During November
1999, I was privileged to attend a three day seminar in New York titled: “The
Bible and the Catholic Church: Challenging The Findings of the Jesus Seminar.”
The seminar was sponsored by CRISIS magazine in conjunction with Monsignor
Michael J. Wrenn.
The “Jesus Seminar” was founded in 1985 by Protestant scholar Robert Funk and it
represents a well-funded, public assault on the scriptural foundations of many
Catholic doctrines. It has now taken to the road in the U.S. and is attracting
Christians from all denominations — it has even held seminars in Catholic
precincts.
The “Jesus Seminar” is composed of scholars from colleges, universities and
seminaries who have met annually for the past fifteen years to vote on which of
the words and deeds of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels should be considered as
accurate. They have concluded that over 82 percent of what Jesus said in the
Gospels is not historically accurate; and that of the 176 deeds of Jesus
recounted in the Gospels, only 10 are historical. It asserts that Jesus did not
rise from the dead, that he did not teach his disciples to pray the “Our
Father,” that his death does not have salvific significance for the human race.
The “Jesus Seminar” reaches its conclusions mainly through the analysis of
biblical texts according to the principles of an exegetical method known as
“historical criticism.” In particular, it bases many of its findings on the
assumed truth of what is known as the “Two-Source Theory” which asserts that i)
Mark’s Gospel was the first to be written, and ii) the Gospels of Matthew and
Luke draw for their teaching about Jesus on the Gospel of Mark and upon a
hypothetical document known as “Q” (from the German word “Quelle”). On the basis
of this theory, the Jesus Seminar fosters the notion that the Gospels of
Matthew, Luke and John are largely mythical elaborations of the real Jesus as
found in Mark and “Q.” However, the 1993 document from the Pontifical Biblical
Commission titled The Interpretation of the Bible in the Church, notes that the
“Two-Source Theory” is today “under challenge” from scholars.
Moderated by the editor of CRISIS magazine, Dr. Deal W. Hudson, the New York
Seminar on The Bible and the Church brought together many distinguished scholars
including: Professor William Farmer, Rev. N.T. Wright, Professor Scott Hahn,
Rev. Dr. Brian Harrison, Msgr. George A. Kelly, Hon. Kenneth D. Whithead,
Professor David Laird Dungan and Rev. Professor Donald J. Keefe, S.J.
An internationally acclaimed biblical scholar and professor at the University of
Dallas, Dr. Farmer, who converted to Catholicism in 1990, stated that the
members of the Jesus Seminar “are involved in a comprehensive misunderstanding
of the New Testament.” He said that Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar want “to
mess about” with the canon of Sacred Scripture — “delete something here, add
something there.” He stated that their first major failing as historians was
their failure “to properly construe the importance of certain data preserved in
the letters of Paul for understanding Jesus and his role in Christian origins.”
In particular, Dr. Farmer described, and expertly refuted, the erroneous
assertions of the Jesus Seminar on the origins of the Eucharist. It suggests
that St. Paul took over the tradition concerning the Last Supper from pagan
Hellenistic circles somewhere in Asia Minor or Greece. This assertion, added
Farmer, amounts to no less than “the difference between a Church with the
Eucharist and a Church without the Eucharist.”
Taking as his point of departure certain New Testament texts regarding the Last
Supper tradition in 1 Cor 11: 23-26 and the Gospels of Matthew and Mark,
Professor Farmer presented a profound exegesis of these texts to demonstrate
that despite some differences in their presentation of the tradition, they
nonetheless converge in their testimony to what happened on the night that
Christ was betrayed. This convergence, said Professor Farmer, bears an
historically reliable double attestation to the following facts regarding what
happened at the Last Supper:
It was on the same occasion, the night he was betrayed,In the same setting that of a meal,Jesus took bread and giving thanks or blessing it, he broke it in the presence
of his disciples and said: “This is My Body,”Later, after taking the cup, Jesus associated it with his blood and with the New
Covenant,In both accounts it is made clear that what Jesus is doing is being done for
others.
Dr. Farmer went on to demonstrate how in the convergence of these two accounts
of the institution of the Eucharist, the Church has “two separate accounts of
the same event” which rests upon “the same set of eyewitnesses, namely, the
disciples of Jesus who were present to witness the awesome event.” Hence, added
Dr. Farmer, “if there is a mystery in all of this, it is a mystery grounded in
history . . . we are dealing with acts and words of Jesus historically
attested.”
Professor Scott Hahn, again took up the question of the Eucharist, but did so
from the perspective of Jesus’ teaching on the Kingdom of God. Dr. Hahn was a
Presbyterian minister for ten years. In 1986, he converted to Catholicism and he
is now a professor of theology at the Franciscan University of Steubenville.
Professor Hahn stated that faith in Jesus Christ “demands that we accept his
promises on his terms — he promised us a glorious kingdom within his own
generation and we have to believe he made good on that promise.” Having said
this Hahn then went on to quote Vatican II where it says: “To carry out the will
of the Father, Christ inaugurated the kingdom of heaven on earth . . . The
Church — that is, the Kingdom of Christ, already present in mystery, grows
visibly through the power of God in the world” (Lumen Gentium, n. 3). Later,
Hahn quoted from Christoph Schonborn’s book Death To Life where the scholarly
Cardinal said: “The Pilgrim Church is nothing other than the Kingdom of Heaven
that Christ established on earth.”
Hahn pointed out that a feature of the work of Loisy and other modernist
biblical scholars is their opposition to the Magisterium’s teaching about the
Catholic Church being the Kingdom of God. Regarding the problems that arise from
dissent against this Church teaching, Hahn quoted Cardinal Henri de Lubac as
having stated prior to Vatican II:
“You have come to Mount Zion, to the City of the Living God. The early Church
Fathers believed these words, as Augustine said, ‘The present Church is the
Kingdom of Christ’ (Sermon 125). In this synthesising vision of the mystery, the
Church is identical with Christ her Bridegroom, who is himself the Kingdom and
precisely this vision corresponds to the deepest logic of Christianity. If one
was to abandon this vision of the Church as the Kingdom of Christ, countless
abuses in thought and deed would be the result.”
Linking the Church’s teaching on the Kingdom with the Sacrifice of the Mass,
Professor Hahn said:
The right place for the Kingdom is the Heavenly Jerusalem which descends to
earth in every Mass. For our Eucharistic liturgy is a royal Sacrament in which
we participate in our King’s priestly self-offering before the angels and saints
and unto his Father and our Father in heaven. And so, the right kind of Kingdom
we should be looking for is a Eucharistic Kingdom.
In his lecture entitled “Re-examining What We Mean By History,” Fr. Donald
Keefe, S.J, who is professor of dogmatics at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie,
stated that the Jesus Seminar “is hardly alone in broadcasting a rationalistic
disillusionment with institutional religion.” Fr. Keefe added that the Western
world now lives on the accumulated interest of nearly 2000 years of faith in
Christ and, that this in turn, rests on another 2000 years of Judaism. Fr. Keefe
cited St. Augustine as “the greatest of the theologians of history,” and added
that in his great book The City of God, he “has taught the Western World about
history down to the time of the Enlightenment.”
In regard to the Enlightenment view of history, Fr. Keefe stated that from the
time of the publication of Voltaire’s History of Manners, “history became a
secular category.” In contrast to this secular view, Fr. Keefe posited “that
history has always been a theological category” and that “the theology of
history is identically the theology of the Eucharist.”
Taking the words of institution of the Eucharist, “This is My Body” and “This is
My Blood,” as the “core of the Church’s worship in Truth,” Fr. Keefe stated that
the truth of these words provide the hermeneutical test for any understanding of
history that may be of use within Catholic theology, or indeed within Christian
theology in general. In this context, Fr. Keefe added:
We place him [Christ] in the center of our free history and we understand this
freedom in the context of his Lordship over it...Within the Catholic tradition,
that Lordship is Eucharistic. When we say, “This is My Body” and “This is My
Blood,” when we hear it said, when the priest utters it in the person of Christ,
he is effecting by these words, by the institution of Christ at the Last Supper,
his Covenantal presence in the world.
Rev. N.T Wright — highly acclaimed author, former lecturer in the New Testament
at Oxford University as well as canon-theologian at Westminster Abbey, currently
guest lecturer at the Harvard Divinity School —stated that it is necessary for
us to study Jesus historically. He said the question about the historicity of
the Gospel portrait of Jesus has been raised in public and it won’t go away. He
said that the quest for the historical Jesus expresses itself in questions such
as: “Who was Jesus? Was he really like the Church said he was?”
Rev. Wright said that if it were true, as some contemporary authors claim, that
Jesus was merely a minor Galilean exorcist, failed revolutionary, or deluded
apocalyptic fanatic, then our faith is in vain. He said that we have to answer
all these questions in order to show that Christianity is not simply about
private religious experiences, but rather about things that happened within
history. In this regard, Rev. Wright noted that it is deeply significant that
Pontius Pilate made it into the Christian Creed — indicating that “this stuff
really happened.”
Rev. Wright pointed out that a failure to study Jesus historically can lead us
into the heresy of Docetism, and that it runs the risk of inventing a Jesus to
suit our own ideologies. He pointed out how such a thing happened in Germany in
the 1920s and 30s where — a neglect of the historical foundations of the
Christian faith — allowed theologians with Nazi sympathies to produce a
non-Jewish Jesus who did not pose a threat to the legitimization of Nazi
ideology.
In speaking of the way in which the ideas of Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza
(1632-1677) influenced the rise of modern biblical criticism, Dr. David Laird
Dungan, a Protestant scholar who teaches at the University of Tennessee and who
is the author of the recently published book A History of the Synoptic Problem
(Doubleday, 1999), touched also on the question of how biblical studies has been
subjected to manipulation by ideologues.
Dr. Dungan pointed out that Spinoza’s skeptical and rationalist questioning of
the historicity of the Gospels had infected German biblical scholarship in the
period 1860-1939. This, he said, contributed to “a violent attack upon Roman
Catholicism in 1870 in the aftermath of Vatican I.” Liberal Lutheran scholars,
added Dr. Dungan, claimed that “the idea of papal infallibility was absolutely
irrational” and this opposition to the dogma gave rise to “a Government led
witch-hunt on Roman Catholic faculties in German universities.” Dungan stated
that German Catholic professors who defended the Vatican I teaching on papal
authority “were fired, they were interrogated, priests were brought in for
cross-examination, churches were closed, there was a centrally organized attack
on the Roman Catholic Church in Germany.”
Dr. Dungan said that in this battle against the Catholic Church in Germany,
biblical criticism was used to challenge the authenticity of Mt 16: 16-19 as a
text traceable back to the historical Jesus and which is important in the
Catholic Church’s apologetic against those who challenge its teaching on papal
authority. Dr. Dungan stated that under Bismarck, those professors who endorsed
the view that Mark and not Matthew was the first Gospel to be written were given
preference by the German Ministry of Education in faculty appointments. Finally,
added Dr. Dungan, the notion generated by liberal Lutheran scholars that
anything in Matthew’s Gospel which did not find attestation in Mark was not
worthy of credence, and the relegation of Matthew’s Gospel to the “basement of
the Bible” together with all its elements of Jesus’ Jewishness, served the First
and Second Reichs in their creation of an Aryan Christ.
In an inspiring lecture on Pope Paul VI and the Historicity of the Gospels, Rev.
Dr. Brian Harrison, who teaches in the theology department of the University of
Puerto Rico, pointed out that on several occasions during his pontificate, Pope
Paul VI reaffirmed the received Catholic teaching on the historical reliability
of the Gospels, as did Vatican II in Dei Verbum.
Fr. Harrison pointed out how the calling into question of the historicity of the
Gospels weakened the foundations of Catholic dogma. To this effect, Fr. Harrison
quoted Cardinal Ratzinger who, in an article published in 1991 in a volume of
Italian essays about biblical studies, said: “Dogma deprived of its scriptural
foundations is no longer holding up. The Bible which has separated itself from
dogma has become a document of the past which essentially belongs to the past.”
In regard to the dogma of Christ’s virginal conception, and while acknowledging
that in Catholic faith Divine Revelation is mediated through both Sacred
Scripture and Sacred Tradition, Fr. Harrison stated that “the Catholic tradition
is not simply that Christ was virginally conceived,” but rather “that Scripture
teaches that he was virginally conceived.” Fr. Harrison pointed out that all of
the patristic and classical theologians relied on the relevant passages from
Matthew and Luke in the their defense of this article of faith regarding the
virginal conception of Jesus.
An example of how the biblical foundations of certain dogmas of Catholic faith
have been called into question by some biblical scholars is Fr. Raymond Brown’s
treatment of the virginal conception of Christ. Expressing doubt as to whether
the Gospels of Matthew and Luke clearly affirm the historicity of the virginal
conception, Brown says that “the scientifically controllable biblical evidence
leaves the question of the historicity of the virginal conception unsolved.”1 In
more common language, what Fr. Brown is here asserting is that, on the basis of
the biblical data, we cannot say for sure whether or not Jesus was virginally
conceived.
At this juncture, it is worth noting that Pope John Paul II gave a marvelous
catechesis on the virginal conception during his Wednesday audience on July 10,
1996. The Pope said that “the virginal conception is a biological fact” and that
“the Gospel accounts clearly teach that Jesus’ conception was the work of the
Holy Spirit and not just a theological expression of his divine sonship.”
Referring to the account of the Annunciation in St. Luke’s Gospel, the Holy
Father said: “The structure of the Lucan text (cf. Lk 1: 26-38; 2:19, 51)
resists any reductive interpretation. Its coherence does not validly support any
mutilation of the terms or expressions which affirm the virginal conception
brought about by the Holy Spirit.” In regard to the texts in Matthew, Pope John
Paul II said: “The Evangelist Matthew, reporting the angel’s announcement to
Joseph, affirms like Luke that the conception was ‘the work of the Holy Spirit’
(Mt 1:20) and excluded marital relations.” (L’Osservatore Romano, 7/17/96).
Also tackling the question of the link between the faith of the Church and
biblical studies at the New York conference was Kenneth D. Whitehead, who is a
former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education as well as an author of several
books and translator of 21 books from French, German and Italian. He quoted
Albert Schweitzer as saying that the motivation for much of the modern critical
study of the Bible was to be found in “a struggle against the tyranny of dogma”
(emphasis added).
Whitehead acknowledged that over the last two centuries critical study of the
Bible has produced some positive results. In this regard, he referred to the
1993 document of the Pontifical Biblical Commission — titled The Interpretation
of the Bible in the Church — which stated that the historical critical method
was an “indispensable method for the scientific study of the meaning of ancient
texts.” However, in conjunction with this, Whitehead recalled another passage
from the same document which stated that “the historical-critical method cannot
lay claim to enjoying a monopoly . . . it must be conscious of its limits, as
well as to the dangers to which it is exposed. . . .”
Basing himself on the teaching of Vatican II in Dei Verbum, Whitehead stated
that in order to serve the Church, biblical exegetes must forge their scholarly
judgments in accordance with three criteria which are: i) the unity of the whole
of Scripture, ii) the Tradition of the Church, and iii) the analogy of faith.
To interpret the Scriptures according to “the analogy of faith,” said Whitehead,
means “that the exegete cannot interpret texts in a way that contradicts either
established doctrines of the faith or interpretations of other passages of
Scripture accepted by the Church.”
After paying tribute to the many Catholic scholars who are working within the
Vatican II guidelines for the interpretation of the Bible, Whitehead pointed out
that there were also many who were not. As an example of this kind of divergent
scholarship, Whitehead cited a book on the historical Jesus written by Father
John Meier of the Catholic University of America entitled A Marginal Jew.
In his introduction to A Marginal Jew, Meier stated that in writing it he
intended to “prescind from what Christian faith or later Church teaching says
about Jesus, without either affirming or denying such claims.” The
contradictions into which such a methodology can lead the Catholic exegete is
inadvertently made clear by Fr. Meier when he says that from a philological and
historical point of view, “the most probable opinion is that the brothers and
sisters of Jesus” mentioned in Matthew 12:46, Mark 3:3 and Lk 8:19 “were his
siblings.” Since the Church in her teaching affirms the perpetual virginity of
Mary, then the method of biblical interpretation being followed by Fr. Meier
falls outside the methodological parameters for biblical interpretation laid
down by Vatican II.
In an illuminating lecture entitled The Wayward Turn in Biblical Theory, Msgr.
George A. Kelly, author of over 30 books including The New Biblical Theorists
(1983) which is about to be republished by Ignatius Press, stated that “biblical
theory is no substitute for Catholic teaching.”
Msgr. Kelly revealed that his involvement with biblical theory began in 1970
when Cardinal Cook mailed to every priest in the Archdiocese of New York a copy
of Raymond Brown’s book Priest and Bishop. Msgr. Kelly said that he was not
halfway through the book when he discovered that Brown “could not prove — that
Christ instituted the ministerial priesthood or episcopacy as such, that Christ
established the Eucharist as a sacrifice or that those who presided at the
Eucharist were really priests, that a separate priesthood began with Christ or
that presbyter bishops were in any way traceable to the apostles, or that Peter
in his life-time would be looked upon as the Bishop of Rome or that the Bishops
were the successors of the Apostles — even though Vatican II had restated that
very claim.”
Msgr, Kelly said that Fr. Brown asserted “that all his statements had to be
nuanced but they were often presented to future priests and seminarians as true
and there was no one around then like Cardinal Ratzinger to tell us what he told
the world later: that you can’t read scripture outside the Church.” Msgr. Kelly
revealed further that the only Church authority in the U.S. who publicly
challenged Fr. Brown over his book Priest and Bishop was Cardinal Shehan of
Baltimore. Coupled with this, Msgr. Kelly told of how Fr. Dennis McCarthy, S.J.
— who taught Scripture at the Biblicum in Rome — stated before a gathering of
the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars in the U.S. that Fr. Brown operated out of a
“squirrel cage” where he ran around and around in circles and always ended up at
one station, namely doubt.
Citing Brown’s treatment of the virginal conception of Jesus as an example of
his deadly methodology, Msgr. Kelly said that he starts by acknowledging the
virginal conception as an infallibly defined doctrine, then points to the fact
that it is under attack from some Protestants and some Catholics, in light of
which he perceives a need to re-examine the received teaching. Concluding that
the “scientifically controlled evidence” in the Bible leaves Mary’s virginity an
unsolved problem, Brown, said Msgr. Kelly, concludes his “re-examination” of the
question by raising a doubt as to whether or not the doctrine regarding Mary’s
virginal conception has in fact been infallibly taught by the Church.
Continuing with this theme of Catholic scholars who have forsaken the Church’s
norms for the interpretation of Sacred Scripture, Msgr. Michael Wrenn remarked
at the New York seminar how grieved he was when he read recently a book written
by Father Marie Emile Boismard, of the famous Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem,
titled At The Dawn of Christianity, Before the Birth of Dogmas. In his remarks
on this book, Msgr. Wrenn said:
Employing a historical-critical approach with kudos to the late Fr. Raymond
Brown and accepting the priority of the Gospel of Mark and the existence of “Q,”
Moismard attempts to eviscerate accepted scriptural justifications for the
Virgin Birth, the Divinity of Christ, the Blessed Trinity, and the Eucharist. He
even puts a novel twist on the doctrine of atonement and justification.
Moreover, he believes that eternal damnation really means annihilation for the
unrepentant and that the concept of the Logos is the result of the influence of
Philo of Alexandria.
To move now towards a conclusion to this article. The Jesus Seminar, and its
fellow travelers amongst Catholic scholars, has the potential to wreak havoc in
Catholic circles where “new winds of doctrine” are forever the flavor of the
month. Soon, the Jesus Seminar will be publishing the “final and approved”
version of “Q.” Scholars belonging to the Jesus Seminar want copies of “Q” to be
placed in all libraries alongside the Bible. Indeed, they are pushing for
versions of the Bible to include “Q.”
The place given in “Q” in Biblical studies as a source of Jesus’ sayings has led
to the acceptance by a growing number of scholars of the value to Christian
faith of the gnostic Gospel of Thomas which was discovered in 1945 and which
dates from sometime in the late-second to fourth century.
The heterodox ideas of rationalistic minded biblical scholars have now moved
from the ivory towers of academia into the classrooms of Catholic junior high
schools in Australia. For example, a new set of religious education texts
entitled Out of the Desert which are intended for use in Years 7-9 (12-15 year
olds) in Catholic high schools has recently appeared in Australia. While
claiming to be based on the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the “spirit of
Vatican II,” these Out Of The Desert texts actually contradict the dogmatic
teaching of the Church in areas such as: death as a consequence of sin, the
foundation of the Church by the will of Christ, the hierarchical structure of
the Church, and the inerrancy of Sacred Scripture.
Book Three of Out of the Desert series contains the following student activity:
1. Find out the meaning of “canon” when used in speaking about the
Scriptures.
2. Research the structure, authorship, contents and literary style of
the Gospel of Thomas. Why was it not included in the canon of the Christian
Scriptures?
3. Using a Sunday missal or lectionary, find out which gospels form the
basis of the Sunday readings in the liturgical years A, B and C?2
The only source reference given to the students in the Out of the Desert text to
facilitate their research on the Gospel of Thomas is the following Internet
site: www.neoism.org/squares/thomas/_index.html. When we go to this website on
the Internet, we find that its main focus is a presentation of the “Gospel of
Thomas” in its two forms: one a translation from the (full) Coptic text, the
other a translation of the (partial) Greek text. Verse-by-verse comparisons are
offered.
The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of 114 verses (in the Coptic version) of
which most begin: “Jesus said . . . .” Prior to verse 1, it states: “These are
the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas
wrote down.” They are alleged sayings of Jesus, and are presented as the
transmission of secret knowledge which requires correct interpretation,
presumably by initiates. For example, verse 1 states: “And he said, ‘Whoever
finds the interpretation of these sayings will not experience death.’”
The invitation in Out of the Desert to 14-15 year-old students to enrich their
Catholic education by visiting the website www.neoism.org/squares/thomas/_index.html,
if accepted by the diligent, would yield further invitations via the website’s
own links. The unsuspecting children may click onto the Gnosis Archive, where
they are asked to “Take a moment to reflect on a brief meditation and readings
from the Gnostic scriptures, selected from this week’s Gnostic liturgy.”
Next, these students browsing this Gnostic website could, through its links,
visit pages dedicated to luminaries such as Heidegger, existentialist devotee of
Nazism; the nihilist philosopher Nietzsche so admired by Hitler, or rampant
homosexual author Proust. At Kafka’s page, they are invited to experience a
spiritual renewal through his exuberantly hope-filled influence. Students with
proficiency in the French language can visit a page dedicated to the noted
sodomite, pervert and pornographer, the Marquis de Sade. As for those interested
in comparative religion, Rosicrucian Fellowship and Masonic links are provided,
as are Kabala links, “Festival of Plagiarism” and the site “Hyper Weirdness by
WWW.”
The invitation into this website associated with their assignment to explore the
gnostic Gospel of Thomas, runs the risk of producing for some of these 14-15
year old students an excursion into the Gnostic world of secret “knowledge,”
witchcraft, fringe religion, bizarre philosophies and perversions. Their
parents, I am sure, would not approve of such exposure, even if some Catholic
educators recommend it.
Sadly to say, of the three authors who wrote Book Three of Out Of The Desert in
which this assignment on the Gospel of Thomas is given, one is the Head of the
Religious Education Department at one of the Catholic Education Offices in
Sydney, while another is a consultant on Religious Education at the same office.
The stakes are indeed high! The hour is late!
Eamonn Keane is a professor of religious education at a Catholic
high school in Sydney, Australia.
Notes
1 R.E. Brown, The Birth of the Messiah (New York: Doubleday, 1977), p. 527
(emphasis in original).
2 Janet Morrissey, Peter Mudge, Greg Wilson, Out of the Desert, Book Three
(Melbourne: Longman, 1998), p. 64.