What did Qoheleth say? There is nothing new under the sun. Mark Kelly looks at the next iteration of the Jesus Seminar -- evidently they didn't go far enough:
But they come to the text with the same exact problem that the Jesus Seminar had and every critic of the Gospels has had since the beginning of the criticism of the Gospels in the late 19th Century and that is they are unable to look at the text "impartially -- without theological or apologetic constraints." It's impossible to do that, they are already coming to the text biased against it being the actual words of Jesus. They are already skeptical. Their theology is that the Bible is not the word of God, but the word of the early church and it was written for theological purposes.The new conference and project are needed because the Jesus Seminar “may have been – for political reasons – too reluctant to follow where the evidence led,” according to the press release.
“When you have pared the sayings of Jesus down to fewer than 20, one begins to wonder about the survivors. Moreover, the Jesus Seminar was not successful in papering over fatal disputes about the authenticity of even those,” said CSER committee chairman R. Joseph Hoffman.
Curiously, Hoffman adds that “the goal is not to ‘disprove’ Jesus or to sensationalize the question of his existence, but to acknowledge the question and examine it impartially – without theological or apologetic constraints.”
All of us come to the text with presuppositions and it is imperative for us to realize that and to take that into account when we read the text or we run the risk of doing what the Jesus Seminar and other critics have done throughout church history, read our own theology into the text instead of allowing the text to speak to us. Acknowledging our presuppositions allows us to test them against Scripture and to see if they hold up or need to be rethought.
