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Gospels: Jesus Seminar
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Such criticism of the Gospels is not new. An attack on the Gospels appeared in 1774 when a 1,400-page manuscript by Hermann Reimarus, a professor of Oriental languages in Hamburg, Germany, was published posthumously. Therein Reimarus entertained profound doubts about the historicity of the Gospels. His conclusions were based on linguistic analysis and seeming contradictions found in the four Gospel accounts of Jesus' life. Since then, critics have often expressed doubts about the authenticity of the Gospels, to some extent undermining public confidence in these writings.
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Gospels are not biographies of Jesus in the modern sense of a detached, academic account of a person's life. In fact, this genre of literature was unknown to the ancient world. Narratives were written to inspire, teach a lesson, warn, or persuade, not to simply inform. The purpose of the Gospel narratives seems to be twofold: to recount the events in the extraordinary life of Jesus, and do so in such a way that its hearers will respond in faith. But these are written that you may believe and that by believing you may have life in his name." {1}
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Experience the entirety of the Gospels and the Book of Acts in this program blending the moving narration of Emmy winner Stephen Johnston, powerful music and a cast of Tony-winning actors who dramatize the tales. You'll see these treasures from the King James version of the Bible in a whole new light as the stories of Jesus' birth, crucifixion and resurrection, along with the genesis of the Christian church, come vividly to life.
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The four canonical Gospels don’t address Jesus’ years as a youth, for example. Professor Johnson shows how apocryphal Gospels such as the Proevangelium Jacobi were written to fill in such gaps, as they did so many others, offering details ignored by the canon. In one of these, the Infancy Gospel of Thomas, you meet the child Jesus might have been, who would be all too familiar to a modern-day parent, becoming a teenager both wondrous and perverse before evolving into the Jesus represented to us today.
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The Gospels were probably written down in their present form between thirty and sixty years after Jesus’ crucifixion. Since Jesus himself left no writings, the Gospels record stories and eyewitness descriptions that had been passed on by word of mouth for a number of years. At first, Jesus' followers were so eager to tell the message about him that they didn't think it was necessary to write down what he had said and done. But as Jesus' first followers and eyewitnesses grew older and died, it became more important to have a written record of what Jesus did and taught, and to describe his death and how God brought him back to life.
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In concluding this discussion of the Gospels as historical documents and as theological proclamations, it would be well to point out a fallacy that seems to pervade the thinking of many. Because the evangelists were theologically motivated is no grounds for arguing that the kerygma has so beclouded the facts of the historical life of Jesus that these are irrecoverable or even that they have been so dramatically altered as to distort the Sitz im Leben Jesu. To imply, as some do, that the evangelists were unable to transmit an objective and reliable account of Jesus’ life because they wrote from a subjective stance of faith is to misunderstand the nature of any history-writing enterprise. In general, it may be asked whether there is any writing of history which is not “subjective.” In this specific case, non-believers would not have been any less subjective, if accounts had been composed by them. The truth of the matter is that no
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