First Glance

Jesus never uttered 82 percent of the sayings attributed to him in the Bible. Or so claims the Jesus Seminar, a group of New Testament scholars who have spent the past ten years rating the authenticity of his words. Only by looking to the remaining 18 percent, it appears, can we draw an accurate picture of the historical Jesus. Other Bible scholars, equally interested in determining who Jesus was, have sifted through the same texts searching for evidence that Jesus was a peasant, a priest, a Cynic, a pacifist or a magician. But by treating the New Testament as a grab-bag from which they can pick and choose at whim, these scholars have abandoned what should be their best source: The distinctive image of Jesus painted by the Gospels as a whole, writes Luke T. Johnson in the “The Search for (the Wrong) Jesus.”

A former Benedictine monk and priest, Johnson is the Robert W. Woodruff Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins at the Candler School of Theology, at Emory University, in Atlanta. His attack on the Jesus Seminar continues in The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest of the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels (HarperSan Francisco, 1995).