The Image of Jesus
June 20, 2021
Best as I recall, I was introduced to the Jesus Seminar by Lee Strobel in The Case for Christ. He describes this group of liberal scholars who gather to adjudicate which of the sayings of Jesus are real and which are fabricated. Voting is done by using red, pink, gray, and black beads—red being historical sayings of Jesus, black being fabrications, pink and gray being somewhere in-between. Strobel is, as you might imagine, very critical of their work.
The Jesus Seminar he describes is not the first attempt by scholars to find “the historical Jesus.” The problem (if you want to call it that) is implicit in the Gospels themselves. If they disagreed on details less, we wouldn’t spend as much time trying to figure out which account is the most historically accurate. Even if they described Jesus in the same way, perhaps we would have less cause to embark on these quests for the historical Jesus.
But no. God, in his wisdom, gave us four different accounts of Jesus, each with a somewhat different description of the man. There’s a lot of overlap, yes, but also significant divergences. So throughout history, we look at those differences and try to adjudicate which is the most historically accurate.
In graduate school I was taught more about the Jesus Seminar. For the record, the Seminar was not and is not very influential. While there are a handful of quality scholars that participated in it, the vast majority of New Testament scholars disagree with it. My favorite criticism is that leveled against all of the various quests throughout history—the scholars always seem to find a Jesus in their own image.
It strikes me that this is also what Jesus’ own contemporaries did. They had gleaned an expectation of who the Messiah would be from Scripture, and he looked suspiciously like themselves, or what they wanted themselves to be. When the Messiah finally did come along, he didn’t fit the bill. They were too in love with their own vision of the Messiah to embrace the changes demanded by the real deal.
The scary thing is, we can do the same thing ourselves. We read through the Gospels and find there a Jesus in our own image, sometimes whether we mean to or not. This is, to some degree, inevitable. When we come to Scripture knowing parts of it, we expect what we read to fit within our present understanding of Scripture. Certainly we won’t say, “Jesus did say this, Jesus didn’t say that,” but we may say “This is an important saying of Jesus,” while unintentionally ignoring that other saying of Jesus that doesn’t make good sense to us. The answer is not to scrap our understanding of Jesus, but to reapply ourselves to reading the word of God afresh. It is to dedicate ourselves to allowing God to speak to us on his own terms, that we may be conformed to his image, rather than conforming Jesus to our own.
—John Coffey
