Furor Over Bible Scholars on Second Coming of Christ

Given the prominence of John Dart’s article on the Jesus Seminar (“Jesus Didn’t Promise to Return, Bible Scholar Group Says,” Part I, March 5), you obviously think their findings constitute an earth-shattering revelation (pardon my apocalyptic language).

Dart tells us that 28 out of 30 “academically mainstream” and “very careful” scholars decided that Jesus never said he would come again. So what? Dart knows as well as anyone that scholars involved in New Testament studies invent critical reconstructions of Jesus with a regularity rivaled only by the migration of the lemmings to the sea, and usually with the same results. Earlier “mainstream” scholarship was convinced Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher. So why should I believe the Jesus Seminar instead of other scholars? Or Saint Paul, for that matter?

What would have been more helpful is a story that tells us not only what the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions are, but gives us some insight into how they got there. What are their critical canons? How do they determine that certain of Jesus’ sayings are authentic, while others are not? What assumptions do they make about the pre-literary and literary development of the Gospels? What presuppositions, philosophical and religious, do they bring to their research? How do their critical rules, assumptions, and procedures fare when applied to other bodies of literature? What would happen to Plato and Aristotle at the hands of these experts?

The Jesus Seminar members are concerned about an unsophisticated, uncritical fundamentalism that takes the Bible at face value. And yet, their pronouncements about what Jesus did or didn’t say may betray a fundamentalism worse than the most vehement Bible-thumper, because they take their own “critical scholarship” so uncritically.

RICHARD J. EUSON

Tujunga