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A 2002 ABC News poll found
that 83 percent of Americans identify themselves as Christian. I’m
more concerned about whether Christ will identify me as a Christian,
but in this world self-ID will have to do.
We just wrapped up an
election in which both candidates explained their relationship with
Jesus. Pollsters and pundits cite Christian values as a factor in
many voters’ decisions, giving credit (or blame, if you prefer) to
Jesus’ present day followers for the election results.
So who is Jesus? In Matthew,
Jesus asked his disciples “Who do you say I am?” Even while he
lived, many weren’t sure. Among other things, it had been suggested
he was John the Baptist or the prophets Elijah or Jeremiah.
Or maybe he was Mary Magdalene’s husband and the father
of her child. So claims the paranoid conspiracy novel “The Da Vinci
Code” (soon to be a major motion picture), the book “Holy Blood,
Holy Grail,” the quasi-academic Jesus Seminar organization, and
countless others. These theories generally involve millennia-old
plots to conceal secret evidence, proof that has been guarded by
generations of clandestine cults sworn to “protect” Christianity.
I am not a big conspiracy buff, being skeptical that a
group of any size can keep a secret of any significance for a few
months, much less millennia. Besides, wouldn’t it occur to at least
one person in all those years to just destroy the evidence and go
out and get a life?
These theories generally don’t take much of a push to
collapse of their own weight. Prop them up with a few academic
credentials and some scholarly-sounding gobbledygook, however, and
many folks will take them as the gospel truth, so to speak.
So it’s no surprise Christians have become gun-shy of
academic research into Jesus’ life and times, fearing it is
motivated more by personal agendas than an honest search for facts.
Non-Christians doubt research by Christian scholars for much the
same reason, which is unfortunate because there is little conflict
between the bulk of secular and Christian research.
“What Are They Saying About the Historical Jesus?” was
the topic of Dr. Craig Evans, a researcher and professor at Canada’s
Acadia University, in an address to over 250 academics at an annual
conference sponsored by the University of Calgary this month.
According to the Calgary Herald, Evans told the gathering “If you
bracket off the Jesus Seminar – and they grab all the headlines –
the work of the last 30 years has given us much greater confidence
that the gospels can yield a coherent, historically accurate
portrait of Jesus.”
Evans continued. “The half-dozen leaders and
three-dozen members of the Jesus Seminar create the impression the
scholarship is seriously divided. But I’ve been at annual meetings
of the Institute for Biblical Research, with hundreds of scholars,
and no one can take their outrageous claims seriously any more.”
Evans cites many sources, including discoveries in the
Dead Sea scrolls and an improved understanding of first century
Jewish culture. A theory that a crucified criminal would not have
been buried in a tomb was debunked by the recent discovery of just
such remains, dating to that era.
The thrust of Evans’ comments is that most credible
academic research supports the Biblical description of Jesus’ life.
Whether he was the son of God is a matter of faith, as Jesus himself
acknowledged in John 20:29: “Because you have seen me, you have
believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have
believed.”
I appreciate the importance and challenge of that
choice. What I don’t understand is the need of some to deny the
facts of Jesus’ life for no other reason than to blur who he is.
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