One of my favorite lines from any movie comes from "Forrest Gump."
The always cynical Lt. Dan asks Forrest if he has found Jesus, and Forrest replies...
"I didn't know we were supposed to be lookin' for him, sir..."
I chuckle to myself every time I think of that interchange. But in reality, many a biblical scholar is still looking for Jesus in their own way. One of them is Marcus Borg. He is very thought provoking, even though I disagree with most of his conclusions.
Fleming Rutledge, a noted contemporary preacher in The Episcopal Church offers a critique of Marcus and others of his scholarly tradition...
Last night at a gathering, Marcus Borg said (twice), “Jesus trumps the Bible.”This is an extraordinarily irresponsible thing for a scholar and leader in the church to say. It can’t be said often enough: we have no access to knowledge of Jesus except through the Bible and its interpretation. There is no record of him outside the Bible until years after his death. The only way to understanding who he was is through the witness of the New Testament apostles. Therefore to suggest that he “trumps the Bible” is to suggest that we can cut loose from the Scriptures and construct a Jesus according to the perspectives of our own time. It has been shown over and over again that attempts to construct a “historical Jesus” or “real Jesus” apart from the faith-based witness of Scripture end in failure because such attempts are grounded, not in the text, but in the bias of those who undertake them.
She goes on for a bit, and it is worth reading...
The full text is here.
Enjoy.
