As a rule, FREE INQUIRY focuses more on issues of the real world and less on horn blowing for the Council for Secular Humanism and re¬lated organizations. Please indulge this exception. A new initiative by the Com¬mittee for the Scientific Examina¬tion of Religion (CSER)—a project launched by the Council twenty-five years ago, now affiliated with the Center for Inquiry—deserves a mo¬ment’s acknowledgment and, to my mind, some sustained applause.
In classic “no free lunch” fashion, be¬fore I share the good news, I’m going to make you slog through some history. Twenty-five years ago, in 1982, FREE INQUIRY announced formation of the Religion and Biblical Criticism Re¬search Project. Founded by FI Senior Editor Gerald A. Larue, a scholar of religion based at the University of Southern California, the Project’s original mission was to encourage dissemination of the findings of more than a century of biblical criticism and archeological discovery. The Project attracted distinguished associates and, with time, broadened its mission.
In April 1985, it convened what re¬mains to this day the best-attended conference FREE INQUIRY has ever sponsored: “Jesus in History and Myth.” It was coordinated by the brash young academic R. Joseph Hoffmann, then an associate professor of religion at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where the event was held. It drew an impressive “who’s who” in religion studies with its promise of reopening an inquiry that professional scholarship had set aside decades before: Did the historical Jesus exist? If so, what can we know of him?
I attended that conference, a star¬struck young volunteer charged with engineering the conference audiotapes. I witnessed the unprecedented excitement that it generated. “Jesus in History and Myth” alerted academe that curiosity about the historicity of Jesus had been rekindled among both scholars and the educated public. In short order, the Religion and Biblical Criticism Research Project donned a punchier name—the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER)—and young Hoffmann joined Gerald Larue among its leaders.
In those early days, FREE INQUIRY and its sponsoring organization lacked the capacity to exploit all the fascination that “Jesus in History and Myth” had un¬leashed. Robert Funk, a bigger-than-life, Montana-based scholar who had also attended the Ann Arbor conference, was better situated. Moving quickly, Funk cofounded the Jesus Seminar. That well-known moveable feast of high-profile religion scholars—theologians, mostly—convened several times a year, always in the public spotlight, to argue over (and vote on) which Gospel sayings had been attributed to Jesus that the historical Jesus actually said. The idea that Jesus might not have existed was off-limits, perhaps understandably in a group dominated by confessional theologians. Still, when the Jesus Seminar finished deconstructing the Gospels, it had blacklined more than 80 percent of the “words of Jesus” as inauthentic. A related book, The Fifth Gospel, became a best seller.
With Funk’s death in 2005, the Jesus Seminar lost momentum. Fortunately, over the intervening years CSER (yes, pronounced like “Caesar”) had matured. Following a peripatetic academic career, including stints at Oxford, Beirut, and in the South Seas, R. Joseph Hoffmann had returned to an American college—and come to realize that his deepest research interests might be better served one step outside of academe. Assuming the helm of CSER, he coordinated a noteworthy 2004 conference on “The Just War and Jihad” at Cornell University. By 2006, CSER had been transferred from the Council for Secular Humanism’s aegis to that of the Center for Inquiry, preparing it for a broader scope of operations, and Hoffmann accepted an appointment as the Center’s Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs.
Fast forward to January 25–28, 2007, when CSER convened its second “new series” conference, “Scripture and Skepticism,” at the University of California, Davis. Again, the roster of speakers featured many of the most distinguished names in the field. (Again, I was there pushing electrons, though by now I’ve clawed my way up to recording not just audio but video.) And, again, as it had been in Ann Arbor, the excitement was palpable.
On Sunday, January 28, panelists including Paul Kurtz; Hoffmann; prominent religion scholar Van A. Harvey; controversial theologian Gerd Lüdemann, author of this issue’s cover story; and biblical scholar Robert M. Price gathered at the head table to make a momentous announcement. CSER was at last ready to launch the research program its long-ago Ann Arbor conference had anticipated and would be able to do so on its own terms. The Jesus Project was unveiled.
End of history lesson. Now, what of tomorrow? The Jesus Project will em¬panel fifty carefully chosen academics from a wide range of disciplines: some theologians, to be sure, but also archeologists, social historians, classicists, ex¬perts in historical linguistics, and others. Their mission will be to apply the most current scholarship and methodologies to the questions that had sparked such passion at Ann Arbor, the questions the Jesus Seminar never confronted: Did the historical Jesus even exist? If so, what can we know of him? Armed with contemporary tools and another century of archeological discoveries, can today’s best objective scholarship push past the point where Albert Schweitzer and his contemporaries judged these questions insoluble?
The Jesus Project will meet twice a year and publish its findings annually (though it will not conduct secret ballots using red and white marbles, as the Jesus Seminar did). At the end of five years, the Project intends to issue a final report. As one hallmark of the objectivity of its mission, that final report may—or may not—put the vexing questions of Jesus’ historicity to rest. The possibility remains that today’s scholars may find, like Schweitzer, that the truth about the historical Jesus still remains out of reach.
Since those electrifying days in 1985, I’ve been convinced that this approach to the “Jesus question” constitutes ex¬actly the sort of inquiry that FREE INQUIRY, the Council, and the Center for Inquiry exist to grapple with. I couldn’t be more excited to see that today CSER is preparing to conduct the Jesus Project as an objective inquiry (not an exercise in a priori scoffing), focusing some of the world’s foremost scholars from a broad spectrum of disciplines.
What might result from this initiative? If cutting-edge research should yield incontrovertible proof that the founder of Christianity is a mythic construct, don’t expect the world to change overnight. For one thing, millions of Christians will simply reject its findings. Additionally, among those who study religion objectively, it is already well known that new faiths can elicit immense personal sacrifices from first-generation converts—despite their first-hand knowledge that the new faith’s teachings don’t quite align with ground truth. Consider the Mormon pioneers who knew Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, or both—warts and all—yet willingly laid down their lives for the church many of them had seen one or both of those men concoct from whole cloth. Nothing about the earliest Christians—not even the eagerness with which some of them embraced martyrdom—should be surprising to serious historians, if, as some scholars think, Christianity never had an actual Jesus but rather a gradually accreting “just-so” story about a figure by that name.
For the same reasons, we should not expect the Jesus Project’s conclusions to sound the death knell for Christianity. Through most of the twentieth century, historically sophisticated Chris¬tian clergy and theologians made the choice to maintain their faith commitments despite their new understandings that, by and large, their religion’s self-proclaim¬ed founding events never actually oc¬curred. That’s not my idea of rationality, but it’s the option many sophisticated liberals exercise. On the long view, it will be more than enough if the Jesus Project can help to create a climate that encourages more rank-and-file Chris¬tians to form similarly nuanced understandings of their faith. (If some of them take the next two or three steps further, abandon supernaturalism, and embrace secular humanism, so much the better—but that cannot be our goal.) One might even hope that this process might provide an example in light of which more Muslims in the West can come to understand their faith, too, as a historical artifact. Want to talk about prospective impact? That’s impact enough for a dozen projects.
The Jesus Project may be the single most important commitment that the Center for Inquiry and its affiliated organizations—among them the Council for Secular Humanism, publisher of FREE INQUIRY—will ever make. I hope you will join me in giving it wholehearted support.
Tom Flynn is the editor of FREE INQUIRY.
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OCTOBER 24-27 2013
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