Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Bruce Chilton on the Jesus Seminar and Jesus Project

Over at Bible Interpretation, Bruce Chilton has an interesting piece on 'Plus ça change… “The Jesus Seminar” and “The Jesus Project”'. The "Jesus Project" is a spin off from the "Jesus Seminar" in the sense of being a shift from a Jesus studied by liberals to a Jesus studied by atheists (generally speaking that is!!!). I liked Bruce Chilton's final paragraph:

The Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion has put its reputation on the line in sponsoring “The Jesus Project,” but so far amateurism, special interest advocacy, and a lack of critical focus have undermined a commendably earnest intent. Anyone who has followed the work of “The Jesus Seminar” should have learned long ago that Fundamentalists are not the only partisans who permit their wishes to cloud what they see and that it takes more than a declaration of “objectivity” to acquire the discipline of reasoning from evidence, both textual and archaeological. But I gave the Seminar time, and I can see no reason not to hope that genuine exchanges of insight and a deepening of knowledge might emerge from the so far conventional proceedings of “The Jesus Project.”

HT: Mark Goodacre

3 comments:

steph said...

James wouldn't care. NT Wright could link to his blog and he wouldn't care. Why should he?

steph said...

James doesn't get upset by silly things like that. He gets associated with all sorts of people.

geoffhudson.blogspot.com said...

If you do away with Jesus a lot of people would be out of a job, and a vast business would disappear. This is why Price finds it difficult to make his mind up about the existence of Jesus.