From Luke_Johnson@info.harpercollins.comWed Mar 20 18:12:53 1996 Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 08:20:04 -0500 (EST) From: Luke Johnson To: Jesus2000@info.harpercollins.com Subject: Week Five: Primary Message (Johnson) Professor Borg's response last week continued to dwell on my rhetoric and on my attack on the Jesus Seminar (or perhaps better, the "Not-Jesus Seminar" since that seemed to be its main message). Concerning the rhetoric, enough has been said: readers of my book know that my tone was calibrated to what I considered the intellectual seriousness of my subjects: I was most dismissive of the seminar and silly Jesus books. Concerning Borg and Crossan, I was moderate. In response to Meier, I was just as tough in my questioning ---indeed, in some senses, more rigorous, since the excellence of his own practice made the intellectual issue of his procedures more clearly the matter for debate. Concerning the Seminar, I made it clear in the book that I was deriving my portrait of the seminar through the medium it had deliberately chosen as its own: the print media. No one has questioned the accuracy of my quotations. In fact, I used my method to rhetorical effect on page 13, which I will repeat here, not for Professor Borg, but for those who may not have read my book as carefully as he has: "As I page through the file of clippings from which I am working, I know some of my readers might object to my procedure. Why such a focvus on Funk? And why draw on statements from press reports, especially when they are obviously quoted out of context? It is appropriate to assert in response to such objections that I have no personal knowledge of Funk at all, nor any reason to consider him as anything but a worthy person. He is known to me only as he has made himself known through this media machine that I am analyzing. My analysis is of Funk [add here: and the seminar] as he appears in these discrete statements. I focus on him because he is the voice most quoted, from beginning to end, and because he appears in these stories as the magister ludi, the coordinator of the game. If my reader objects that a selection of random comments taken out of narrative context does not lead to an understanding of the "real Funk," I shall be delighted. For I would then ask my reader if the application of the same procedure with the Gospels is any more likely to yield the "real Jesus." I also in the first chapter provided a dose of the seminar's own rhetoric, which was scarcely delicate when it came to traditions and texts held sacred by millions of people. It depends, Professor Borg, on whose ox is being gored, I guess. Your sense of personal injury at being criticized for having written some popular works on Jesus as thoughthey were serious scholarship, and for having continued an association with the Jesus Seminar long past the time when its public rhetoric against creedal Christianity was widely disseminated is ill-timed. The more pertinent question is why you have continued that association ---and the same question applies as well to Dom. You say you have disagreed with many of its votes. Yet in none of your publications do those disagreements surface, at least that I have seen. You say that THE FIVE GOSPELS was not voted on by the members, and you regard as unfortunate the "spin" put on the seminar's work by the editors. But FIVE GOSPELS appeared in 1993. You have given countless lectures and participated in many meetings since then. Have you distanced yourself from that "spin?" Perhaps you have, and I have not seen this public disclaimer. And do you, finally, really think of all this as a matter of "spin?" Are the intellectual and spiritual issues identified in this debate really reducible to that level? Does the suggestion in FIVE GOSPELS that the christian creed is a form of theological tyranny bother you so little? You say that you want a "both/and", but not every "both/and" is possible. At some point, one must say: this is not acceptable either as historical scholarship or as theology. Sometimes saying that even requires language that transgresses the ethics of niceness. Professor Crossan: In my response last week, I asked how you got from the narrative portrayal of Jesus' conflicts with Jewish authorities to your programmatic statements: "God says, Caesar sucks." I raised this question because I think it illustrates how a model ends up dominating the data it is invoked to interpret. Some clarification of how you got from the only words of Jesus concerning Caesar, "Give Caesar what belongs to Caesar, give God what belongs to God" (translation from p.xvi of your "The Historical Jesus"), to your epitome of his first and most important "ideological healing," would help me see whether I am fair in my assessment. It seems at first to confirm precisely my objection to the role played by such models when they are employed without sufficient responsiveness to the textual evidence itself. I should also like to engage him on this question: is it not the case that a process of historical reconstruction that begins by eliminating the narrative framework of the canonical gospels as well as most of their contents as "unhistorical," and then continues by reassembling the "authentic bits" within an alternative framework, suggests that the canonical gospels are not only "inadequate" for the historical reconstruction of Jesus (which I readily grant, and on which point I am closer to you than to others), but are also "wrong" in the meaning they give to Jesus? I ask this as a way of returning to my question of some time ago: if you can agree with me concerning the "character of Jesus" as I sketched it, why did that not emerge thematically in your publications? I understand that in your response to Professor Borg on healings you wanted to emphasize the ideological. Let me grant you the point of emphasis. But satisfy me on the point of inclusion, please: is the character of Jesus as portrayed in the canonical framework, a Jewish man who gives his life in service out of radical obedience to God, essential or peripheral? To be included or excluded?