"HONEST TO JESUS"
"Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium" by Robert W. Funk, HarperSanFrancisco, a Polebridge Press Book, 1996. 342 pages, indexes, appendixes, charts, US$24, Can$34. Well. After many years of watching Bob Funk, consummate biblical, language and rhetoric scholar, wrestling to produce a cogent, readable book that is genuinely ephochal in its implications ... I have it, right here in my hands. It was selling like hot cakes today as The Jesus Seminar's advance sessions, for intelligent and wisdom-hungry non- scholars, began in Santa Rosa, California. Halfway through four solid hours of sharing his new book with the Seminar Associates, Funk said he fully expects to be "crucified" this fall as talk-show hosts and traditionalist critics assail him anew-- because this is the first time he's come fully out, as an individual, from the relatively broad shield of the collegial Seminar to say in public why he wants to put Jesus the Iconoclast onto giant billboards and electronic light shows in place of creed- bound churches' Christ as Icon. This is Funk's story-- a confession, if you will-- woven into the Story of Jesus whose "glimpse," as Funk calls it, of God's Realm was so compelling that even though his disciples couldn't really understand that their impassioned preaching about Jesus would make him a deity, against his wishes, they were driven to share their own visions of who their Lord was and is, whether distorted or not. I'm not sure Funk will suffer anywhere near as much as, say, the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Newark, who shares much of Funk's vision of the vision of Jesus. That's because Funk operates outside the traditional church while John Shelby Spong is one of its bishops. When critics assail Spong they are-- whether or not they mean to-- in part assailing the church, because he is such a visible and very powerful part of it. When they bludgeon Funk it is to defend the church against which, they will say, Funk has turned. Read the book as soon as you can. It's nicely organized and quite clear if you can get your head around two centuries of scholars' trying to distinguish the Jesus of history (the pre-crucifixion man) from the Christ of creed and even scripture (the post-Resurrection Lord, part of the Godhead). And if you can understand that historical scholars are not throwing out theology: they use what they learn of history- - facts they can with some confidence infer out of texts which are unashamedly rhetorical, polemical, kerygmatic, that is, theological preaching. That seems to be hard for many to do. At this point, let me insert something of my own wording about this matter. Jesus taught his vision of God and God's Kingdom. He is said to have spoken in such a way that people heard him as authoritative. What was he so sure about? Not himself, surely, in spite of claims in the theological poetry of John's Gospel and of Revelation, no: He taught about God, cautioning that he himself was not the subject. He spoke with directness even though his witticisms and wisdom were so often cloaked in ambiguity. In his person, he was an authority on God. When he appeared, after his death, and even his followers could hardly believe it, it was necessary, once they owned their belief, for them to tell the story as a story, and that they did. That is what the gospels are, stories which modern historical-critical and literary scholars can see are the kinds of things one would develop as carriers of the gospel. Seldom are those stories in substantial agreement, but they did what they were intended to do. They took the facts, as apostles knew them, and put them into permanently memorable form. When you go to church, would you want a simple recitation of sayings without contexts, of deeds without settings, to be what you heard as the preacher told you about Jesus' God? Hardly. We all know facts are internalized in feeling units: Cognition needs affective carriers. The literary geniuses whose works survive in the churches' canons knew that and practiced it. So what you have in scripture is not just Jesus talking about God-- though that's hidden in there, as in the hypothetical sayings collection called "Q" that both Matthew and Luke evidently depended upon as they reworked and enlarged Mark's material. What you have is enthusiastic preaching about Jesus, setting scenes and describing events in which to place the rather stark sayings which most scholars, conservative or liberal, think were what the communities of followers first passed along orally until, in writing them down, some narrative framework was needed: but who remembered the frames for the words dependably enough to qualify as historical documents? Funk likes to talk of Jesus the iconoclast being turned into an icon by the simple need of early preachers to talk about him, not just to recount his talking about God. Unless you think God dictated the whole canon, you may be able to go along with this understanding of kerygma (preaching, with narrative embellishments) replacing didache, or the teaching of Jesus about God, in which even he himself used stories at times, but not about himself. I'm going to have to delay a longer description of Honest to Jesus, I guess-- it's time to go back for two more hours of Funk! Bob Cramer