The Meaning of Jesus (How do we know about Jesus?)

Borg: Seeing Jesus: Sources, Lenses and Method (Chapter 1)

Wright: Knowing Jesus: Faith and History (Chapter 2)

Borg & Wright begin the book in their own individual ways but by addressing the same question: What does the educated Christian do with the knowledge that we have gained about the Bible in the last half-century. I, like them, grew up believing that the Bible was the Word of God and essentially inerrant. Any conflicts between the gospels were explained away by the blind men touching an elephant story. It was only later in life that I realized that David did not write the Psalms and that Moses did not write the Torah. It was later still that I was to discover just how much of the gospels were created by the Church, years after the death of Jesus, in order to promote a particular theology that the church had developed. This new knowledge has not been easy to fit into my old faith.

Both authors also discuss the challenge to religiont that our current world-view to religion poses. They describe this world view as one that treats the world that we can see as “real” and the world that we cannot see as “unreal.” For the Greeks and most of humanity for thousands of years, heaven was Real, with a capital R, and the earth was an emanation or unreal. Jean can talk about Aristotle’s cave in which the things that we see are merely reflections on the wall from the light that is shining from the Real World outside the cave. I tried, in my talk on modern science, to point out that modern atomic science has shown that what we can see and touch is really, truly “unreal” and that reality, which consists of atoms, is the true reality. But, until we all absorb that into our own world views, we will all continue to treat God as unreal and the trash bin, which we can kick, as reality.

Borg responds to these challenges by distinguishing between Jesus the man and Jesus the Christ, the human and the cosmic. Borg doesn’t particularly care whether the wedding at Cana really happened; he does care greatly about his relationship in the present to God through Christ. Borg makes the good point that by focusing on Jesus the man, “he” disappears from history until he returns whereas by focusing on Christ, that is the risen Jesus, the after-Easter Jesus, we are reminded that he is here and now with us.

Wright is a little harder for me to read but as I understand him he is averse to separating Jesus the man from Jesus the Christ. He sees the one as the Jesus of history and the other as the Jesus of faith. He argues that if we are to proceed we must keep history and faith going hand-in-hand. In the chapters that follow, we will see Wright saying that the historical Jesus can only be understood through the lens of faith and that faith becomes empty if we disconnect it from history.

Since these first chapters are largely academic, they will be potentially difficult to discuss. I suggest – but I  am more than open to persuasion – that we might usefully begin by introducing the book and its authors and by outlining the challenge that they are addressing: modernism and modern biblical scholarship. We might then ask the class where they are on their faith journey when it comes to the Bible. I suspect that many will be where I am – and where our two authors find themselves – not nearly as certain today about whether David slew Goliath as they were when they were younger. The book promises a wonderful voyage through the two faith stories of two remarkable men.