The End for the End-Times?
The End for the End-Times?
I will not treat the Jesus Seminar in detail here, since its target audience has been the general public (especially through popular media); the scholarly guild advances ideas in different ways. But the Jesus Seminar does help introduce one of the issues on the table in this chapter. The Jesus Seminar claims to be representative of mainstream Gospels scholarship particularly in its skepticism concerning Jesus’ eschatology — a claim that many other scholars reject.20
Johnson complains about a particular scholar’s claim that most scholars today regard Jesus as noneschatological, pointing out that this supposed majority scholarly opinion is simply based on 59% of the Jesus Seminar, “a self-selected group of like-minded scholars (at most, seventy out of the 6,900 members of the Society of Biblical Literature).”21 Indeed, a member of the Seminar helps explain how the Seminar’s own perspective became so emphatically noneschatological: “When the cynic school prevailed, for example, in the voting at the Jesus Seminar, the apocalyptists quit coming; this further skewed the vote.”22
Many scholars argue that, while scholarship after Schweitzer for a time abandoned Jesus the comfortable, noneschatological sage, the pre-Schweitzer position has made its comeback in circles like the Jesus Seminar.23 The resulting experience of déjà vu has prompted one critic to remark, “There is something disturbingly familiar about a mildly reforming, sagacious teacher, who . . . does not use language and imagery that promises the reversal of the rulers of the world.”24 As John Meier, one of the most textually thorough scholars in Jesus research,25 complains:
A tweady poetaster who spent his time spinning out parables and Japanese koans, a literary aesthete who toyed with 1st-century deconstructionism, or a bland Jesus who simply told people to look at the lilies of the field — such a Jesus would threaten no one, just as the university professors who create him threaten no one.26
The Seminar’s critics suggest that its view fails to explain how its harmless, noneschatological sage, like that of the nineteenth-century lives of Jesus, would get himself crucified.27 E. P. Sanders complains that those uncomfortable with an eschatological Jesus who fit his milieu, followed John and left an eschatological church must instead resort to claiming “that everybody misunderstood Jesus completely.” This is, he opines, a position based on wishful thinking without evidence.28