The real Jesus is here (already)

When scholars appoint themselves the ultimate authorities on what Jesus really did say and do (contrary to the alleged propagandistic dogmas of the churches), when liberal clergy offhandedly write off the miracle of the virgin birth, and when a bigoted pastor threatens to light up a bonfire to desecrate a religious text, a cry of protest builds up inside of me.

I have just about had it with the closed minds of academia who have built their careers on attempting to dismantle what they perceive to be an illegitimate, illusory Jesus: the Jesus, they assert, that has been made into a divine, messianic figure by his followers. Something, of course, that was never intended to happen. So, in accordance with their self-styled, self-invented programme, their quest for the true, historic Jesus, they more or less declare as myth anything that conflicts with their apparently naturalistic outlooks. Which more or less means that what they end up with, is a deluded revolutionary of first century Palestine, or a mere mortal gropingly looking for truth, an ideal moral figure with no intention of being a leader of people, and certainly not of being worshipped by his followers.


Funnily enough, the people behind e.g. the Jesus Seminary, present the results of their quest with a prancing conviction that seems to equal that of some of the faith movement preachers. Jesus, the seminarists say, certainly did not put forward claims regarding himself to the effect that he was anything beyond a human being. Thus, in JS (Jesus Seminary)-speek: the sayings recorded in the New Testament were much later additions, and the number of genuine utterances made by their real Jesus are despairingly few.


So they had better continue, then, in their futile search for the historic Jesus. I say futile, because how can anyone, 2000 years removed from the Nazarene in time and space, possibly hope to discover any new, reliable information on Jesus? Are they hoping for some obscure, hitherto undisclosed document to be produced - in the form of, say, another collection of sayings purportedly older than even the gospels, which, by the way, are commonly held to have been written well before the setting of the first century?


I would like to make a proposition here, namely, that there are no really compelling  reasons why we should not take the gospel accounts at face value. The accounts by Mark, Matthew, Luke and John were written by serious, conscientious, informed people with free access to hundreds of eyewitnesses to the events that had transpired before their eyes, in public and not behind closed doors. They did not include supernatural elements merely to shore up their less-than-watertight accounts, or to embellish the truth. They wrote down  what they had meticulously weighed and scrutinized, but because of the sheer magntiude of the body of eyewitness stories, much of it had to be left out.


To be continued.