Holy War Brewing Over Image of Jesus : Research: Conservative scholars challenge Jesus Seminar. One says if liberal theologians’ revisionism on what Christ actually said and did were correct, he would have been much too likable to be crucified.

As the 2,000th anniversary of the birth of Jesus nears, an intellectual tug-of-war is pulling at the pivotal religious figure of Western civilization.

At stake as the world heads into what many predict will be a post-Christian era of skepticism and biblical illiteracy is the popular image of just who the Jesus of history was, and what he said and did, religious scholars say.

This week marks another round in the fight as the media-savvy Jesus Seminar, the nationally known conclave of liberal Bible scholars, holds its semiannual meeting in Santa Rosa.

But, unlike before, the seminar’s declarations--chipping away at the centuries-old portrait of Jesus--will meet resistance from a phalanx of conservative scholars now launching counterattacks to defend a traditional view of the Christian savior.

Today, seminar participants will end five years of study of Jesus with last looks at the Gospel accounts of his arrest, trial, execution and burial. The group already has contended that few historical details of his death are reliable, beyond Jesus’ crucifixion by Romans in Jerusalem during the rule of Pontius Pilate.

Even if the seminar captures little public attention this time, the battle over conflicting portraits of Jesus will flare anew in the marketplace this coming Christmas season, as bookstores feature new works both attacking and bolstering revisionist views--an outpouring unparalleled in the last 50 years.

Jesus scholars are shucking their typical anonymity to make their case on the public stage. Although scholarly debates over “who was Jesus” are at least 150 years old, academic decorum has always frowned on taking complex theories beyond classrooms, erudite journals and scholarly meetings.

“What is different now is that we are inviting ordinary people on the cutting edge of the debate,” said Catholic scholar John Dominic Crossan, the co-chair of the Jesus Seminar and author of provocative best-sellers on Jesus.

Crossan has sold more than 150,000 copies of two books on the historical Jesus and spent a total of 18 months on the religious bestseller chart since 1991. His third book in this series, “Who Killed Jesus?” has been a best-seller since its release in April.

The Jesus Seminar has captured headlines for 10 years, portraying its research as the discovery of the true Jesus. The seminar contends it is peeling away layers of myth and storytelling attached to Jesus by early Christian writers who were reflecting various religious and social concerns in the early church.

Setting aside the question of whether Jesus was divine, the seminar has whittled away at the biblical account of his life, rejecting 82% of his reputed words as invented and dismissing the Resurrection as myth. Almost all that remains of Jesus in its version is a wandering sage, healer and cultural provocateur.

That non-prophet Jesus, nevertheless, has sold well in books written by seminar organizers, whose original goals included an alternative to the literal Bible story of the televangelists.

Now, after years of ignoring the seminar or berating the unorthodox way it sifts history, scholars on the traditional side have responded with books, conferences and lecture tours of their own--arguing that good scholarship does not have to separate the Christ of faith from the Jesus of history.

“The impact of the Jesus Seminar and the left-most wing of New Testament scholars has been so pervasive that it has to be reckoned with,” said Gregory Boyd of Bethel College in St. Paul, Minn.

Boyd was one of three authors at the Christian Booksellers Convention in Denver in July to preview their books criticizing the seminar and authors such as Burton Mack of the School of Theology at Claremont. Mack’s upcoming “Who Wrote the New Testament?”--subtitled “The Making of the Christian Myth”--pushes the case for a de-mythologized Jesus.

Books like Mack’s--which contend that “messiah,” “lord” and “son of God” were attributes given to Jesus well after his lifetime--and those turned out by the Jesus Seminar are devastating to traditional Christian faith in Jesus as the divine bearer of redemption, contend two Biola University professors in their book, “Jesus Under Fire.”

“They leave people spiritually bankrupt and hopeless,” wrote Michael J. Wilkins and J.P. Moreland.

Last spring, about 1,500 people packed Biola’s gymnasium in La Mirada to hear church tradition defended by Wilkins and Moreland. The pair then repeated the conference last month in Dallas, and will take it to at least five more cities.

But members of the Jesus Seminar have also taken their radical Jesus on the road, with a small conference last week in Marina del Rey and another planned for next month in Palm Springs.

Both sides speak ominously of a coming post-Christian era in North America--a time when spiritual searchers are many, but biblical literacy is on the wane. Many expect the liberal camp to push its vision of Jesus as no more than a historic figure. Traditionalists may be hard-pressed to articulate Christian beliefs formed in the 1st through 4th Centuries.

The Jesus Seminar’s Marcus Borg, an Oregon State University professor who describes himself as an active Christian, contends that historical scholarship permits modern Christians to distinguish between “Jesus as a figure of history and the Christian estimate of him” that are intermingled in the New Testament.

But that is difficult for many people to do today, Borg said. In the Pacific Northwest, he says, “the largest ‘religious’ grouping is skiers, followed by hikers.” Young people are puzzled by, if not skeptical of, some Christian beliefs.

Going further, Robert W. Funk, founder and fulltime leader of the Jesus Seminar, suggests that “a scientifically minded public in the post-Christian age” will ignore as naive and obsolete any historical Jesus studies that reflect the traditional church view.

Jesus was “one of the great sages of history,” Funk said, but the seminar’s historical research has cut the ground from under the long-cherished New Testament portrait, and Christian beliefs must follow.

“I do not want my faith to be in Jesus, but faith in the really real. . . in some version of whatever it was that Jesus believed,” said Funk, former president of the Society of Biblical Literature and ex-director of the large joint annual meeting of the Society and the American Academy of Religion.

The seminar, founded in 1985, includes Funk and about 75 “Seminar Fellows”--ranging from biblical experts to professors in other religious studies.

At its meetings, guest specialists or member-scholars present papers analyzing the sayings or deeds of Jesus found in biblical and extra-biblical sources, citing earlier studies and their own findings.

In assessing the words of Jesus, to judge what he actually said, seminar fellows tend to reject sayings that were commonplace expressions of his day to get at what was unique in his teachings. They feel that Jesus typically taught with parables and pointed aphorisms rather than, for example, the long discourses attributed to him in the Gospel of John.

Using their knowledge of early Christian history, they look for a consistent Jesus. They toss out sayings they contend reflect church issues that arose decades after his death, when the Gospels were written.

Critics have been particularly derisive of the manner in which the seminar votes after its discussion to determine whether the historical Jesus actually said something attributed to him, calling it “glitzy” and “a charade.”

To register their votes, the scholars drop colored beads in a box passed around a table at their twice-yearly meetings. A red bead is a vote that Jesus actually made the statement in question, a pink one means he might have said something like it, gray means probably not and black is a flat rejection.

Bible scholar Luke Timothy Johnson of Atlanta skewers the Jesus Seminar’s conclusions in his book, “The Real Jesus,” which will be published in December by HarperSanFrancisco, which has done well with books from the Jesus Seminar and its liberal trio of Borg, Crossan and Mack.

Johnson, a Catholic scholar, raps the seminar’s readiness to say who the “real Jesus” was, “simply on the basis of a handful of his sayings that it judged to be authentic,” while casually dismissing the rest of the New Testament as fabrication or irrelevant.

“The seminar’s obsessive concern with historicity and its extreme liberalism merely represents the opposite side of fundamentalism,” Johnson wrote, accusing the seminar of employing academic methodology that by its very nature leads to unfounded skepticism.

“It is in the very nature of scholars to vie with one another to be more critical, to be ‘hard graders,”’ said Johnson, who teaches at Emory University’s Candler School of Theology.

Johnson’s defense of a more traditional Jesus is “a viewpoint that people are hungry to have articulated,” said John Loudon, Harper executive editor, who also edited the books by Crossan, Mack and Borg. “When I sent out the manuscript for advance comments, we were deluged . . . by mainstream Protestant and Catholic scholars.”

And when the quarterly “Theology Today” featured opposing articles on the debate last spring, the small journal was “swamped with requests for reprints by pastors and seminaries,” said co-editor Thomas Long.

British scholar and cleric N.T. (Tom) Wright, whose 11-city U.S. lecture tour this fall was advertised as a challenge to the Jesus Seminar, has praised Johnson’s book as exposing “the shallowness of much would-be scholarship about Jesus.”

And New Testament specialist Ben Witherington III of Ashland (Ohio) Theological Seminary says the witty sage portrayed by the Jesus Seminar would never have wound up nailed to a cross as a troublemaker.

He “seems a much better candidate for a late-night visit with David Letterman or Jay Leno,” writes Witherington in his book, “The Jesus Quest,” published this month. .

But that traditional viewpoint may also be an increasingly hard sell to a skeptical American public.

“American culture over this century has become progressively more biblically illiterate,” Witherington said at the Christian Booksellers Convention.

Religious pollster George Barna of Glendale says surveys bear that out. Barna adds a warning for evangelical Christians about the attitudes of young people toward religious claims: Three-quarters of people under 30 surveyed by the Barna Research Group say that there is no such thing as absolute moral truth.

“Although the Bible claims something is absolutely true, most young adults will challenge that contention, demonstrating their fierce belief that no statement is to be taken at face value,” Barna said.

Biola University’s Michael Wilkens, co-editor of the first book to take on the Jesus Seminar, said it will be harder to promote orthodox Christianity in the next century, and perhaps easier for the notion of Jesus as a non-divine sage to gain a following.