From Marcus_Borg@info.harpercollins.comFri Mar 15 11:39:58 1996 Date: Thu, 14 Mar 1996 16:32:52 -0800 From: "Marcus J. Borg" To: Jesus2000@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Borg response (week four) Dear Luke and Dom, First, thanks to both of you for your responses of last week. Dom, you said some things I haven't heard you say before, and I am pleased to have elicited them. Second, I am aware that my response this week is more to Luke than to Dom. Perhaps that is inevitable, given that Dom and I are more alike than different (though we do have differences), and given that Luke's book is a critique of both of us (as well as of others). 1. I want to raise the question of how Johnson knows what he claims to know about the Jesus Seminar (including the claim that it is so bad that he is surprised that Dom and I didn't withdraw a long time ago). As somebody who has been part of the Jesus Seminar for ten years, I simply do not recognize the group he describes. This is an important sentence: the Seminar is not as he portrays it. Moreover, though I have not done a survey of all the Fellows, I do not know personally of anybody in the Seminar to whom Johnson spoke. Given that we are all easy to reach, would it not have been natural for Johnson to call one or two of us and ask us about how we see the Seminar? I wouldn't expect him simply to accept our opinion, of course - but before mounting such an attack, it might have been good to say to one of us, "I've been hearing terrible things about the Seminar - how do you see it? Help me to understand whether it has any positive value." And regarding his attack on Bob Funk. How does he know that Bob Funk is "insincere"? As one who knows Funk, I have no doubt that he sincerely sees things the way he does - even though I disagree with him on some important matters. But what is the basis for questioning his sincerity? Because he can be flamboyant? Because he can be "in your face"? Because he's caustic toward many forms of Christianity? He is all of these things, in my experience of him. But what does any of this have to do with sincerity or integrity? If Bob Funk were to begin to present himself as a devout practicing Christian concerned to reform the church, then we might have reasons to wonder about sincerity. But he does not so present himself. And let me conclude this point by saying that I am not an uncritical defender of the Jesus Seminar. I disagree with a number of our votes. I don't care very much for the commentary in The Five Gospels - I think in some respects it does not accurately reflect what we did or how many of us would describe the significance of our work (and I want to add that the Seminar did not vote on the commentary - we did not review it before it went to press; thus the "spin" in the commentary is the product primarily of its two editors, Funk and Roy Hoover). One of the most serious misunderstandings of our work is a particular way of interpreting the fact that only 18% of the sayings of Jesus appear in red and pink. There are two ways of interpreting the fact: 1) in the judgment of this group of scholars, ONLY 18% of the words attributed to Jesus go back to him; or 2) in the judgment of this group of scholars, AT LEAST this 18% goes back to Jesus; these are the sayings about which the positive consensus is the strongest. Given the meaning of our votes, the second way is the right way of interpreting the 18% red and pink. The press has most commonly interpreted it the first way (and there is at least one sentence in The Five Gospels which interprets it this way). The point: I (and Fellows of the Seminar generally) can be critical of our work. But the sinister spin put on our work by Johnson seems unwarranted. It seems to be part of an attempt to marginalize the work of the Seminar (and perhaps part of a more comprehensive attempt, represented especially in Time magazine, to marginalize the historical study of Jesus and Christian origins). 2. I want to raise a question about Johnson's rhetoric. In his response to me last week, he justified his rhetoric with two statements: its SHARPNESS is justified by intellectual responsibility (O.K.); its "sarcastic edge" is a function of the PUBLIC rather than professional character of the conversation. What does this second justification mean? That the public can only understand sarcasm, or wouldn't get the point if it weren't made sarcastically? (Sounds a bit condescending to me). Or that sarcasm creates more public interest and more public market? (And Johnson accuses the Jesus Seminar of being publicity-seeking and market-driven). And what do you think of the implicit claim that it's O.K. to be sarcastic about your colleagues because the conversation is a public one? Many of us write for a public conversation without sarcasm. Or am I missing something here? 3, You ask why I haven't said more about the canonical Jesus (or "the post-Easter Jesus," to use the phrase I typically use.) Two responses: 1) I am a historical Jesus scholar, and so it only makes sense that most of my published work has been about the historical Jesus ("the pre-Easter Jesus"). That's my special topic area. To ask why I haven't written more about the post-Easter Jesus is a bit like asking a scholar who specializes in John's gospel why he doesn't write more about Paul. 2) More importantly, I have said some things in print about the post-Easter Jesus, esp. in Meeting Jesus Again and in a couple of the essays in Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship. I have stressed that BOTH the historical Jesus AND the post-Easter Jesus matter for Christians; that it's not an either/or; that the Johannine "I am" sayings (though not coming from the historical Jesus) are nevertheless profoundly true statements about what the risen living Christ had become in the experience of the community. Given my emphasis on BOTH the historical Jesus AND the canonical Jesus, you can imagine my surprise when I found myself castigated in your publications as among those who think that ONLY the historical Jesus matters, and that Christian beliefs must be based ONLY in that which can be historically verified. 4. Reading through all of our entries of the past week, I am struck by how we all emphasize that which we fear would otherwise be overlooked or subordinated. Crossan fears that kingdom will be lost if God/Spirit is emphasized too much. I fear that God/Spirit will be lost if Kingdom is emphasized too much. Johnson fears that the canonical/narratival Jesus will be lost if the historical Jesus receives much attention. In all of these cases, I think it is a BOTH/AND, and I do not understand the need to deny one half for the sake of affirming the other half. I think Crossan and I are in agreement here, so again, I find myself addressing myself primarily to you, Luke (switching now to second person). Tell me again why you see the question of the historical Jesus and the canonical Jesus as a radical either/or. And this isn't a request for you to repeat what you say in your book - I think I understand that. But I still don't get it. So can you say anything else to help me to understand why, in order to affirm the importance of the canonical Jesus (which I do), you must deny any significant significance to the historical attempt to glimpse the figure behind the texts? With best wishes to you both.