Scholars Puzzle Over Jesus the Prophet and Jesus the Sage : Research: A Claremont Graduate School professor says that Jesus was originally viewed as a teacher, not as the Messiah. That title, and others equating Jesus with divinity, came later, James M. Robinson says.

A leading biblical scholar says the oldest sources for the Jesus movement in the Holy Land portray Jesus as a teacher of divine wisdom--not as a foreboding figure with titles of divinity himself.

“Jesus the apocalyptic prophet has given way to Jesus the sage,” said James M. Robinson of Claremont Graduate School, who claims that scholarship on the historical Jesus is in the throes of a major shift.

Divine titles such as “Christ/Messiah,” “Son of God” and “Son of Man” abound in the New Testament and are integral to Christianity’s understanding of its savior. As such, churches are unlikely to abandon the New Testament as uninspired or historically unreliable. Indeed, the picture of Christ, the heaven-sent prophet, has its academic defenders.

But Robinson has emphasized in recent lectures that the New Testament in its final form is a selective collection of Gentile-oriented books and letters written primarily in what is now Turkey and Greece. Relatively little was written in the Holy Land.

“The early Galilean beliefs tend to be lost in the New Testament because they are (obscured by) later apocalyptic views,” Robinson said in an interview. “We’ve been whistling in the dark, pretending that it didn’t make any difference.”

In a lecture this fall at Claremont’s Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, which he directs, Robinson said, “If Jesus is understood in a different way, then chaos emerges over how you’re going to understand the first generation of Christianity.”

Two sources have been increasingly valued by scholars like Robinson for what Jesus of Nazareth most likely said and how the first generation of believers spoke of him: the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas, unearthed in 1945, and a never-found collection of sayings which scholars call “Q,” for quelle , German for source or origin.

The existence of Q has gradually won favor as the most logical explanation for the similar sayings used by the Gospels of Matthew and Luke when writing episodes of a teaching Jesus, such as the “Sermon on the Mount.” Otherwise, many scholars say, the two Gospels relied primarily on the Gospel of Mark for the story of Jesus’ ministry, trials and crucifixion.

The discovery of Thomas, a compendium of sayings without an accompanying story, helped to persuade most scholars that Q is not a theoretical invention. Thomas’ earliest version, some analysts say, probably appeared about AD 60, prior to the writing of the New Testament Gospels.

Thomas and Q have many of the same proverbs and parables, and “share the oldest layer of sayings attributed to Jesus,” Robinson said.

For the last five years, Robinson has led a 30-member seminar on Q for the Society of Biblical Literature, the world’s largest professional group of biblical scholars, which begins its annual four-day meeting today in Anaheim in conjunction with the American Academy of Religion.

On Friday, Robinson co-chaired with Toronto scholar John Kloppenborg the first meeting of the International Q Project, which hopes to publish a reconstruction of the long-lost sayings source.

Contributing to the shifting views of the historical Jesus, the Q seminar reached a consensus that the sayings source went into at least two editions. In the first, the sage-like Jesus spins out aphorisms, including pithy critiques of conventional society and piety. In the second edition, additional sayings, many thought to have put on Jesus’ lips, portray him as the Son of God who laments unrighteousness in Israel and warns of future calamity. The scholars consider the first version to have a higher percentage of authentic sayings.

The proposed two-stage development of Q agrees with research findings of the sometimes-controversial Jesus Seminar, which votes twice a year on what sayings most likely go back to Jesus. Some scholars, such as Kloppenborg, have participated in the Sonoma, Calif.-based Jesus Seminar and Robinson’s Q Seminar.

One dissenting scholar, who will present his views at a session Sunday, said he thinks the two seminars “are sort of like clubs” of scholars who have “gotten carried away by their own concepts.” Richard A. Horsley, professor of religion at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, said he is not convinced that there are objective ways to distinguish the early and later sayings in Q.

Horsley, whose studies have emphasized the turbulent background in Palestine during Jesus’ time, said he believes Jesus sought the renewal of Israel. “I would see him as a prophetic figure, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t also teach wisdom,” Horsley said.

Robinson, a former president of the Society of Biblical Literature, nevertheless cited a number of scholars outside the two seminars who are abandoning the once-common view of an apocalyptic Jesus.

Robinson himself takes a moderate position. He allows for the possibility that the compilers of Thomas and Q were selective, leaving out sayings of Jesus that would have lent themselves to interpretation as warnings about the future.

To the left of Robinson are scholars who have boldly compared Jesus to a Cynic philosopher--notably Burton Mack of the School of Theology at Claremont and British scholar F. Gerald Downing.

“The Cynic in antiquity was sort of a dropout from society with a half-baked philosophical training who would make fun of all that’s high and holy for pompous people who run things,” explained Robinson. “It’s folk wisdom poking fun at the Establishment.”

Indeed, there are words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament that support that image--sayings about not worrying what you will wear, disparaging wealth and power, and flaunting religious custom.

A persistent question nagging New Testament scholars is how much the authors and their religious communities cast Jesus according to their own expectations, putting words on his lips and adding titles of deification.

Jesus was “Christ” to the Apostle Paul, an early convert whose letters preserved in the New Testament date from the 50s. But nowhere in Q, written about the same time, does the title “Christ” appear, scholars say. Nor is Christ, or any other honorific name, used in the Gospel of Thomas.