Historical Jesus answers the wrong question: How Narrative Criticism led to Modern Christianity

Send us Fan MailThe Jesus Seminar and its work to elucidate a historical Jesus ran out of steam. Robert Funk, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and others did done a lot of great work to put the gospels in historical context. They famously voted on the historical plausibility of the Jesus narrative using colored beads. But by the time the Jesus Seminar disbanded in 2006 after twenty years, they really have seemed to only show how tenuous the historical Jesus really is. I argue in this insightful podcast episode that the main problem of the Jesus Seminar is that they were answering the wrong question. They fall into the same trap of historical criticism that fundamentalists do. They rely on fact rather than narrative. This is a major fallacy of biblical apologetics. I describe how Walter Brueggemann's book "The Prophetic Imagination" was a watershed describing the shift to Narrative Criticism and other biblical interpretation methods that are much more widely adopted in today's scholarship.I was talking with someone who I really care about. He was frustrated that the liberal church he grew up in was obsessed with Historical Jesus, and the Jesus Seminar with Marcus Borg & John Dominic Crossan. He thought it cheapened the divinity of Christ, he was stunned when I agreed. The Historical Jesus sought to answer the wrong question however. It had its purpose, but whether Jesus, his life and the bible is historically correct is a fools game that comes from the enlightenment. It's the same game as fundamentalists play. It adds to scripture rather than illuminates it. That's why I love Walter Brueggemann’s work so much. It's the narrative that's important not historical fact. Even history is narrative depends on the author & the perspective of the reader. A very important lesson I learned in seminary. Prophetic Imagination is not a luxury, but the heart of biblical interpretation. God speaks to us in stories not bulletin points on PowerPoint.