Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship.

In an earlier column I wrote appreciatively of Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. This new volume from the pen of a distinguished American scholar is basically a collection of essays which he wrote over the past decade or so. If there is a unifying theme, it is an apologia for the renewed interest in, and the labors of, those scholars who search through the sedimentary levels of the New Testament for the "historical" Jesus.

Borg claims that this search (the third in this century) is new in that it is not driven by theological concerns; that it brings new disciplines (cultural anthropology, the social sciences, literary theory) to bear on the Gospels. The essays in this book sketch out some of the more recent reconstructions of the life and significance of Jesus, the new insights we get about Jesus as a result of these reconstructions, the work of the "Jesus Seminar" (those scholars who attempted a consensus, based on a vote, about which of the logia of Jesus are authentic), and the place of such work in the life of the church.

The results of such research, of course, made it to the front pages and at least one of the leading scholars in this enterprise (John Dominic Crossan) produced a best-selling book. However, a careful reading of Borg reveals how precarious is the foundation used to arrive at conclusions. Indeed, as Borg notes, the major players have themselves formed no united consensus. E. P. Sanders argues for a profoundly Jewish picture of Jesus while Burton Mack minimizes his Jewishness in order to present a model of the "Cynicsage." For Borg himself, Jesus becomes a "Jewish mystic" while for Richard Horsley he is a political/social revolutionary.

As one who, in company with theologians like David Tracy, tends to emphasize the postresurrection Jesus proclaimed as Christ, I read these other authors with more detached interest than firm conviction. Of the lot, Borg is one of my favorites since he still remembers that Jesus has something to do with the Christian church (in this he is similar to Elizabeth Schussler-Fiorenza) and because he provides us with interesting and "strange" (in the nonpejorative sense of the term) approaches to Jesus, especially within the context of the trajectory of Wisdom.

In sum: Borg's inexpensive (but somewhat repetitive) collection of essays repays reading, both to get a sense of the status questionis of recent Jesus studies and for the leads he provides in his notes for further study. My bias is somewhat against this school of scholarship but, at the same time, I never fail to learn good things from it. For that reason, I am grateful to Borg and recommend his work.