© 1994 Merlyn Cox
© 1994 The Christian Fellowship of Students of The Urantia Book
How well can Jesus be known? Now that we’ve reached the twilight of the second quest for the historical Jesus, the answer is apparently much like the first — very little. Reading through “The Five Gospels,” the published results of a poll by a group of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar, one wonders if the result of all this intense effort has brought us closer, or farther away, from the one who said “follow me” and proceeded to transform the world.
Reading through the introduction, I’m impressed by the thoroughness and reasonableness of their effort, the combined insights of decades of scholarship, and the proper questions to be asked in such an undertaking.
However, the set of assumptions which guide their effort is highly speculative and leads to conclusions less than convincing. For example, one of the criterion used is that of “dissimilarity,” which holds suspect any texts that are harmonious with either the Jewish tradition on the one hand, or with the early church on the other. If they are not “dissimilar” enough, they’re discounted as inauthentic. The result is a Jesus who has been shorn of any vital connection with either first century Judaism or with the early church.
While the goal has been to avoid at all costs making Jesus into our own preconceived image, some will find the results, in fact, dictated by preconceived notions of who Jesus could or could not have been. These preconceived notions seems more in tune with twentieth century existentialism than first century Judaism or Christianity. The new search for the historical Jesus leaves us with a curiously a-historical Jesus, a mystic and wandering sage, whose ideas about God could neither have been grasped by first century Jews or early Christianity.
Instead of narrowing the gap, this latest quest has, if anything, increased the gap between the “historical Jesus,” (the real Jesus) and the “Christ of Faith,” a mythical construct of the early church. Since the first is essentially unknowable, and the second is mythical creation of the early church, where does that leave us?
I recently heard a Biblical scholar talk about the importance of archaeology in these terms: “we cannot believe in one we don’t know, and we cannot love one we don’t believe in, and we cannot serve one we do not love.” The implication is that archaeology is thus critical because it will build for us a basis on which we can “know” Jesus — the first step in being able to believe and love and serve.
This would no doubt surprise millions down through the centuries who have felt that they have “known” Jesus better than anyone else in their lives — which would make Jesus the best known person in all of history.
If we need more knowledge, it is a knowledge about Jesus that unifies our knowledge of Jesus, not only with the ancient world, but the world we live in, and the world of future generations to come.
The only source that holds out that possibility is The Urantia Book, and it does it so thoroughly and convincingly you can only wonder at the skepticism and fear that keeps it from being read by scholars as well as laymen who are so thirsting for what it contains.
…paganized and socialized Christianity stands in need of new contact with the uncompromised teachings of Jesus; it languishes for lack of a new vision of the Master’s life on earth. A new and fuller revelation of the religion of Jesus is destined to conquer an empire of materialistic secularism and to overthrow a world sway of mechanistic naturalism. Urantia is now quivering on the very brink of one of its most amazing and enthralling epochs of social readjustment, moral quickening, and spiritual enlightenment. (UB 195:9.2)