Will the real Jesus please stand up?

"The Real Jesus" is a book by Luke Timothy Johnson, a former Benedictine monk who currently teaches New Testament studies at Emory University. Although the author is a scholar, the book is strictly speaking not scholarly. Rather, the purpose of "The Real Jesus" is to stimulate debate about various topics, including the Jesus Seminar, the current state of Biblical studies, the mass media, and, of course, the figure of Jesus.

The main bulk of the book contains a criticism of the Jesus Seminar, a group representing the ultra-liberal portion of the scholarly (and theological) spectrum. The Seminar, led by John Dominic Crossan and Robert Funk, believes that most of the sayings attributed to Jesus weren't really spoken by him. Thus, the real Jesus was very different from the one we meet in the Gospels. The members of the Seminar also take a positive view of apocryphal texts, such as "the Gospel of Thomas" and "the Gospel of Peter", speculating that they might contain a more authentic picture of Jesus.

Apart from criticizing the ideas of the Jesus Seminar, Johnson also takes exception to their way of using the mass media. To Johnson, the Seminar is more a media phenomenon and less a scholarly enterprise. It's task is to change the perceptions of the public, not to influence their academic peers. (Ironically, this is the same kind of criticism natural scientists level at Christian creationists!)

Since Johnson is attacking the liberals regrouped around the Jesus Seminar, it's easy to assume that he is a conservative, even a fundamentalist. Actually, he is much more flexible. Thus he admits that the "historical" or "real" Jesus is very difficult to reconstruct. Extra-Biblical sources are scanty, and the New Testament itself is primarily a document of faith, rather than a strictly historical source. Any reconstruction will be on the level of probabilities rather than certainties.

Johnson believes that this doesn't threaten the Christian faith. But if the historical Jesus is impossible to fully grasp, why believe in the Christian message at all? Why not turn agnostic? This is a question Johnson cannot really answer. He seems to be saying that Jesus can be approached only through the tradition of the Church that canonized the Gospels in the first place. The historical Jesus isn't important. The resurrected, heavenly Jesus is. And he is experienced every day by the believers. The Gospels reflect this experience and are hence "real".

But are they? Isn't this really a form of Docetism, where the real Jesus doesn't matter, only the Christ of faith as he is described in later Church traditions? But if these traditions aren't real, aren't historically true, why believe them rather than the Gnostic message, or any other competing religious or non-religious message? What Johnson brushes aside as a typical "Protestant" problem - the attempts to prove that the Gospel narratives really happened - is a problem for Catholics as well, unless you want to end up with a completely irrational faith in some subjective experience or unattested dogma.

I give this book four stars since its thought-provoking, both when criticizing the Jesus Seminar for sloppy scholarship and when presenting its own theological alternative.

But is it true? That still remains the question.