Skepticism of Many New Testament Scholars Clashes With Laymen’s Faith in Traditional Beliefs on Jesus

New Testament scholarship today agrees that Jesus of Nazareth was baptized by John the Baptist, that as a teacher and healer Jesus attracted disciples, and that he was executed by crucifixion. But the chairman of Stanford University’s religious studies department says the progress of biblical research has made anything else historically questionable.

“So far as the biblical historian is concerned, there is scarcely a popularly held traditional belief about Jesus that is not regarded with considerable skepticism,” says Stanford’s Van Harvey.

The “enormous gap” continues between what the average lay person believes to be true about Jesus and what “the great majority of New Testament scholars” conclude after 150 years of research and debate, he said.

Significance Underestimated

Harvey said the historical significance of this disparity--”in a culture so dominated by experts in every field”--is underestimated.

“It constitutes an enormous wrench in the consciousness of Western humanity,” he said in an address at the University of Michigan for a conference on “The Jesus of History and Myth,” co-sponsored by Free Inquiry, a humanist-oriented magazine.

“For despite decades of research,” Harvey contended, “the average lay person tends to think of the life of Jesus in much the same terms as Christians did three centuries ago: the humble manger birth in Bethlehem, the flight into Egypt to avoid the wicked King Herod, the baptism by John the Baptist who recognized Jesus to be the long-promised Messiah, a three-year ministry in which Jesus’ claims to divinity are met by the hostility of the Jews who conspire to have him tried and crucified, the burial in Getheseme after which he rises from the dead.”

Different Ethics Applied

The problem seems insoluble because different “ethics of belief” are often applied to the Bible than to other subjects, he said.

“Since the Reformation, it has been assumed in Protestant countries that any literate person could pick up the Bible, understand it, and assent to its various claims,” Harvey said.

But he said that the expertise needed for biblical studies plus the qualities of judgment that characterize those who reach distinction in scholarly work--the “professionalization of knowledge”--all tend to render “amateur most of the traditionally held beliefs of the average lay person and the conservative Christian.”

Approach of Faith

Harvey said that the conservative Christian student often is hostile toward professors who rely on such biblical scholarship because the student believes the Bible must be approached through faith. Harvey also appeared to discount the research work of conservative scholars to the extent they seek to bolster orthodox beliefs rather than let the evidence lead them where it might.

The conservative Christian may be sometimes right that a university professor has a non-believer’s inclination, but historians in any field must bring a skepticism about claims of what happened in the past, Harvey said. Using their training, they then come to carefully modulated conclusions about what is unlikely, possible, probable or certain.

The Stanford professor said that New Testament scholarship has become so specialized and requires so much preparation that many scholars feel “the lay person has simply been disqualified from having any right to a judgment regarding the truth or falsity of certain historical claims.”

The lay person unacquainted with New Testament research is no more in a position to have an informed judgment on the historical reliability of Gospel accounts than a non-specialist would about “the Seventh Letter of Plato, the relationship of Montezuma to Cortez” or other historical matters.

“This conclusion, which initially sounds so outrageous and arrogant, is really nothing more than the extension of the attitudes of the scholarly community to its own fledgling members,” he said.