The Jesus Project?
I was a little surprised to see the following story circulating in the press this week:
Scholars to debate if Jesus existed, Group to discuss, test truth of Bible
Jennifer Green
The Ottawa CitizenWednesday, January 10, 2007
Internationally recognized biblical scholars are set to launch The Jesus Project, a new endeavour to examine the historical existence of Christ.
The project is intended to pick up where the controversial Jesus Seminar left off in its research into the veracity of Jesus’s words and deeds in the Bible.
The seminar has lost momentum in recent years, but in its heyday, about 200 scholars met regularly to discuss whether Jesus really behaved as the Bible says he did.
The scholars voted using a system of beads — red for accurate, pink for probable, grey for possible but unreliable, and black for improbable — and found 82 per cent of Jesus’s sayings, and 84 per cent of his deeds were unreliable to improbable.
Conservative Christians and many scholars of all stripes were outraged. Some theologians believed the seminar drove a wedge further between faith and reason, while others in more liberal churches said their faith was, in fact, bolstered by the research.
Now, the Jesus Project “will take off where the Jesus seminar left off,” says Nathan Bupp, spokesman for the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion, the group sponsoring the conference at the University of California this month. “It will breathe new fire into it. We will not close the door on free inquiry.”
The original seminar may have been reluctant to follow where the evidence led, says R. Joseph Hoffman, committee chairman and author of Just War and Jihad: Violence in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
He says the goal is not to prove that Jesus never existed, but to acknowledge that it is a legitimate field of inquiry that needs to be examined objectively.
“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.”
Among those attending the conference are some of the biggest names in biblical studies today:
- James D. Tabor, chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, and author of The Jesus Dynasty: A New Historical Investigation of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity.
- Elaine Pagels, a professor of religion at Princeton University, who was awarded the Rockefeller, Guggenheim and MacArthur Fellowships.
- Van Harvey, professor emeritus of religious studies at Stanford University and author of The Historian and the Believer.
- John Dominic Crossan, leading member of the Jesus Seminar
Two Canadians will also be presenting papers: Islamic specialist Andrew Rippin of the University of Victoria, and Philippa Carter of McMaster University.
The conference will also look at the origins of the Koran, biblical and Koranic mythology, modern developments in examining ancient texts and the role of skepticism in examining religious texts.
The committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion is not tied to any school, but is a project of the Centre for Inquiry, in Amherst, New York, a group that defends secularism and reason, science, and freedom of inquiry.
© The Ottawa Citizen 2007
Although I am quite happy to be ranked among my superiors as “some of the biggest names in biblical studies today,” I think there is a bit of confusion between the upcoming conference, Scripture and Skepticism, at the University of California at Davis, and the formation of a group called The Jesus Project. Although I and lots of others will be reading papers or giving responses at the conference, this is the first I have heard of any Project of this description. I do think those involved will need to choose a new name since “The Jesus Project” as well as “The Jesus Film Project” are both efforts of evangelical Christian groups trying to carry out worldwide evangelism.