The Fascination Continues: Part 2

The so-called Historical Jesus movement was founded on the belief that we still can find in the Gospels sufficient data to reconstruct the portrait of Jesus as a historical figure, notwithstanding the theological tampering by the early church (as alleged by Enlightenment thinking). The new approach to studying Jesus was seen by its advocates as scientific, and thus in keeping with the mood of the times.

The trend held sway until the twentieth century, when new studies helped undermine this whole movement, showing how this historical Jesus idea was utterly unscientific and subjective. Studies exposed the entire rationalistic enterprise as a miserable failure.

The history of Jesus studies are long, winding, and complicated; and they need not detain us further, except to mention the so-called Jesus Seminar, a contemporary group of radical scholars determined to succeed where other historical quests before them failed. Their goal is to "'rescue Jesus from the spin doctors' who wrote the Gospels"—Roy Hoover, in Kenneth L. Woodward, "The Death of Jesus," Newsweek, April 4, 1994, p. 39.

Few today take the Jesus Seminar people seriously. (After all, how seriously can you take people who argued that instead of being resurrected, Jesus, after His death, was eaten by dogs?) Today, the prevailing Christian position insists that Christianity stands on a firm, historical foundation. Notwithstanding two millennia of criticism and controversy, Jesus remains the undisputed Master of the centuries.

In one of his most penetrating rejoinders to the intellectual sophisticates of his day, Paul zeroed in on the essence of the Christian proclamation: "For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God" (1 Cor. 1:18, NIV). Why is the message of the Cross so important for us today, as well?

Read also 1 Corinthians 1:18-27. What message is there for us in those verses? What are some of the things we believe that just cannot be explained by the "wisdom of the world" (vs. 20, NIV)? In what ways has "God made foolish the wisdom of the world" (vs. 20, NIV)?

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