The Jesus Seminar.

Every once in a while someone informs me a particular Jesus-saying in the gospels wasn’t actually said by Jesus. It’s extremely rare; it’s only happened to me thrice.

“No it was said by Jesus,” I’ll tell them. “Best we can tell, it’s been part of Christian tradition since the first century. it’s not a textual variant.”

“No it’s not,” they’ll respond, “because the Jesus Seminar says it’s not.”

First time I heard this, I laughed. A lot. “Who put them in charge of deciding what’s bible and what’s not?” As far as I knew, the Jesus Seminar people were just a bunch of crackpots.

Eventually I looked into this Jesus Seminar stuff and discovered… well crackpot isn’t the kindest way of putting it, but there’s an awful lot of cracked pottery involved in their setup. Lemme back up a bunch and explain what I mean.

The Jesus Seminar was the brainchild of liberal theologian Dr. Robert W. Funk (1926–2005), who created it to publicize his recently-founded Westar Institute, a nonprofit which promoted biblical studies from a liberal theological viewpoint. And before I keep flinging that term around, I’d better define it: Liberal theology presumes the theologian—not the Holy Spirit, scripture, and orthodox Christian tradition—is the authority when it comes to forming one’s beliefs about God. They decide what’s true and what’s not.

Based on what? Well, the conservative theologian will point to other authorities, like the Spirit, scripture, and tradition. Depending on the integrity of the theologian, they might not quote or interpret these authorities properly… but they do recognize it’s important to point to other authorities, and say, “They say so; it’s not just me.” Whereas liberal theologians don’t care if they’re the only ones saying so. They might point to the Spirit, scripture, and tradition, but they figure what ultimately decides whether something’s true or false about God, is them. And their commonsense, assuming they have any.

Hence liberal theologians don't do orthodoxy, don't recognize bible as authoritative, and frequently don't believe God intervenes in human history anyway. You might notice many of ’em go out of their way to reject orthodox and biblical ideas, just to show off how independent, novel, and radical they are. Plus it's great publicity. You’re not gonna gain notoriety for saying, “By golly, it looks like Jesus was born in Bethlehem of a virgin!”—unless you’re already well-known for denying every other creedal belief.

Funk was one of those guys. In 1985, he invited 50 academics and 100 laymen to join him at the new Westar campus in Santa Rosa, California, and participate in a seminar in which they’d vote on the legitimacy of 1,500 individual Jesus sayings, found in the gospels, the rest of the New Testament, and the Gospel of Thomas. Are they authentic Jesus, or hokum? Each participant voted by dropping a bead in a box:

• RED (3 points) meant it’s definitely Jesus.
• PINK (2 points) meant it’s likely Jesus—they were pretty sure he said something just like that.
• GRAY (1 point) meant Jesus didn’t say those exact words, but it’s consistent with his thinking.
• BLACK (0 points) meant it’s not Jesus at all.

The academics were largely legitimate biblical scholars, regardless of their liberal views. The laymen were… well, laymen. Not scholars. Churchgoers, and not. Filmmaker Paul Verhoeven, who’d just directed his first American movie—hadn’t even made RoboCop and Total Recall yet—was one of ’em. He’s a Historical Jesus fan; he published a book about Jesus in 2008, and has wanted to make a Jesus movie in which he’s a radical political activist. Again, not a scholar. And y’notice the laymen outnumbered—and could easily outvote—the scholars.

What criteria did these people use for determining whether something truly came from Jesus or not? Well, having it in all the gospels certainly helped. They were also looking for certain traits: It had to be memorable; they figured Jesus would say catchy stuff, like “Don’t throw pearls to pigs.” They liked irony, so if Jesus’s teachings sounded ironic to them (“The last will be first, and the first last”) they figured he’d say that. They liked the idea of trusting God, so if Jesus talked about that (“Have faith in God”) they figured that was legit.

What they didn’t consider legit, were End Times stuff, miracle stories, stuff about the church (’cause they didn’t believe Jesus intended to start any church), anything where Jesus talks about himself (“I am the way, the truth, and the life”). Plus if something is found in one gospel but not the others, they presumed the author of that gospel was pushing his agenda, not Jesus’s.

The end result? They published a new translation of the gospels, color-coded to how they voted. Black meant most voted black; red meant most voted red. Thus you wind up with a Lord’s Prayer which looks like so:

Matthew 6.9-13 Jesus Seminar version

9“Instead, you should pray like this: Our Father in the heavens, your name be revered. 10Impose your imperial rule, enact your will on earth as you have in heaven. 11Provide us with the bread we need for today. 12Forgive our debts to the extent that we have forgiven those in debt to us. 13And please don't subject us to test after test, but rescue us from the evil one.”

So the only thing they deem Jesus definitely said was “Our Father,” and he definitely didn’t say “in heaven,” nor “Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven,” nor “Deliver us from evil.” And only mighta said the rest.

In this way, with this criteria, 82 percent of Jesus’s teachings got nullified. Don’t have to follow them anymore! Of course if he’s not really divine, and doesn’t wholly speak for God, you never had to follow him anyway. So this isn’t really about growing closer to Jesus, nor learning to follow him better; this is just a fun intellectual exercise.

Thanksgiving. The prayer, not the day.

In the United States, on November’s fourth Thursday, we celebrate a national day of thanksgiving. Today I’m not talking about the day itself though. I’m talking about the act.

Americans don’t always remember there’s such a thing as an act of thanksgiving. Our fixation is usually on the food, football, maybe the parade, maybe the dog show. If you’re pagan, you seldom even think to thank God… or anyone. Instead you conjure up some feeling of gratitude. You have a nice life, a decent job, good health, some loved ones, and got some stuff you’ve always wanted. Or you don’t have these things, but you’re grateful for the few things you do have. Or you’re not grateful at all, and bitter… and in a few minutes, drunk.

But this feeling of gratitude isn’t directed anywhere. Shouldn’t you be grateful to someone or something? Shouldn’t there be some being to thank?

And that’s a question many a pagan never asks themselves. I know of one family who thanks one other. Civic idolaters might be grateful to America or the president, as if they consciously gave ’em anythng. Those who love their jobs might be grateful to their bosses and customers. But pagans generally suppress the question by drowning it with food and drink. Maybe thanking the person who prepared the food—but just as often, not.

Even among the Christians who remember, “Oh yeah—we’re thanking God,” a lot of the thanking is limited to saying grace before the meal: “Good bread, good meat, good God let’s eat.” Although every once in a while somebody in the family might say, “And now let’s go round the table, and everybody say one thing you’re thankful for.” A game nobody enjoys but them… although I myself have come up with a lot of outrageous answers to that question, which amuse me at least.

But enough about Thanksgiving Day and its not-so-religious customs and behavior. The practice of thanksgiving isn’t limited to just this one day. If you wanna practice more actual, authentic thanksgiving in your relationship with God, great! I’m all for that. So’s God. But it means way more than thanking God only once a year, on the government-approved day set aside for it.

Answering questions. Or not.

Years ago a friend—let’s call him Matty—led the college-age small group at his church. (Not my church; not my denomination either. They’re Christian though. I knew Matty from school.) They’d meet and chat, he’d give them some bible lesson, they’d pray, and at the end he liked to play Bible Answer Man for a bit—he took questions.

Most questions were easy, with nice short answers. But sometimes they needed a more detailed answer, so Matty would put a pin in it, and make it the subject of next week’s lesson, where he could spend a half hour or longer on it. Which, he admitted, he appreciated; sometimes he didn’t know what he was gonna talk about next week, but “God provided.” (Well, when his topics weren’t all that profitable, I’m not so sure it’s God who provided. But whatever.)

So… one week the question had to do with women in ministry. The scriptures have no problem with it, and therefore neither does Matty, so the next week he made a thorough biblical argument in favor of it. Thing is, his church is sexist, so you can already see where this was headed: Someone at the small group who disagreed with him, tattled on him. In their denomination the board, not the pastor, runs the church; and the board decided Matty ought not teach the college-agers any longer. So he didn’t.

Here’s the thing: The young’uns still had questions, and since Matty was the answer man, they’d bring them to him, class or no class. Pastor got wind of this, called Matty in for another meeting, and told him, “You gotta shut that down.” Shut what down? These kids and their questions. If they have questions, they’re to take it to one of the pastors. Not Matty. They didn’t trust Matty.

I’ll be honest: This’d be the point where I left this church. But Matty had a lot of years invested in this church, so, y’know, sunk cost fallacy. He felt he oughta be a team player, so he agreed. Whenever the college-agers had questions, he now said, “Oh, you should ask Pastor.” So they did. Then they started leaving the church.

Matty ran into one of those young people after she’d left their church, asked her what’s up, and got the whole story: Seems when Pastor got a question he didn’t like, his response was, “You ought not ask such questions.” The frustrated young people recognized a red flag when they saw one, and soon left that church. Some of ’em sought and found a church where pastors do answer questions. But more of ’em simply presumed Christianity didn’t have answers, and quit church altogether. (And I find if you grew up in one of those Fundamentalist churches which loudly declares or implies every other church is misled, too liberal, too heretic, or otherwise dangerously wrong, you’re likely to despair: “There are no other churches I can go to,” and likewise quit church altogether.)

There’s more to this story, but I wanna stop here to say this is the point of this article: When churches don’t or won’t answer questions, they’re gonna lose the people who have those questions. And rightly so. I’ll be blunt: If you aren’t allowed to ask questions in church, it’s a cult. You should leave.

Good behavior is part of our ready defense.

1 Peter 3.15-18.

As I said in my previous piece on 1 Peter 3.15, Christian apologists love this verse because they figure it justifies everything they do to “defend” Christianity by arguing in its favor. Nevermind the fact argumentativeness is a work of the flesh; they’re doing it for Jesus, so that makes it righteous.

But when we keep reading 1 Peter 3, you’ll notice it’s not to be done argumentatively. We’re to keep things civil. Respectful. Gentle—with our emotions in check, because it’s a proper fruit of the Spirit, and actually righteous.

We’re not to resort to the misbehavior of fleshly Christians and pagans, who care far more about winning than behaving themselves and being truthful. They’re gonna violate their consciences, ’cause they’re willing to do what they know is the wrong thing—manipulate and cherry-pick data, try to get one’s emotions to override facts, insist their opponents listen to them instead of listening to the Spirit. Roman rhetoricians did all that stuff when they debated, because they sought to win no matter what. But it does matter how we defend ourselves. Still gotta avoid fraud, untruth, anger, and sin.

And if we’ve done that, our opponents can’t point to our misbehavior and use it to justify dismissing us. See?—goodness has its advantages. As Simon Peter pointed out.

1 Peter 3.15-18 KWL

15Sanctify Christ the Lord in your² minds,

always ready with a defense

for everyone who asks you² for a word

about the hope in you.

16But do it with gentleness and respect,

having a good conscience,

so when you’re² spoken about,

those who verbally abuse your² good lifestyle

might be disgraced.

17For, God willing, doing good is better

than to suffer for evildoing,

18because Christ Jesus once also suffered for sins—

the just for the unjust—

so that he could bring us to God,

putting us to death in the flesh

and making us alive in the Spirit.

Finite amounts of faith.

Christians regularly talk about putting our faith in God. But we don’t always get the definition of “faith” correct. Sometimes we think of faith as a substance—same as we sometimes think of grace. We think of it as a supernatural object God has to grant us. Because Jesus’s apostles asked him about increasing their faith, Lk 17.5 they got the idea it’s a spiritual material we have in us… and there’s only a certain amount we can hold. Like the battery in your phone; like the gasoline tank in your car. Sometimes the “faith tank” is full; sometimes it’s low.

But precisely like grace, faith is not an object. It’s an attitude. It’s our trust in God. And either we have it or we don’t.

The supposed amount of faith we have, isn’t really an amount. It’s whether we have faith in God in a given situation. I’ve known Christians who absolutely believe God can cure illnesses; they’ve seen it happen! But when it comes to whether God will cure them personally, they’re not so sure.

I know how they feel. I knew, hypothetically, God can cure the sick, ’cause Jesus does it all over the gospels. Didn’t really trust him to cure me… until one day, when I was seriously nauseous and finally, finally prayed, “God, could you please just take this away?” and he immediately did. I was fine. Hadn’t happened before; haven’t been in a situation where it happened again; but at the time I think God wanted me to experience for myself how he can do that, so he did that.

It didn’t increase my faith level; it meant I didn’t really have faith before, but I definitely have it now. My attitude changed. Because again, faith is an attitude.

Christians who try to discourage you away from bible apps.

When I bought my first Macintosh, I also bought bible software. I’ve written a little about it elsewhere. I switched software a few times, finally settled on Accordance, spent a lot of money on modules, and now exclusively use it for bible study. I’ve got it on my phone too; I read it instead of my tiny bibles.

My print bibles? Getting dusty.

And I’ve met certain Christians whom this bugs to no end.

Most are bibliolaters, who worship the Holy Bible instead of the Holy Spirit. They may not be aware that somewhere, baked into the moldy filling of their over-elevation of the scriptures, they grew to also revere the printed word. To them, digital books aren’t real books… even though they absolutely are. They’re pretty snobbish about it.

It’s not the medium which makes a book. A book can exist in a stone tablet, a papyrus scroll, a parchment codex, an eight-ring binder, a strip of microfilm, a 30-pack of audio cassettes, a 12-pack of audio CDs, a floppy disk or CD-ROM or thumb drive, the solid-state hard drive of your iPhone or Kindle, or the solid-state hard drive of some internet-accessible server somewhere (which people like to call “the cloud,” but yeah, it’s physically somewhere).

Me, I prefer the hard drive. I don’t always have a wifi signal, so the cloud’s definitely my second choice.

So during Sunday morning services, when these bibliolaters wave their big black pleather-clad KJV study bibles at the listeners and say, “Got your bibles?” what they want to see is a room full of big black pleather-clad KJV print bibles waving back at them, like foam fingers at a baseball game. When they see phones instead… well, a little bit of them dies inside, and not the idolatrous part which needs to die.

Because to them, these aren’t bibles. They’re just phones. And they’re pretty sure you don’t read bible on ’em.

And they’re also pretty sure you don’t actually have a bible on them. In that, they’d usually be correct. I’ve met many a Christian who has no dedicated bible app; they go to Bible Gateway. And when they do have a bible app, most of those apps don’t actually install any text on your phone, which you can still read even when you’re offline. All their bible translations are on a server, not your phone. They’re entirely dependent on internet.

I don’t really see that as a problem, but bibliolaters certainly do: They worry that at some point in the future, probably during the End Times, the Beast’s government is gonna ban bibles, and if you don’t have a print copy you’re boned. Me, I suspect most Beast-like autocrats are gonna be just fine with bible. Will even pretend they love the bible, and hold it up for photo opportunities, and even claim their favorite verse is somewhere in “two Corinthians”—because they know perfectly well Christians don’t follow it, which is how they got elected in the first place. But that’s a whole other tangent. Back to bible apps!

Is it fair to say people don’t read bible on their phones? Well, kinda. Which is just as true for bibles in print.

Church shopping. ’Cause sometimes you need a new church.

CHURCH SHOP 'tʃərtʃ ʃɑp verb. Look for the best available church to attend or join.

[Church shopper 'tʃərtʃ 'ʃɑp.pər noun, church shopping 'tʃərtʃ 'ʃɑp.pɪŋ noun]

If you haven’t been going to church lately, or you never did go to church, and you seriously want your relationship with Christ Jesus to grow, it’s time to start. There are lots of other good reasons, which I spell out in my article, “Go to church!” but the main reason is because you need a Christian support system, and church—a good church, anyway—is that.

If most of the reason you don’t go, is because the church you think of as “yours” is not a good church, it’s time to start shopping for a new one. Yes, I use the word shopping. I didn’t come up with the American term “church shopping,” but I still use it, ’cause church shoppers kinda are shopping. When you shop for clothes, you wanna make sure they fit. You try them on. Churches likewise.

Other times, you have to shop for a new church. Happened to me when my last church shut down: I had to go to another. I didn’t shop long; I went to the same church almost everybody else in my old church moved to, realized it was a good fit, and stayed. Took me longer to find that previous church; I had moved to town and was looking at other churches for a few months.

Church shopping isn’t complicated. You visit a new church and try it on for size. If you like it, stick around. If not, try another.

It only gets complicated because certain Christians are extremely choosy about their churches. They insist it should have just the right faith statement. Just the right type of sermon and preacher. Just the right type of music and singers. Just the right type of people—friendly and loving and inclusive, to the right level; you don’t want ’em to be pushy. (Although there are some folks who don’t wanna be befriended, loved, and included; somebody hurt them, and they need therapy.)

Which leads me to talk about bad reasons people might be choosy about their churches. They don’t like the decor. Or there are certain misbehaviors they wanna get away with, and they’re hoping this church will give them a free pass. Or they wanna go to the “cool” church, however they define coolness… which means they look down on their current church, and likely not for the right reasons.

But for most Christians it’s fairly easy. There’s a church in town they’ve either visited, and wouldn’t mind visiting again. Or a church they’ve never tried, but they’re curious about it, and would like to visit. They go, they like it, they stay. Easy.

For others, church-shopping is an ordeal. They visit a church for a few months: They get involved, get to know the people. Even try to join, minister, or try to get into church leadership right away. And then… they discover the dealbreakers, the things they simply cannot abide in their church, and realize they can’t join this church, and leave. And they’re just heartbroken. They’ve been church-shopping for so long. Sometimes years! Just about every church in town—heck, the county—has met these folks: “Yeah, they went here for five months. So they’re at your church now? Well I’m glad they’re somewhere. I always wondered.”

I gotta tell you, though: If you’ve been through 25 different churches in the area and can’t stay in a single one, it’s not the churches which are the problem. It’s you.