary (negative) condition, Mack is free to disregard as non-historical later documents which report sayings, which pass positively other criteria of authenticity like multiple attestation, embarassment, dissimilairy, etc..

Can you see Mack's trick here? You have to have a correct understading of the use of the criteria of authenticity in order to see how Mack is taking in his readers. This will become evident in the next points:

2-If the criterion of date regarding the Q document is used negatively, as a necessary condition for authenticity and historicity, then the most indisputable fact about the historical Jesus, namely, his crucifixion, will have to be denied and considered to be non-historical, because Q doesn't clearly shows Jesus' crucifixion.

But Jesus' crucifixion is multiply attested, even in sources outside of the New Testament. According to atheist John Dominic Crossan: "That he [Jesus] was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be" (Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 145).

And keep in mind that Crossan accepts the crucifixion, not on the grounds of the NT evidence, but on the grounds of the LATER non-Christian sources of Josephus and Tacitus (see Crossan's book, The Historical Jesus, p. 372).

In other words, since as an athest Crossan is skeptical of the NT material, he accepts the crucifixion on the grounds of non-Christian sources, which make the crucifixion multiply attested (even if they don't pass the criterion of date, because the Gospels' reports of the crucifixon are EARLIER than those non-Christian sources).

Can you see how liberal scholars use the criteria of authenticity both negatively (e.g. Mack regarding the criterion of date) and positively (e.g. Crossan regarding the criterion of multiple attestation... even though Crossan also uses this criterion negatively, for example, in order to deny the passion and resurrection narratives in the Gospels).

This is a subtle and very technical but (once properly understood) almost irrefutable example of bad scholarpship put at the service of an anti-Christian agenda.

3-The traditions about the empty tomb pass, positively, the criterion of embarassment and multiply attestation (e.g. in Paul) and hence it is likely to be historical. However according to Mack, since the criterion of date regarding Q is necessary for historicity and it doesn't contain reference to the empty tomb, then the traditions of the empty tomb were later inventions, a mythmaking of Christians. (Also for Crossan, the empty tomb was an invention by Mark; here Crossan clearly disregards the positive use of the criterion of embarassment and mutiple attestation regarding the empty tomb but in other cases Crossan himself uses positively, that is as a sufficient condition, the same criterion, for example regarding the crucifixion).

Can you see how the misuse of the criteria of authenticity allows these scholars to select only the facts that fit with their preconceived anti-Christian view of Jesus? They use these criteria selectively and inconsistently in order to create a view of Jesus which fit with their anti-Christian ideologies.

4-Likewise, since the Q document doesn't contain Jesus' resurrecton, the misuse of the criterion of date by Mack allows him to conclude that the resurrection wasn't known or imagined by the "first followers of Jesus". However, the resurrection appearences pass positively the criterion of multiple attestation (being reported not just in the Gospels but in Paul too).

Again, it is Mack's negative use of the criterion of date regarding Q which allows him to consider non-historical the distintives Christian elements of the historical Jesus which pass, positively, OTHER criteria of authenticity (like multiple attestation, embarrasment, etc.).

5-In Q, there is evidence that Jesus saw himself as the unique son of God. The saying in Matthew 11.27: "All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him" is a Q saying (see Luke 10:22).

However, the atheist and religious pluralists scholars in the Jesus Seminar (and some other liberal scholars) don't accept that Jesus regarded himself as the Son of God even if this view is made explicit in the Q document and therefore passes positively the criterion of date (plus other criteria like the criterion of dissimilarity, as I've argued here, which reinforces the authenticity of this saying).

In order to deny this Q's view of Jesus, these scholars are forced to speculate about "layers" in Q, so they can claim that some layers are "earlier" (and hence more reliable) than "later" layers (and hence, less reliable) of Q. This approach is largely speculative and provides too much room for the scholar's own personal assumptions to go uncontrolled (for example, seeing a "sage" layer as earlier precisely because it portraits a purely "sage" view of Jesus, which is clearly question-begging).

Moreover, constructing speculation and hypotheses on other purely speculative hypotheses is clearly a procedure unlikely to produce historically accurate results. But the scholars who prefer this kind of procedure are pushed in this direction in order to deny the traditional portrait of Jesus which they want to disbelieve.

6-As an example, Mack and other anti-Christian scholars reconstruct an "earlier" layer of Q in which Jesus appears to be noneschatologcal (Non-eschatology is also essential in the work of the Jesus Seminar). So, Q sayings which are clearly eschatological (e.g. Jesus rejecting the wicked at the judgment at Matt 7:21-23 and Luke 13:26-27, or the powerful endtime judge burning the wicked at Matt 3:7-12 and Luke 3: 7-9/ 16-17) are considered to be non-historical sayings.

This point shows clearly the wishful thinking of these liberal scholars: For theological and ideological reasons, they don't want a Jesus like that. Therefore, they mutilate Q itself in order to leave only the sayings of Jesus which fit with their anti-Christian view of Jesus as a non-eschatological, non-divine, purely wisdom teacher/Cynic phlosopher type of man which is palatable to a secular age in which religious pluralism, New Age-mystical spirituality and atheism is rampant, palatable and politically correct.

Since they want to believe in a New Age type of Jesus (a Jesus which is not unique or special in any divine sense, but a Jesus on a par with other important spiritual teachers. See the work of Marcus Borg for this kind of view). they try hard to misrepresent the evidence (including the evidence in Q) in order to give plausibility to their position.

Can you know see why these people, consistently and predictably, cannot accept Jesus' resurrection and, like Borg, force false interpretations on the evidence for it (e.g. in 1 Cor 15)? Can you see why these false and eccentric views by these scholars cannot be euphemistically considered as mere "tendencies" or "inclinations" or "excess" or " simple mistakes", but the logical and necessary consequence of their anti-Christian pressupositions which pervade their work? A resurrected Jesus doesn't fit well in the pluralist view of Jesus that they have made and this tension, clearly perceived by them, is eliminated through a selective use of the evidence supported by a clever and astute misuse of the criteria of authenticity.

So, religious pluralist Marcus Borg can happily claim "Imaging Jesus as a particular instance of a type of religious personality known cross-culturally undermines a widespread Christian belief that Jesus is unique, which commonly is linked to the notion that Christianity is exclusively true and that Jesus is "the only way." The image I have sketched views Jesus differently: rather than being the exclusive revelation of God, he is one of many mediators of the sacred. Yet even as this view subtracts from the uniqueness of Jesus and the Christian tradition, it also in my judgment adds to the credibility of both." (Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time: The Historical Jesus and the Heart of Contemporary Faith, p. 37)

A Jesus who is "one among many" is precisely that kind of Jesus which is palatable to a contemporary culture (like our) in which religious pluralism, New Age spiritualities, etc. are ruling. (Q sayings and other authentic sayings of Jesus in which he implies that he is "the only Son of God", God's final eschatological agent, Jesus' predicting his own resurrection and so forth, obviously cannot have place in this religious pluralistic, New Age kind of portrait of Jesus). It is not surprising that the work of liberal scholars, specially those in the Jesus Seminar, have been so influential in popular culture.

Understanding all of this is absolutely essential to expose the portrait of the historical Jesus made by the Jesus Seminar (they are the champions of the misuses of the criteria of authenticity) and people like Burton Mack, Crossan, Borg and many others.

In conclusion, the Q document is an hypothetical (not proven to exist) source. But even assuming its existence, it is only the misuses of the crterion of date (as a necessary condition) plus the misuses of OTHER criteria of authenticity (whch are used positively or negatively, depending on which facts the "scholar" in question wishes to select in order to create a Jesus in his own image) plus speculative ahd largely arbitrary division of Q into "layers", which underlies the beliefs that the Q document provides a different view than the traditional view of Jesus. The latter is a non-sequitur which is testimony of bad scholarphip and, above all, of ANTI-CHRISTIAN PREJUDICES AND WISHFUL THINKING.

Q is NOT the only source about the historical Jesus, hence it is not sufficient to the reconstruction of him. As consequence, it is unwarranted and strongly biased to think that the information contained there suffices to conclude that the Q document is at variance with the traditional view of Jesus, because the information contained in other sources can qualify, interpret, put into context or develop the information contained in Q.

Amazingly, liberal scholars seem to be unware of or incapable to perform this contextual examination of the evidence, as evidenced for example by Marcus Borg in his thoughtless, unjustified, illogical, incompetent and purely prejudiced obsession to read 1 Cor 15 as an "explicit denial" of bodily resurrection by Paul. See discussion here, here and here).

For a brief explanation of the misuses of the criteria of authenticity by Bart Ehrman, wacth very carefully (and think hard about it and compare with the work of Ehrman and the Jesus Seminar) the following lecture on Ehrman by William Lane Craig:

Criteria of Authenticity, the historical Jesus, and the Jesus Seminar's misuses of them

Key to exposing the Jesus Seminar's view on the historical Jesus (specially Jesus' teachings and deeds) is to have a good command of the so-called criteria of authenticity. These criteria have been developed in order to know if a given saying, teaching or deed by the historical Jesus is likely to be historical.

As I've argued in a previous post, the proper use of the criteria is the positive one, that is, if a given saying or deed passes the criteria, the it is likely to be historical (more exactly, it gives more probability to the authenticity of the saying in question). But if it doesn't pass them, it says nothing about the historicity of the saying or deed in question. A saying could be authentic (and hence historical) even if we cannot prove it on the grounds of our criteria of authenticity.

Reading carefully the reconstructions of the historical Jesus by the Jesus Seminar, you can discover that they use the criteria of authenticity both positively and negatively (in order to consider historical only the sayings of Jesus which fit in their preconceived, anti-Christian and politically correct version of Jesus that they want to accept). So, for example, some of the sayings of Jesus in which he says or implies to be the "Son of God" are considered to be non-historical by the Jesus Seminar.

In the book "The Five Gospels" by the Jesus Seminar, around 80% of the sayings attributed to Jesus are considered to be unauthentic. Note carefully the words used by the Jesus Seminar: "Eighty-two percent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the Gospels were not actually spoken by him..." (p.5)

Read again the above passage. Can you see that the conclusion is formulated in negative terms ("were NOT actually spoken by him") regarding the 82% of Jesus' sayings in the Gospels which don't satisfy the Seminar's criteria for authenticity?

As I've argued in my post about Jesus' self perception as the "son of God", these sayings commented there PASS positively some criteria of authenticity and hence are likely to be historical. Consistency regarding the use of the criteria of authenticity demands that you accept them as historically likely (if you like it or not). But the Seminar rejects some of these sayings because they imply a Christology which doesn't fit the secularistic, atheistic, specifically anti-Christian agenda of the Seminar. As consequence, the portrait of the historical Jesus made by the Seminar is likely to be false, because it doesn't fit with the actual, positive historical evidence that we have about Jesus (considered as whole and not just fragmentarily).

Consider the Seminar's view on Jesus' post-mortem sayings: "Whenever scholars detect detailed knowledge of postmortem events in sayings and parables attributed to Jesus, they are inclined to view that the formulation of such sayings took place after the fact" (p. 25)

But this "inclination" is an assumption, not a conclusion based on positive, concrete evidence. Moreover, it assumes that "scholars" are materialistic, atheistic "scholars" like the members of the Seminar who don't believe in spirits, God and the afterlife. But what about non-naturalistic scholars?

The Seminar's view assumes that postmortem events cannot exist. The assumption includes the idea that the Gospels are fabricating the information, instead of attesting the known facts. (So, a materialistic, anti-survivalist assumption is added to an anti-Christian assumption on behalf of forcing the evidence on the direction in which the Seminar wants the historical Jesus to be). Clearly these anti-Christian assumptions are pure atheistic wishful thinking, not responsible and objective scholarship.

Objective and consistent historians and scholars would subject the postmortem sayings to the criteria of authenticity and from that consideration alone would conclude if the saying is likely to be historical (the scholar cannot appeal to his own atheistic ideologies or theological convictions as hidden premises and then claim that he is doing objective "historical research") Atheistic ideologues like those in the Seminar assume in advance that such sayings were not historical (regardless of the evidence).

Consider a more egregious example of the Seminar's anti-Christian assumptions: "By definition, words ascribed to Jesus after his death are not subject to historical verification" (p.398)

Read again the above passage.

Technically, you cannot verify any historical event, because it doesn't exist anymore. What can be done is to reconstruct the past using the available evidence. But if the historical evidence points out consistently (and passing positively the standards criteria of authenticity) to afterlife manifestations, then exactly why should us to consider them to be non-historical? Obviously something more than purely historical considerations is operating here. The hidden premise is that the afterlife doesn't exist, and hence no words attributed to Jesus after his death can be veridical (=historical=factual).

The traditional view of Jesus (which essentially includes his resurrection and hence afterlife manifetations) is assumed to be non-historical by definition. I cannot think of a more dishonest, prejudiced, question-begging procedure than this one. It is designed to block any historical investigation and eventual validation of the Jesus as portrayed by traditional Christianity. It determines and guarantees anti-Christian results in advance.

According to the Jesus Seminar, Jesus' teachings after his death are assumed BY DEFINITION (and therefore, a priori, previous to the examination of the historical evidence and independently of it) to be not historical (remember that the Seminar uses the criteria of authenticity negatively too, so they conclude the non-historicity of a given saying or teaching when it cannot be accepted according to their use of historical methods).

In conclusion, we can say that in addition to the positive historical criteria of authenticity, we could add the:

Jesus Seminar's atheistic and anti-Christian criteria of unathentitcity and non-historicity:

1-If a given Jesus' teaching or saying support the traditional view of Jesus as divine, it's non-historical (i.e. was not actually uttered by Jesus) and was invented by the Church.

2-(Essentially connected to 1): Jesus' sayings implying Christology are non-historical.

3-If Jesus' teachings were uttered after his physical dead, they are (by definition) not historical, because the afterlife doesn't exist and dead people cannot say or teach anything.

The above criteria works better if, as a rhetorical ploy to produce peer pressure, you claim (without any evidence), that "mainline scholars" agree with your view about Jesus, and that only ultra-conservatives and fundamentalist Christians, exclusively or mostly motivated by "faith", reject your conclusions.

In future posts, the misuse of the criteria of aunthenticity by the Jesus Seminar and how this directly affect the reconstruction of the historical Jesus will be discussed.

C.K.Barrett's denial of Jesus' self-perception as the Son of God in Mark 13:32

In a previous post, I argued that, according the proper, positive use of the criteria of authenticity, Jesus' self-perception as "The Son of God" is likely to be historical.

However, historian C.K.Barrett comments about this saying that "The description of Jesus by the most honorific title available would be precisely the sort of compensation that tradition would introduce" (Jesus and the Gospel Tradition, pp. 25-26. emphasis in blue added).

Reading carefully Barrett's book, you'll discover that NO EVIDENCE is provided for such conclusion. It's actually an ASSUMPTION. It assumes that the title "Son of God" is precisely what the later Christians would introduce to refer to Jesus.

The problem with Barrett's assumption is not just that no evidence for it exists, but that applying the criteria of authenticity to the saying provides POSITIVE evidence for the authenticity of it. And you cannot refute positive evidence simply assuming, without evidence, alternative interpretations (just because they're palatable for you). It only reveals your prejudices, not what the evidence is implying. (Analogy: Think about the creative pseudoskeptical a priori assumptions about psychics using all kind of undiscoveried tricks which weren't detected by the researchers. You simply cannot assume that this was the case without any evidence; you have to actually provide positive evidence for the psychic's deception or for the technical incompetence of the experiments in order to make plausible the charges of fraud. Simply assuming that positive evidence for psi is fraudulent or product of undetected tricks, with not supporting evidence whatsoever, tell us more about your prejudices, than about the evidence).

Concretely, the saying in Mark 13:32 passes the criterion of embarassment:

In the saying, Jesus is portrayed as being ignorant of his second coming. But the early Church thought that God is essentially omniscient, hence if Jesus is considered to be God, he couldn't be ignorant (specially of his own second coming).

Ignorance is not what the early Church would attribute to a man that they considered to be the all-powerful, all-knowing God.

Moreover, according to Scripture, God knows the time (Zech: 14: 6-9). Hence, if Jesus was considered to be God, then it is impossible to his followers to portrait him as being ignorant of the time of his second coming.

This evidence suggests that, contrary to Barrett's no based in any evidence assumption, the saying in question is authentic and Jesus thought of himself as God's (unique) Son.

Finally, Barrett's assumption that the "Son of God" was a later addition which was written back into Jesus' lips can be challenged on independent grounds: The obvious problem that faces such assumption is that it doesn't explain the origin of such a belief: why hard-core monotheistic Jews would, suddenly, change his worldview in order to consider that a man (Jesus) was God?. It would be extremely blasphemous for them to claim such a thing.

As New Testament scholar Larry Hurtado comments "This intense devotion to Jesus, which includes reverencing him as divine, was offered and articulated characteristically within a firm stance of exclusivist monotheism" (Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, p. 3. Emphasis in blue added).

As agnostic philosopher Anthony O'Hear concedes: "We should remember that his first followers were pious Jews, to whom the claims being made would have seem blasphemous had they not been given strong reason to believe them-- and where better than from Jesus himself? (Jesus for beginners, p. 84)

They had every religious predisposition against the view that any man could be God (note that this predisposition, being theologically central and essential to them as monotheists, is even stronger than the predisposition against the view that resurrection of a person would occur before the general resurrection).

Given this context, Barrett's assumption is intrinsically very unlikely.

In general, the motivation behind most efforts to avoid this historical conclusion about Jesus' self-perception as the only "Son of God" rests on ideology: Mainly, theological dislike for a Jesus like that, strong animosity against the traditional Christian view of Jesus and atheistic and religious pluralistic wishful thinking.

Robert Perry on the resurrection body according to Paul

Scholars debate Paul's view on the resurrection body in 1 Corinthians 15. Since Paul talks about a "spiritual body" (when referring to the resurrection body) it has been suggested by some scholars that Paul is (explicitly or implicitly) denying bodily resurrection. As I've argued in several posts (specially here and here), a careful exegetical analysis of Paul reveals that he is plausibly talking of bodily resurrection, but the relative ambiguety of the specific passage could allow some room for debate. In the following article, Robert Perry (a researcher and author more sympathetic to the Jesus Seminar's works about the historical Jesus than me) provides a new look at this problem and more convincing evidence from Paul showing that Paul's actual views of the resurrection implies bodily resurrection. In the light of this evidence, I think the issue about Paul's view on the resurrection body has been settled.

After reading Jime’s recent posts on the resurrection body according to Paul, in which he takes to task the Jesus Seminar and Marcus Borg, I wrote him with some additional evidence of Paul’s views, and he invited me to write a post for this blog.

When it comes to assessing evidence for the resurrection of Jesus, what the Apostle Paul says in I Corinthians 15 is paramount. There, Paul passes on a creedal statement which he says he “received” (“For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received”), and this seems in fact to be the case, as much of the language in this statement is non-Pauline. It says that

Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures,

that he was buried,

that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures,

and that he appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. (1 Corinthians 15:3-5)

What makes this so significant is Paul’s proximity to the resurrection event itself (whatever that event may have been). Paul probably had his “Damascus Road” experience of the risen Jesus between one and five years after the crucifixion. Three years after that, Paul tells us (Galatians 1:18-19), he went to Jerusalem to investigate or research matters, staying fifteen days with Peter and also visiting James, the brother of Jesus—both purportedly recipients of resurrection appearances. All of this helps explain why 40 years ago, C. H. Dodd claimed that Paul’s creedal statement could be traced to Jerusalem somewhere around 35 C.E. This puts us extremely close, in terms of time, location, and eyewitness testimony, to the resurrection.

Here we have, then, what seems like important evidence that something happened after the crucifixion that was very much like what the gospels report. This initial impression, however, tends to fade when skeptical scholars note that we should not uncritically conflate Paul’s view with that of the gospels, which came decades after his writings. After all, they say, once Paul quotes that early tradition, he goes on to explicitly contrast Jesus’ “physical body” with his post-resurrection “spiritual body.” And he openly says, “flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (15:50). Paul’s view of the resurrection, then, can easily appear to be hardly a physical one at all. Stephen Patterson, prominent member of the Jesus Seminar, speaks of “Paul’s pneumatic, ghost-like Jesus”, which stands in stark contrast to the “living, breathing, flesh and blood Jesus” we find in Matthew, Luke, and John (The Fourth R, Vol. 24, Number 3, pp. 7, 8).

Because I Corinthians 15 is our earliest testimony to the resurrection, scholars hotly debate just how physical or non-physical is the “spiritual body” described by Paul. On this issue seems to hang the question of how objective the resurrection was. A non-physical body apprehended only by a spiritual faculty in witnesses doesn’t sound very objective at all.

While the nature of the spiritual body is clearly important, when it comes to assessing the objective status of the resurrection as framed by Paul, I believe there is an easier, more basic way in. This is what I will call the transformation question: Did Jesus’ corpse transform into his resurrected, “spiritual body”? Or did it stay buried, while the spiritual body roamed free and appeared to his followers (however we might conceive of that)? In other words, was Paul talking about one body in two different modes—first physical then spiritual—or were there actually two different bodies—physical and spiritual?

So we have two questions—the resurrection body question and the transformation question—and of these two, I believe the transformation question is senior. No matter what the exact substance of the resurrection body, if the corpse transformed into the resurrection body, then that means there was indeed an empty tomb and a paranormal event of massive significance.

Further, of these two issues, the transformation question is one that I believe can be definitively resolved, in the sense that we can firmly ascertain what Paul himself believes.

I Corinthians 15 itself seems clear on this. First, the sequence that Paul passes on—died, buried, raised, appeared—makes most sense if all four steps happened to the same thing, if the same thing which died was buried, and then was raised and appeared. The dramatic arc of the sequence is all about the downward trajectory of the first two terms (died, buried) being reversed by the upward trajectory of the last two terms (raised, appeared). Yet that reversal is only a real reversal if the very same thing that traveled the downward trajectory also ascended the upward one.

Second, Paul ties the resurrection of Jesus to the general resurrection (15:20: “But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep”; 15:13: “But if there is no resurrection of the dead, then Christ has not been raised”), and the general resurrection was expected to be a transformation of dead bodies into resurrected bodies.

Third, Paul uses the metaphor of a seed growing into a plant to speak of the relationship of the physical body and the spiritual body: “What you sow is not the body which is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain....So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable” (15:37, 44). The metaphor seems to evoke the image of transformation: Seeds transform into the plant that grows out of them. No seed lies intact in the ground while a new plant merely grows on top of it.

Fourth, Paul’s language identifies the spiritual body as the same thing that had been the physical body: “It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. It is sown in weakness, it is raised in power. It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body” (15:43-44). In this language, the same “it” covers both the physical body and the spiritual body.

For these four reasons, it seems to me that in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul has in mind the transformation of the physical body into the resurrection body. However, many commentators do not see it this way. Brandon Scott, a founding member of the Jesus Seminar, while unpacking 1 Corinthians 15 in his The Trouble with Resurrection, says,

Is something left over, some element that connects the body as seed planted in the ground and the plant that grows? Probably the most we can say is that Paul’s understanding of death in 1 Thess 4:17 [“then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”] leads to the conclusion that he thinks nothing subsists. A body planted in the earth would turn to dust, and God would raise up another body. God can bring life from nothing.

So in Scott’s view, nothing actually “connects the body...in the ground” with the resurrected body that rises out of the ground. The corpse does not transform into the resurrection body. Rather, the physical body completely disintegrates, and God raises up “another body.” On the transformation question, Scott thus sees Paul answering in the negative. Apparently, then, different commentators reading 1 Corinthians 15 can see Paul coming down on different sides of the transformation question.

The issue does not end there, however. There are several Pauline passages outside of 1 Corinthians 15 that seem to make it clear where exactly Paul comes down on the transformation question. For these, I will use the Scholars Version, a translation produced by the Jesus Seminar in The Authentic Letters of Paul, by Arthur Dewey, Roy Hoover, Lane McGaughy, and Daryl Schmidt. The first passage is Philippians 3:21:

He will transform our weak and mortal body into a body as glorious as his, by the power he has to make everything subject to his will.

There are two things that interest us here. First, Christ will “transform our weak and mortal body into” a glorified body. Second, our glorified body will be like Jesus’ glorified body (i.e., resurrection body). This seems to liken what will happen to our bodies (transformation into a glorified body) to what happened to his.

And if the power of the One who raised Jesus from among the dead resides in you, the One who raised the Anointed from among the dead will give life to your mortal bodies through the power and presence of God that resides in you. (Romans 8:11)

This verse draws an even clearer connection between what happened to the body of Jesus and what will happen to our bodies. The same power that raised Jesus will give life to us. And since it specifically will “give life to your mortal bodies,” the natural implication is that that is what it did to Jesus’ mortal body.

We know that the whole creation has been moaning with birth pangs till now; and not only the creation, but we who have savored the first taste of God’s power also sigh within ourselves while we await our adoption, the release and transformation of our bodies from their earthly limitations and fate. (Romans 8:22-23)

Just as creation is moaning with the birth pangs of a new creation, so we are sighing while we await “the release and transformation of our bodies.” Paul expects our earthly bodies to be transformed into bodies no longer bound by “earthly limitations”—into glorified bodies. And we know from other passages that he sees what happened to Jesus as the template for what will happen to us.

In any case, the body is not intended for sexual indulgence, but is intended for the lord, and the lord is intended for the body. God raised up the lord and God will raise us up by divine power. (I Cor 6:13-14)

This passage makes it especially clear that what happened to Jesus will happen to us: “God raised up the lord and God will raise us up by divine power.” That this sentence is preceded by a sentence about the body implies that the raising up is something that happens to the body. If we put all that together, then, “God raised up the lord’s body and God will raise our body up by divine power.”

In these passages, a clear and repeating pattern emerges, which we saw in I Corinthians 15 (my second point there), and which is a specific version of Paul’s frequent teaching that Jesus was the “first fruits” of a coming collective resurrection. That pattern is this:

1. What happened to Jesus in the resurrection will happen to us.

2. What will happen to us is that our mortal body will be transformed into a glorified body.

These two points act as premises that lead to an inescapable logical conclusion: According to Paul, Jesus’ mortal body was transformed into a glorified body.

These passages, then, seem to make clear that on the question of transformation, Paul answered yes. And that necessarily entails Paul believing in an empty tomb. If the glorified body that appeared to Peter, James, and Paul himself was the dead body transformed, then that body was obviously no longer in the tomb. Thus, no matter how he saw the nature and substance of that glorified body, Paul appears to have envisioned an empty tomb resulting from God transforming Jesus’ dead body into a glorified body.

This is so significant, as I said earlier, because of Paul’s proximity to the event. Given that, the importance of his words can hardly be overstated. Of course, there is always room for the possibility of misreporting, on the part of Paul or his sources. Yet Paul is so early, so close to the event, that there is immeasurably less room than with later sources like the gospels.

Much of my reading over the years has been of scholars associated with the Jesus Seminar, and I remain deeply grateful to them, for they identified for me a body of radical spiritual teaching which I believe was the core of Jesus’ ministry. However, I also have major disagreements with them, one of which involves their separation of Jesus the wisdom teacher—which they affirm—from Jesus the miracle worker and from Jesus’ resurrection—which they tend to deny. I personally don’t see that separation. I believe that Jesus’ miracles and resurrection were intended as demonstrations of his wisdom, to show that his teachings were not pie-in-the-sky idealism, but rather a kind of higher pragmatism, capable of producing powerful results in the real world.

For all of my gratitude for the Jesus Seminar, and Marcus Borg in particular, I believe I see significant holes in their accounts of the resurrection. They tend to see the resurrection story growing ever more fantastic over the decades, until the gospels finally have Jesus leaving the tomb, eating fish, and urging Thomas to thrust his hand into his side. In this vein, these scholars often propose that no one had ever heard of the empty tomb story before Mark put it in writing forty years after the fact. This version clearly gives us enormous wiggle room with regard to the original event. A story that takes fifty years to reach mythical proportions may have easily begun as something entirely inauspicious and tame.

Yet this version requires that Paul not be in possession of the full-blown story at the beginning of that fifty-year process. And so my sense is that there is tremendous psychological pressure to read into Paul a more modest, less developed resurrection scenario, one that, in my view, does not do full justice to his words.

I believe that when we read Paul sensitively and accurately, we find something rather remarkable: testimony in writing from a man who, within several years of the event itself, spent two weeks in Jerusalem with an eyewitness and central figure (Peter), met with the leader of the church and brother of Jesus (James), and then passed on to us a tradition he received, in its own words rather than in his. This tradition appears to require an empty tomb, and the man who passed it on seems to have definitely understood it that way.

With so little room for a fantastic tale to grow up in between the event itself and Paul, we are naturally left wondering: What happened on that first Easter which could inspire, so soon and apparently in those directly involved, the remarkable story that Paul has passed on to us?

The Jesus Seminar: reflections on worldviews and beliefs about the fabric of reality and its connection with Jesus' teachings and resurrection

Worldviews provide the glasses or lens through which we interpret facts. Certain facts fit better with certain worldviews, or don't fit with them at all.

A couple of examples:

1-Parapsychological phenomena and "consciousness" fit well with personalistic (spiritualistic) wordviews, for example with theism. But they don't fit well or easily with impersonalistic, mechanistic, materialistic worldviews (e.g. scientific naturalism).

2-Moral values and free will (essential to moral responsability), being essentially connected to free and rational persons, fit well in personalistic (spiritual) worldviews, but don't fit well with mechanistic, impersonalistic, radically deterministic and materialistic worldviews (e.g. scientific naturalism).

The above considerations are pretty obvious for most objective people and don't require any special defense (in any case, in this blog I've provided a lot of arguments for them).

The important thing here is that, once you have chosen a particular worldview (and everybody have one), your worldview will exert strong pressure on you in order to be sympathetic to the facts which fit well with it, and unsympathetic (and even openly hostile) to the facts which are at variance with them. This pressure works well regardless of whether you're aware of them or not.

As example, scientific naturalists (self-proclaimed "skeptics") are unsympathetic (and even hostile) to paranormal phenomena, the afterlife, the existence and causal efficacy of consciousness, free will or the objectivity of moral values. On the contrary, theists, in general, openly admit all of these facts because they fit well, easily, in the theistic-personalistic worldview (in fact, in theism, God is a personal, spiritual, conscious, free, rational, moral, causally efficient being who has created us spiritually at his image... so naturally, these personalistic properties and facts are fully expected to exist if theism is true)

This general consideration applies with great force in the case of Jesus' scholarship. Since Jesus' life, teachings and deeds are connected to "spiritual" matters (God, exorcisms which imply the existence of souls, resurrection, etc.), the worldview of each Jesus scholar will be reflected in his assesment of the evidence for the historical Jesus (specially, in the fact that each scholar will consider as antecedently probable and hence likely to be historical any claim about Jesus which fits the scholar's own worldview; and the facts which don't fit the scholar's worldview will be considered antecedently unlikely or even impossible, regardless of the evidence).

The above is valid for all scholars and non-scholars alike (including us). So, the question is not if our worldview influences our assesment of the evidence, but rather if our worldview is justified or not.

Examplesof worldviews' influences in Jesus scholarship:

According to New Testament scholar Dale Allison, our worldview influences both the specific topic of the resurrection as the more general topic of Jesus' life and teachings (because, after all, if the ressurrection happened, it happened in the same person who uttered such sayings and teachings, so there is a continuum in the life of Jesus which cannot be separated). Allison comments: "If judgment about the resurrection cannot be isolated from one's worldviews, it equally cannot be isolated from one's estimation of the pre-Easter Jesus" (Resurrrecting Jesus, p. 350)

Almost everybody understand this and this is also why atheistic scholars don't accept Jesus' resurrection (because the widely-recognized and agreed connection of such event with God's causation). You won't see atheist scholars accepting the resurrection, but explaining them in terms of extraterrestial intervention, a cosmic accident, parapsychology (which knows of not independent evidence for paranormal resurrections in the sense that it applies to Jesus) or any other contrieved explanation.

They know that accepting the resurrection as a fact will make the inference to God as the most likely explanation too easy, and this is incompatible with the atheist scholar's own worldview. Moreover, this is a too Christian-favourable conclusion, which they cannot accept.

Let's see two examples:

1)The Jesus Seminar: The scholars belonging to this group are the most egregious example of scholarphip based on atheistic, secularistic, strongly anti-Christian worldview.

The book "The Five Gospel" by the Jesus Seminar is telling, because it presents clearly the working assumptions of these scholars. In the preface, you can read:

the Christ of creed and dogma . . . can no longer command the assent of those who have seen the heavens through Galileo’s telescope. The old deities and demons were swept from the skies by that remarkable glass. Copernicus, Kepler and Galileo have dismantled the mythological abodes of the gods and Satan, and bequeathed us secular heavens (preface, p. ix-x, xiii. Emphasis in blue added).

The atheistic content of that paragraph is explicit: in advance it is assumed that modern science has refuted the belief in God (and therefore, by implication, of a Jesus who could be divine). Note that this assumptions IMPLIES (prior to the examination of the evidence) a Jesus that cannot be the Son of God or be resurrected by God.

Note carefully that the assumption is not a conclusion of Jesus scholarship, but an assumption based on physical sciences (which are interpreted in naturalistic, atheistic terms).

As fully expected, they read the historical evidence about Jesus with such "secularistic glasses". And the consequence is that the Jesus which is portrayed by the Jesus Seminar is a non-eschatological Jesus, a non-divine Jesus, a non-supernaturaslistic Jesus, a non-resurrected Jesus... that is, a Jesus fully compatible with the "secular heavens" which the Seminar supports. This is what I meant when I say that the Jesus portrayed by these people is a Jesus palatable to a secular age and anti-Christian readers (because it is exactly what the latter want to hear, specially by scholars who pretent to speak in the name of "modern scholarphip"). Nonsense and charlatanism!.

Obviously, such assumption is massively question-begging: Precisely, what we want to know on the basis of the evidence is if the traditional Christian portrait of Jesus is true or false. You cannot settle these questions on the grounds of ideological assumptions about the atheistic implications of Galileo's discoveries. It's just bad scholarship which reveals an ideological agenda.

The Jesus Seminar is the CSICOP-equivalent of Jesus scholarship.

Many people sympathetic to the paranormal, but (for whatever reasons) unsympathetic to Christianity will agree with the Seminar's rejection of the "Christ of creed and dogma" (because the paranormalist in question shares the same anti-Christian assumption). But such paranormalist will reject the Seminar's rejection of the paranormal (because this rejection doesn't fit with the paranormalist's personal beliefs). This is what I meant by the pernicious influence of our worldview in our assesment of the evidence.

All the people who I have known who supports the Jesus Seminar are people with strong anti-Christian beliefs. I know of no exceptions to this rule. Perhaps for theological reasons, they don't want a Jesus like the one portraited in traditional Christianity. They don't want a Jesus who was resurrected by God, or a Jesus who is the only son of God and they fight hard to avoid these conclusions or the evidence in favor of it.

2)John Dominic Crossan: Crossan is a member of the Jesus Seminar who has his own idiosyncratic beliefs about Jesus. Philosophically, he's an ATHEIST (as I've proved in other posts).

Consistent with his atheism, Crossan cannot accept the resurrection because correctly he perceives the plausible theistic origin of such event. Since there is not God, there is no one who can raised anybody from the death. He says "I do not think that anyone, anywhere, at any time brings dead people back to life" (Jesus: A revolutionary biography, p. 35)

Obviously, Crossan's opinion is true only if God doesn't exist. But if God exists, how the hell can you say in advance that bringing dead people back to life cannot occur? How do you know that? If God exists, then presumibly He has the power to do that, and it is an open historical question whether he did it or not (e.g. in the case of Jesus).

Crossan's atheism is of a naturalistic, materialistic kind. Se says: "I myself... do not believe that there are personal, supernatural spirts" (ibid. 85)

Note that Crossan's belief implies the NON-existence of God, because God is supposed to be a "personal, supernatural" spirit.

But let that pass. Crossan's naturalism prevents him to accept, for example, the evidence for the afterlife (e.g. NDEs), because for him, not such spirts exist at all.

Now, without reading any Crossan's works, ask yourself: What kind of Jesus is going to be portraited by an atheist scholar like Crossan? A resurrected Jesus? A Jesus as the Son of God? Obviously NOT!

As expected, for Crossan, Jesus had nothing to do with the supernaturalistic portrait of him in the Gospels. He was a mere peasant Jewish Cynic-like individual who never was resurrected in any literal sense and who was not the Son of God at all (after all if God doesn't exist, he cannot have sons, isn't it?)

I must confess my astonishing in discovering how the Jesus Seminar, and prominent members of it like Crossan and Marcus Borg, have been so influential among lay readers. Among professional scholars, they tend to be see with more skepticism (even by liberal scholars), and many of their main contributions have been (I think) rejected by most scholars in the last 15 years. (Even Borg's attenuated portrait of Jesus is not accepted by most scholars, as far I can see).

Since Christian scholars also have a worldview which influences the assesment of the evidence for the historical Jesus (e.g. exerts pressure on them in order to see Jesus as the Son of God), similar considerations apply to them.

The difference, in my opinion, is that scientific naturalism is false, and theism is likely to be true. And given the evidence for the resurrection, any purely naturalistic reconstruction of the historical Jesus is likely to be false too, because if Jesus was purely a natural man as the Seminar, Crossan and Borg pretend, the resurrection is extremely unlikely to happen. (Hence, the study of the resurrection of Jesus is crucial to discover who the real Jesus was).

But if theism is true and the evidence for the resurrection is good, then antecedently we have reason to think the view of Jesus as a special individual regarding God is likely to be true. Hence, the claims that Jesus was the Son of God are, antecedently, more likely to be historical given theism + the resurrection than in naturalism + Jesus= a mere teller of stories and teacher.

With such background (functioning as worldview), you can examine the evidence for Jesus' life with an open mind. Perhaps he was the son of God, perhaps not. Perhaps the resurrection happened, perhaps not. Perhaps he was God incarnate, perhaps not. Theism allows for all these options and hence supports open-mindness which see the historical Jesus as something which have to be settle by the historical evidence.

The Jesus Seminar's atheistic naturalism and secularism, on the contrary, reject some of these options in advance, so only the evidence which supports the Seminar's view will be accepted as the most plausible facts to the reconstruction of the historical Jesus.