A prominent purpose of the Jesus Seminar since the middle 1980s has been to sift the teachings and timelines of Jesus from the layers of culture and history that have separated us from times then. But is this misguided Positivism, laboring under the mistaken idea that there is a single or at least relatively more objective way of knowing the meaning and the events of long ago? Or is there value in wrestling with closely read texts, translations and other evidence from physical remains, cultural and linguistic properties, understandings of ritual functions and concepts of purity, along with the facts of geography, flora and fauna?
As the 12 step plans begin, "the first step to solving a problem is to recognize that there is a problem to begin with." So by problematizing the published Bibles (and commentary literature of the ages and sages) that we routinely accept, perhaps indeed there is a chance of creating space to breath and reflect between us and our times on the one hand and the Word of God on the other. It may be foolish to think that there is one correct understanding of events and teachings. After all, the moment that we rest easy with some certainty of knowledge about God, that is the moment that we have foreclosed all other meanings; making the eternal and infinite fit into the small box of our mortal minds. And yet, the exercise of the Jesus Seminar to apply social & natural science to the ordinary textual tools of analysis does cast the things told into a different light. At the very least it supplies another standpoint to triangulate deeper and fuller meanings and contexts of significance.
Bruce Chilton's Rabbi Jesus (2002) and then Rabbi Paul (2005) show what is possible by focusing events of the Bible through these multiple lenses.
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