Content area
Full text
LUKE TIMOTHY JOHNSON, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1996). Pp. viii + 182. $22.
Not every book tossed into the debate about the Jesus Seminar and the historical Jesus is worthy of being discussed: Luke Johnson's, however, is. Whether it is his crystal-clear examination or his piercing critique of recent scholarship (most notably that of Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan, and Burton Mack, as well as Barbara Thiering, Bishop John Spong, A. N. Wilson, and Stephen Wilson), J. offers to this newest roundtable of discussion insights worthy of further debate. While J. criticizes the Jesus Seminar for too much concern with public media (where such debates are not ultimately resolved), his approach itself is popular, sober-minded, and provocative. He contends that the Jesus Seminar's results do not "represent anything like a consensus view of scholars working in the New Testament, but only the views of a group that has been-for all its protestations of diversity-self-selected on the basis of a prior agreement concerning the appropriate goals and methods for studying the Gospels and the figure of Jesus" (p. 2). He contends that this Seminar has its own "road show" appearances (p. 5), and that "the agenda of the Seminar is not disinterested scholarship, but a social mission against the way in which the church controls the Bible, and the way...