Bone Crushingly Stupid

from Stand Firm by David Fischler 

It will no doubt come as a surprise to some of you to hear that the Jesus Seminar—the commune of academic atheists dressed up as biblical scholars—is still around. According to Jeff Walton of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, two JS hippies recently held an event here in America’s largest open air insane asylum, contending that unlike a pair of modern Ph.Ds, Jesus was a rube:

Early Christianity was an oral culture launched by an illiterate Jesus Christ, according to two liberal New Testament scholars who spoke recently at a Jesus Seminar event in Washington, D.C.
The claim was one of several bold assertions made during a recent March workshop in which the prevalence of Evangelical Christianity was bemoaned and scripture was “reimagined” from a feminist perspective. The Salem, Oregon-based Jesus Seminar dismisses scripture’s historicity and draws from sources outside of the Biblical canon in order to produce what they claim to be a more authentic view of Jesus than the church teaches.
Bernard Brandon Scott of Phillips Theological Seminary in Tulsa, Oklahoma and Joanna Dewey, a professor emerita of Biblical Studies at Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, argued that a later move into manuscripts minimalized the role of women in the early church.
“Early Christianity was an oral culture based on oral authority,” Dewey claimed, adding that manuscripts were “inherently male” and eliminated women, while oral story kept them in.

There is so much wrong with this it’s hard to know where to start. Let’s do it this way:
1) Christianity grew directly out of Judaism. Judaism was, indisputably, a “manuscript culture,” one that took great pains to pass down the revelation of God and its rabbinic interpretation in written form. That doesn’t mean there weren’t oral elements, of course (that’s where most if not all of the Talmud comes from), but that by Jesus’s day Judaism was based on the written word. So how could Jesus have been taken seriously as a teacher and preacher if He wasn’t familiar with the written tradition of His faith?
2) Given the extraordinary care that was taken to insure that the written tradition was properly maintained, why should we think that there was some kind of opposition between the two in the early church?
3) Why was writing “inherently male,” other than because it happens to fit the presuppositions and ideology of the academic?

During one session of her presentation, Dewey donned a head covering and dramatically sought to “re-imagine” a female-centered telling of Mark’s gospel, performing as an imaginary late first century woman.
“I think something like this could have happened,” Dewey proposed, titling her performance “the Gospel of Ruth.”
The Episcopal seminary professor described such a “reimagining” of Mark’s gospel as an important step in countering alleged sexist distortion of Biblical history. Women, Dewey argued, would be at center, rather than periphery, of any actual gospel events.
Scott agreed, asserting that “These days, unless you are a right-wing conservative actually a Christian, a feminist reading of the Bible is typical.” (Fixed it for him—DF.)

So Looey and Dewey don’t like Mark’s Gospel. They think it should be “reimagined,” i.e., re-written in accord with modern political principles, without any regard for historical accuracy, since it’s just pious fiction anyway. Women, who are already far more prominent in the Gospels than they would have been in a telling of Jesus’s story that was in full accord with the cultural norms of the time, must be at the center of the story, regardless of what their role actually was, in order to make the story more palatable to the cultured despisers. So here’s where that leaves me: why don’t these two just make up their own religion, since that’s what they are effectively doing. They could call it “Joannaism” (good thing her first name isn’t Judy, huh?)

Dewey was firm in her assertion that Jesus was illiterate. Refuting the Luke chapter 4 account of Christ reading in the synagogue as an invention of the gospel writer, Dewey claimed it was “because he couldn’t imagine Jesus as illiterate.”

Yeah, it couldn’t possibly be because He could read. I mean, Luke was only a very near-contemporary (at least). He didn’t live 2000 years later and have a Ph.D, so what could he know?

“Jesus did not know how to read and write, there was no reason to,” Dewey flatly declared, adding that while modern people take literacy for granted, “this was not true in antiquity.” Dewey offered that the only group among whom literacy was the norm at the time was the elite, with letters orally dictated and then performed before community.

All those Torahs from which people read in the synagogue? They were just toilet paper rolls laid out to fool the rubes.

Sweeping claims by Scott and Dewey, including an assertion that monastics rejected episcopal authority, went mostly unchallenged during the workshop at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill. Scott at one point suggested to the audience of 40 mostly elderly participants to “make up your own canon” of scripture.
“I would trade the book of Revelation for Hamlet any day,” Scott announced, adding that he would swap the Pastoral Epistles for any two Emily Dickinson poems. “We’d be way better off.”

It appears that both of these clowns are frustrated English teachers. Anybody know a college that would let them follow their dreams, and get them away from this icky Bible stuff? Oh, and someone should tell them about Marcion. That “making up your own canon” stuff is so second century.
It wasn’t only knuckle-dragging, right-wing, misogynistic, homophobic, racist, sexist, patriarchal, corporatist, fundamentalist, white male [fill-in-the-blank with your favorite hate] evangelicals that get this pair’s goat:

Mainline Protestants also earned Dewey’s scorn, as the retired Episcopal seminary professor expressed frustration at “pressure still there to preach [Bible] stories as true.”
“We’re not just talking about Evangelicals – but liberal, east coast Episcopalians,” Dewey fumed. Scott agreed, sharing that he no longer revealed to fellow airplane passengers that he was a New Testament scholar out of frustration with preconceived notions he encountered.

Thank God for small favors.