John Dominic Crossan, Jesus Seminar

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I tried to put this on ask an apologist, but i dont know if it was sent properly… I lost the original, so here is a recap

Can someone give me some info on John Dominc Crossan and the Jesus seminar. Especially the stuff where Crossan says that Jesus was left up on the cross or eaten by dogs and that the ressurection was made up by the apostles.
I dont know what to say when my “professor” tells this stuff to the class. Now Crossan has a book out about Paul, and says that Paul want really talking about Jesus in his writings!

I went onto westarinstitute.org/ the Jesus Seminar page, and it had an anit Catholic letter at the bottom. As I checked out the page, one thing that seems absurd to me is how it talked about how they take a vote on differnent topics to see if what the New Testament says about Jesus really happened. and give it a kind of A-F grade.

Again, I dont know how to defend my faith against these “scholars”, so i am asking you guys. In my opinion this is serious stuff, more so that the Davinci Code
 
Just read Luke Timothy Johnson’s “The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus”

amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060641665/qid=1102210670/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/104-7411259-4373527

Professor Johnson is very critical of the Jesus Seminar in the book. He takes them to task for taking the Gospel of Thomas out of second century gnosticism and attributing them to the first Christians. The JS only found 5 sayings in the GoT which are taken straight from the synoptics!

But what I agree with most is Johnson’s assertion that when you try to reconstruct history with only a limited amount of sources then any hackeneyed theory can be supported no matter how ludicrous the claim. In order to stand out from the crowd and sell books, a biblical scholar needs to come up with a new theory and does so by introducings suspect evidence or worse throwing out legitimate evidence.
 
Another good book which I am reading is Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost its Way. It’s by Phillip Jenkins. In his book Phillip Jenkins mostly looks at the context and motivations of the Jesus Seminar and what it claims as radical new discoveries are really just over-rated theories dating as far back as the 19th century. Another more conservative scholar critical of the Jesus Seminar’s methods is John P. Meier. I haven’t read any of his works, but I hear that they are good.
 
I thought Johnson’s The Real Jesus was all in all pretty fair, though I suppose when one wants to learn about a group one shouldn’t just read what their critics have to say about them. (i.e. I wouldn’t suggest anybody learn about the Catholic Church by reading Chick tracts. Not that I’m comparing LT Johnson to Jack Chick.)
 
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Grolsch:
Just read Luke Timothy Johnson’s “The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus”

amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0060641665/qid=1102210670/sr=2-1/ref=pd_ka_b_2_1/104-7411259-4373527

Professor Johnson is very critical of the Jesus Seminar in the book. He takes them to task for taking the Gospel of Thomas out of second century gnosticism and attributing them to the first Christians. The JS only found 5 sayings in the GoT which are taken straight from the synoptics!

But what I agree with most is Johnson’s assertion that when you try to reconstruct history with only a limited amount of sources then any hackeneyed theory can be supported no matter how ludicrous the claim.
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That’s always a possibility - but the best answer to scholarship which draws too sweeping conclusions from such evidence as is available on whatever the subject of study might be, is scholarship that makes proper use of the evidence.​

Not wanting to derail the thread - just trying to stop all OT & NT scholarship being trashed en masse. There seems to be a terrible amount of suspicion of it - even among Catholics. 😦 (My knowledge of the Jesus Seminar is very slight - I never heard of them until quite recently) That having been said, scholarship is not “bad” merely because it is radical or shocking. Some of Father de Vaux’s work on the early history of Israel is disconcerting, if one is a Fundamentalist - but he was not a sensation-seeker. ##
In order to stand out from the crowd and sell books, a biblical scholar needs to come up with a new theory and does so by introducings suspect evidence or worse throwing out legitimate evidence.
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As to that - it’s a bit sweeping. Most Biblical scholarship gets on very well without making “ludicrous claims”. It’s a pity if people have heard only of the Jesus Seminar - they are not the entire community of Biblical scholarship - as this thread shows.

This list has some good stuff on it:

wsu.edu/~brians/bible.html ##
 
If you want something concise, there’s a chapter about Crossan and the Jesus Seminar in “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel. Strobel was a non-believing journalist who came to faith.

One chapter has his interview with Gregory Boyd, PhD., who is a professor at protestant Bethel College. He quotes Boyd: “Their [The Jesus Seminar] major assumption…is that the gospels are not even generally reliable. They conclude this at the outset because the gospels include things that seem historically unlikely,like miracles…” So, they rule out anything supernatural pertaining to Jesus, and then from the leftovers they piece together bits of their own choosing to construct their own Jesus.

Another thing about the Seminar is that instead of writing in scholarly journals, they go straight to the media and give the impression that their output comes from careful, accepted scholarship when their methods and opinions in fact are not accepted by serious scholars.
 
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JohnPaul0:
If you want something concise, there’s a chapter about Crossan and the Jesus Seminar in “The Case for Christ” by Lee Strobel. Strobel was a non-believing journalist who came to faith.

One chapter has his interview with Gregory Boyd, PhD., who is a professor at protestant Bethel College. He quotes Boyd: “Their [The Jesus Seminar] major assumption…is that the gospels are not even generally reliable. They conclude this at the outset because the gospels include things that seem historically unlikely,like miracles…” So, they rule out anything supernatural pertaining to Jesus, and then from the leftovers they piece together bits of their own choosing to construct their own Jesus.

Another thing about the Seminar is that instead of writing in scholarly journals, they go straight to the media and give the impression that their output comes from careful, accepted scholarship when their methods and opinions in fact are not accepted by serious scholars.
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Does mean that their conclusions are not peer-reviewed ? If they don’t write their conclusions down, how can those conclusions be properly studied and assessed ? 😦​

 
Crossan debated William Lane Craig a few years back at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago. The debate was titled, “Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?” It was moderated by William F. Buckley. Craig absolutely made Crossan look foolish. At one point in the debate, Crossan was asked if God existed millions of years ago and Crossan refused to answer yes! Crossan kept saying that that was a meaningless question. Crossan’s theories just don’t stand up under cross examination. The debate was taped and marketed and is well worth purchasing.
 
I believe Crossan is an ex-priest who is both ultra-liberal and a disident Catholic. He had been the the media “go to” person on several Catholic issues but I haven’t read much about him lately. The Jesus Seminar is a New Age development.
 
Bob Baran:
I believe Crossan is an ex-priest who is both ultra-liberal and a disident Catholic. He had been the the media “go to” person on several Catholic issues but I haven’t read much about him lately. The Jesus Seminar is a New Age development.
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Not so long ago, I was reading a book on the historic Jesus by Paula Frederickson (one of Crossan’s colleagues) and she built all sorts of suppositions based on the Q Document (the supposed common source between Matthew and Luke) and the assumption that all the gospels were written after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

That was just after fragments of the Gospel of Matthew had been found that could be dated to the mid-60s. That one discovery simply cut the ground out from under the whole edifice she had constructed.http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/icons/icon10.gif
 
vern humphrey:
That was just after fragments of the Gospel of Matthew had been found that could be dated to the mid-60s. That one discovery simply cut the ground out from under the whole edifice she had constructed.http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/icons/icon10.gif
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People from the Jesus Seminar crowd never let little things like this deter them. Self anointed, self made, commercially saleable - they’ve come to believe their own press clippings.
 
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HagiaSophia:
People from the Jesus Seminar crowd never let little things like this deter them. Self anointed, self made, commercially saleable - they’ve come to believe their own press clippings.
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What a bunch of nut-cases. We ought to have some way of marking these used-to-be-catholics so people won’t think they’re for real. There’s actually a copy of “The Fifth Gospel” in the little library in my church, and I suppose there was someone at one time thought this was valid research.
 
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Uranage:
Crossan debated William Lane Craig a few years back at Moody Memorial Church in Chicago. The debate was titled, “Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up?” It was moderated by William F. Buckley. Craig absolutely made Crossan look foolish. At one point in the debate, Crossan was asked if God existed millions of years ago and Crossan refused to answer yes!
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Perhaps that was because the question is inapplicable to God ? If so, that would be a perfectly good reason not to answer, “Yes”.​

As for the question of the presence of the supernatural being a factor in their considering the Gospels unreliable - it would be very illuminating to know what was actually meant by the members of the Seminar. And what do people here think is meant by that suggestion ? This issue may be a bone of contention if people understand different things by it. ##
Crossan kept saying that that was a meaningless question. Crossan’s theories just don’t stand up under cross examination. The debate was taped and marketed and is well worth purchasing.
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Thanks foir the recommendation. 🙂​

 
vern humphrey:
Not so long ago, I was reading a book on the historic Jesus by Paula Frederickson (one of Crossan’s colleagues) and she built all sorts of suppositions based on the Q Document (the supposed common source between Matthew and Luke) and the assumption that all the gospels were written after the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD.

That was just after fragments of the Gospel of Matthew had been found that could be dated to the mid-60s. That one discovery simply cut the ground out from under the whole edifice she had constructed.http://forums.catholic-questions.org/images/icons/icon10.gif
Click to expand...

Can you tell more ? There was a time when a Spanish priest, a Father O’Callaghan, claimed that fragments of Mark (?) from the 40s had been found. I don’t think his claim was supported.​

 
QUOTE=Gottle of GeerAs for the question of the presence of the supernatural being a factor in their considering the Gospels unreliable - it would be very illuminating to know what was actually meant by the members of the Seminar. And what do people here think is meant by that suggestion ? This issue may be a bone of contention if people understand different things by it. ##

Not sure what you are asking. From what I understand about the members of the Seminar, they flatly reject the possibility of any miracle, and that would include the Resurrection.
 
Gottle of Geer said:
## Can you tell more ? There was a time when a Spanish priest, a Father O’Callaghan, claimed that fragments of Mark (?) from the 40s had been found. I don’t think his claim was supported. ##
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I thought for a moment I had a website bookmarked, but can’t find it right now.

The fragments were found amongst some “confetti” at Oxford – tiny fragmenrts saved and put aside for later research. When the fragments were found and identified, the writing style was dateable – it’s Coptic and mid-60s.

The Oxford researchers knew where the fragments came from, and knew the French had some of the same material. They contacted the Bibliotheque Nationle in Paris, and they had some fairly complete letters – including one precisely dated legal document (a petition to increase the size of a flock of sheep.)

So the dating is pretty solid – and since the language is NOT the Koine, it indicates Matthew was in fairly wide circulation prior to the mid-60s.
 
vern humphrey:
I thought for a moment I had a website bookmarked, but can’t find it right now.

The fragments were found amongst some “confetti” at Oxford – tiny fragmenrts saved and put aside for later research. When the fragments were found and identified, the writing style was dateable – it’s Coptic and mid-60s.

The Oxford researchers knew where the fragments came from, and knew the French had some of the same material. They contacted the Bibliotheque Nationle in Paris, and they had some fairly complete letters – including one precisely dated legal document (a petition to increase the size of a flock of sheep.)

So the dating is pretty solid – and since the language is NOT the Koine, it indicates Matthew was in fairly wide circulation prior to the mid-60s.
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Many thanks 🙂 - if you find the website, can I ask you to pm me about it ? I want to find out as much as possible about this. TY again 🙂​

P.S.: Is this the text in question ? ##
 
for what it’s worth - I’m not too familiar with the Jesus Seminar, but very theologically liberal people I’ve talked to about it say it’s bunk, that the scholarship and research behind it was substandard.
 
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