Even though I am retired, I still try to keep up with current trends and discoveries in biblical studies, especially the New Testament. Now it’s more of a hobby, so I’m not into reading full-size books (which, as in any academic arena, are often rather tedious). But today many biblical scholars maintain web sites, blogs, and YouTube channels, so you can get the “highlights” of their work fairly easily.

Since I attended a mainline seminary, we used “critical” Bible study methods, the opposite of a fundamentalist or literalist approach. We didn’t assume that what any particular passage said was historically accurate just because it was in the Bible but approached it as scholars would any ancient text. In other words, being in the Bible didn’t give it any special privileges.

Further, we read the Bible from our own cultural context, which especially included our modern understanding of science and history. So no, to use the most well-known example, the universe wasn’t created in six days. Even more, we learned that isn’t what Genesis was trying to say, anyway. I know many of you are well aware of these things, so I’m not going to go into a rehash of the whole critical vs. literalist approach to the Bible.

My problem coming out of seminary forty-some years ago was the realization that not only were most people in the pews unaware of what pastors were being taught about the Bible (and still are), those pastors were doing little to let them in on this “secret.” And the answer I got from those pastors I asked about this, as well church higher-ups, was that, well, it didn’t really matter, so why upset people with this “academic” stuff?

I disagreed with that attitude then, and still do. But what I am coming to realize is that the biblical studies train has moved significantly further down the track since I was in school. To put is simply, nearly everything is up in the air and we know with certainty very, very little.

With regard to the gospels, for example, we don’t know who wrote them, when or where they were written, where they got their information from, and/or how much the authors created themselves. Further, the non-canonical gospels have now been studied extensively and are viewed by many scholars as being as valuable as the four in the New Testament. Further, their exclusion is seen as being primarily political rather than because they were untrue or of no value.

Scholars agree that the earliest writings in the New Testament are the letters of Paul. It’s also accepted that many letters attributed to him were, in fact, written by others under his name. When I was in seminary, we were taught that it was a common ancient practice for disciples to write in the name of their beloved but now deceased teacher. We now know that, no, that was not common practice and ancients called it what we would: forgery. What does it say about the early church that they were faking documents and attributing them to early apostles?

As for Paul himself, like so many things in the Bible, the more we know the more we don’t know. It’s now widely accepted that the supposedly historical book of Acts is almost entirely fiction. Even the accepted authentic letters of Paul have obviously been edited. II Corinthians, for example, is two or three letters spliced together. But who did that? And what did they leave out? Editing likely occurred with other letters but where and how much is unclear. And we will never know what letters of Paul weren’t saved for posterity.

As a result, a biography of Paul has become nearly impossible. What was he, really? One scholar I encountered believes there was no “historical” Paul at all but that he was simply a literary creation. I wouldn’t go that far. I think there was a historical person at the center of these writings but saying much that’s definite about him has become pretty difficult.

And that is also where we are at with the New Testaments’ most important character: Jesus of Nazareth. The idea that Jesus was also a mythological figure has been around for quite a while. In the past, scholars laughed it out of the room. Today, they aren’t laughing quite so hard, or in such great numbers.

The scholarly consensus is still that Jesus of Nazareth is a historical person but beyond that, everything gets complicated. One of my favorite quotes is still that of Bible scholar Robert Price who said, “We just have too many Jesuses.” In other words, all the things he said and did according to the gospels just can’t be fit into one personality.

The gospels each present very different pictures of him. How could they feel so free to do that unless they were basically just making Jesus to be who they wanted him to be because they really knew very little about him? Paul, who to repeat is our earliest source, says nothing about a historical Jesus and really does present him as more of a mythical figure, the ascended Christ. Was that also the situation of the early church and of the gospel writers who wanted to bring him down to earth, so to speak?

Let’s look at one example. One of the central “stories” of Jesus for the church is the Last Supper. All four canonical gospels tell of it, though with significant differences. John, for example, makes no mention of Jesus establishing the Eucharist. Further, there are early church eucharistic liturgies which make no mention of the Last Supper. Were the Last Supper and the Eucharist actually connected?

The one instance where Paul seems to be talking about a historical Jesus is in his recounting of the Last Supper in 1 Corinthians 11. But look carefully, and he says he got the story as a revelation, not from the disciples who were supposedly there. Many scholars now say that the synoptic gospel writers got their Last Supper eucharist stories from Paul, who got it from his imagination. And then there is the gospel of Thomas who tells his version of the Jesus story without any mention of the Passion or the Resurrection, let alone a last supper.

As we look for the Jesus of the early 1^st century, we see only an impenetrable fog. We have no information about him from that time. As we pull back some decades, a blurry image appears out of the gospels but we can never get it into focus. The result is that people and the church have picked and chosen the parts of the Jesus tradition they liked and ignored the rest. So today, the Jesus of mainline Protestants and progressive Catholics versus that of MAGA Christians bear no resemblance to each other. Yet both groups think they are being faithful to the Bible. Chasms like this have been present, shifting with culture and history, throughout the church’s existence.

I’m not going to argue the merits of any of the issues New Testament scholars are wrestling with today. You could amass a whole library of books on these topics, if you wanted to. My point is, as I said at the start, that everything historical or biographical is now up for debate. Knowledgeable people today can’t say the creeds with a straight face. We know with certainly very little.

So then, what is Christianity based upon? Or more fundamentally, what is Christianity really about? It is easy to see why moderate and mainline churches are in steady decline. They are the ones that on paper take critical Bible study seriously. But it’s a love/hate relationship because they see where the results of biblical scholarship are leading. Clergy in these churches are largely keeping these results to themselves for fear of the consequences. They view the modern church like a Jenga tower which is at the point where removing one more block of “biblical truth” will bring it down.

In reality, however, we’re already well past that point. The church which was based on fact, history, revelation, authority, scripture, doctrine, and capital “T” Truth is over. Which terrifies church people because that has been what held it together. The church’s foundation has always been revealed and demonstrable Truth.

Yet Christianity has also always been about more than that, however much it’s been ignored or forgotten by the church. For the real life of Christianity is its story as story; its myth, tradition, ritual, and, perhaps most important of all, wisdom.

Wisdom is at the heart of all the world’s great religious and spiritual traditions. It is the small “t” truth which gives people purpose, direction, hope, and confidence–the confidence to center their lives on love.

Once the church’s pretense of unique and unassailable Truth is peeled away, the truth of Christianity becomes clear, a truth that is renewing and life giving. At that point it is seen to be in harmony with the world’s wisdom and spiritual traditions, and with what Aldous Huxley called the “perennial philosophy.” What might such a Christianity, and perhaps even a renewed church, look like? Next time I’ll offer some ideas about that, as well as the obstacles preventing it from happening and how they might be overcome.

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