‘My continuation in the Jesus Seminar is a matter of my personal integrity.’ : New Testament Scholar Quits Nazarene Faculty

A professor at Point Loma Nazarene College, an evangelical Protestant college, has resigned after being told to drop out of a long-term project involving 75 scholars studying the authenticity of sayings attributed to Jesus in the New Testament and other sources.

John Lown, 44, professor of philosophy and religion, said Tuesday he resigned shortly after the president of the 1,900-student college told him to end his participation in the so-called Jesus Seminar.

Lown, who has taught for 15 years at the college, said he could have defended his position on the grounds of academic freedom but decided it was not worth his time and energy.

The English-born scholar, whose doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University emphasized New Testament studies, said the recent incident was simply “the last straw” in what he called restrictive direction on the Nazarene campus.

“A large portion of the (Nazarene) membership now leans to a more literalistic interpretation of Scripture,” he said.

College President Jim Bond confirmed Lown’s summary of their conversation. Bond added, however, that he was not questioning Lown’s right to participate but rather “the wisdom of participating in light of the negative impact on the institution.”

Point Loma Nazarene College, which changed its name from Pasadena College after its move from that city in 1973, is supported principally by the 750,000-member Church of the Nazarene, which has a strict social code and identifies with conservative, evangelical positions on Bible interpretation.

“Obviously, when a scholar from the evangelical community participates with scholars from the liberal community, that makes the project suspect in the minds of evangelicals,” Bond said. He said his mail has not been heavy on the subject, but he cited two letters received Tuesday as typical. Church members wrote asking how a Nazarene professor could be involved in a seminar that in their view reduces the words of Jesus.

The Jesus Seminar was designed by its organizer, noted New Testament scholar Robert Funk of Bonner, Mont., partly to present somewhat provocatively a consensus on Jesus’ sayings, drawn from mainstream, historical-literary criticism of biblical and apocryphal sources. The six-year project plans to publish a color-coded book of the likeliest authentic teachings of Jesus printed in red and to challenge in public forums the literal interpretations by fundamentalist preachers.

At its first full voting session at Saint Meinrad, Ind., last fall, the participants deemed that more than half of Jesus’ sayings in the Sermon on the Mount were put on his lips by gospel authors or members of the early churches. The scholars were asked to base their votes on the weight of critical scholarship as well as their own research. Their next meeting is March 6 through 9 at the University of Redlands.

“This is an important project using basic principles of biblical research commonly held by most reputable scholars in the discipline,” Lown said. “My continuation in the Jesus Seminar is a matter of my personal integrity.”

Lown, whose resignation is effective at the end of the spring term, says he will continue to teach part time at National University in San Diego and may look into other job offers.

Howard Owens, editor of the college newspaper, said that he sympathized with college President Bond. “He took a pragmatic approach to resolving the situation in the best interests of the college. Unfortunately, we lost a really outstanding professor to the misperception by some people as to the nature of the Jesus Seminar and to our own Nazarene beliefs,” Owens contended.

Owens quoted the Church of Nazarene Manual as saying “the Bible is inspired but written by men, with room for corruption by men, and is not totally inerrant.”

The Rev. Paul Benefiel, the college’s board of trustees chairman and the Los Angeles district superintendent for the denomination, said that although Nazarenes are not fundamentalists, “we do accept the Bible as divinely inspired and do feel the words of Jesus have certain sacred connotations.”

Lown said he discussed his part in the Jesus Seminar in November with Bond and thought that the matter had ended then. But Bond called him in again on Jan. 29 and asked him to resign from the seminar. The next day, he resigned from the college instead.

“He indicated there was hardly any support for me on the board of trustees,” Lown said. “The kind of work I was doing in the Jesus Seminar was perfectly within the view of Scripture that the church maintains. . . .”

Lown charged that freedom in the classroom is restricted at Point Loma. “Administrative officials have tended to allow students to criticize instructors without appropriately verifying with the instructor the basis of the criticism,” he said.

Bond denied that characterization. “I don’t think that would be the attitude of the faculty,” he said. He also said that if a student comes with a charge against a professor, “we provide the professor with an opportunity to refute that.”