Reinventing (the) Jesus (Seminar)
I am a huge fan of April DeConick's work on The Gospel of Thomas and benefitted from it extensively in the writing of my own thesis on Thomas--available in a forthcoming volume from Kregel! :)--and her blog is fantastic as well. But surely I'm not the only person who noticed that her recent (well-received) critiques of the Jesus Seminar were made just as forcefully two years ago in Komoszewski's, Sawyer's, and Wallace's Reinventing Jesus. To be fair, I don't doubt there were plenty of others before them who made similar critiques as well, but still, seems a bit odd to me.
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Her ultimate conclusion was a bit different than the one Dan, Tim, and Ed reached though.
Vinny! Good to see you again. I wonder if you wouldn't mind elaborating on how?
I haven't read Reinventing Jesus, but based on my other encounters with its authors, I am guessing that they come down on the side of reading the Gospels as more or less historical accounts.
On the other hand, it sounds to me like DeConick believes that the Jesus Seminar sees too much historical data in the Gospels.
i would disagree with your interpretation of deconick's perspective. from her other work, as well as from her posts on TJS, it seems she reads the gospels as supremely historical documents. the difference between how she would take those documents versus how the RJ authors would take them, however, is that deconick probably views the gospels more as pointing to the histories of the communities that produced them rather than as histories of christ. all of them would agree, though, that something like TJS reflects more upon its members and methodology than upon the person of jesus christ.
Yes, I can see that. However, I think you would find a lot of scholars on the skeptical side of the aisle like Carrier and Ehrman who might agree with that criticism of the Jesus Seminar.
Well, first of all, I think it's important to recognize that there's very little sense in which Carrier and Ehrman would be on the "same side" of the TJS debate. Carrier is a myther, while Ehrman has given no indication that he doesn't actually think Jesus existed. But I agree that there are plenty of people all over the liberal-conservative spectrum that would have problems with TJS or the various quests for the historical Jesus.
Carrier wasn’t a myther last time I checked, although I think that he has a decent amount of sympathy with some of their arguments. I think he would agree with the notion of reading the gospels for historical information about the communities in which they existed rather than for historical information about Jesus. Somehow that also sounds rather Ehrman-like to me.
I think Ehrman and Carrier and Wallace could all agree on many of the problems with TJS methodology while disagreeing mightily on what a better methodology might be.
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