The strange but ultimately reassuring book of Revelation tells of a dragon with seven heads, 10 horns and seven diadems on his heads, who tries to threaten the woman and devour her Child as soon as He is born. War breaks out in heaven, but Satan is defeated. He is cast down to earth but here he runs amuck, albeit for a short time. He seeks to perse­cute the woman who had given birth to the male Child, but heaven and earth combine to protect her (Rev. 12).

In picture form the apostle John is telling us that the devil sought to kill the Christ Child at His birth (Mt. 2), and that the history of the Church will see the continued and frenzied attempts of Satan to destroy the kingdom of God. Scripture and history combine to teach us that Satan will use two main methods in his destructive attempts to defeat Christ: he will persecute Christ’s people and he will undermine Christ’s truth. This is what we find in the letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3. There were false apostles at work at Ephesus (2:2) and there was persecution at Smyrna (2:10). The churches of Ephesus, Pergamos, Thyatira and Sardis all faced heretical teach­ing and immoral practices (2:6, 14-15, 20­ 21; 3:4). Philadelphia seems to have been battling opposition from the synagogue (3:8-10) while Laodicea simply lapsed into lukewarmness (3:15-17).

In essence, this explains the history of the world — Satan is doing everything to destroy the cause of Christ. The Corinthian church was beguiled by a different Christ, a different spirit, and a different gospel (2 Cor.2:3-4).

And so it has continued down through the ages. In the period of the early Church, there were numerous attempts to portray another Christ in place of the God-Man of the Bible. The Ebonite’s taught that Jesus was only a man, the gnosticizing Docetists taught that the Christ spirit only seemed to come as a man (see 1 John 4:1-3), and the Arians taught that Christ was the highest of the angels. As the Preacher says, there is nothing new under the sun (Eccles. 1:9).

The medieval period saw much emphasis on Mary and the saints, and Christ often seemed too divine to be close to sinners. At other times He almost disappears into a kind of idealistic Christ-mysticism.

The Reformation of the 16^th century sought to return to the Christ of the Bible and the historic creeds of the Church. Even then, Calvin had to battle against the anti-Trinitarian views of Michael Servetus. What became known as Socinianism emerged, with its open denial of the deity of Christ.

Indeed, the aftermath of the Reformation, the period of the so-called Enlightenment, was to see a renewed assault on Christ as the God-Man, all in the name of scientific inquiry. The 19^th century especially saw the quest for the historical Jesus, but this only produced a liberal Protestant Jesus. David Friedrich Strauss claimed his Life of Jesus (1835), for example, was a work based on scientific presuppositions. In fact, Strauss was only explaining away the mirac­ulous. The conclusion was presupposed — Jesus Christ could not be the divine Son of God who died for sinners and rose bodily from the dead because that is supernatural and supernaturalism is unscientific.

Ernst Renan’s view was similar, though more saccharine. Renan portrayed Jesus as an idyllic carpenter who in another age might have written sentimental poetry. Renan wrote: “We do not say miracle is impossible, we say only that there has never been a satisfactorily authenticated miracle.” This original quest ran aground in 1906 when Albert Schweitzer demolished it.

After Schweitzer, there was an increasing tendency to separate history from faith. Faith was not standing on an historical rock, but floating existentially in midair, an arbi­trary leap into the dark. In 1926 Rudolf Bultmann claimed that “we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus”. It was Bultmann who for­ mulated the “dissimilarity” principle — the rather silly rule which excludes any text which might have been spoken by Jews or Christians of the first century. Jesus is thought only to have said what could not have come from Judaism or the early Church. There was no overlap at all. Presumably, the world could have been spared most of Bultmann’s voluminous writings had it applied the same criterion to his work.

The 1950s saw a new quest, although it seemed to disappear from view in the 1970s. Existentialism had little interest in history, even in the kind of truncated history offered by the first two quests. But the 1980s saw the rise of the third quest, the most recent manifestation of this being the misnamed Jesus Seminar. This is the brain­child of Robert Funk and his Westar Institute, basking in rather too much Californian sun.

Papal infallibility has nothing on the pon­tifications of Funk and his ilk. They do not regard Matthew, Mark and Luke as having much authority, or even as possessing some vague kind of reliability. John has none at all. Instead, we are meant to take seriously a hypothetical collection of Jesus’ sayings in a document which is yet to be discovered but which is referred to as ‘Q’. This consists of about 225 sayings found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark. As the limerick goes:

Oh! a scholar with nothing to do
Except make things harder for you
Invented a spook,
Haunting Matthew and Luke
And called it, appropriately, ‘Q’.

The issue at hand is not whether Q exists — in itself it matters not — but that the Jesus Seminar people regard this hypothetical document as more authoritative than the four Gospels themselves. Only the apoc­ryphal and late (second century?) Gospel of Thomas is to be added to it. The result is a Jesus without a story; all we have left is iso­lated, rather iconoclastic sayings. And there are not all that many of those — any red let­ter editions of the Bible issued by the Jesus Seminar are likely to be mostly black. We are told that Jesus did say “blessed are the poor” but not “blessed are the meek” or “blessed are the peacemakers”. Most of the Sermon on the Mount is eliminated, but so too is the blood atonement and the resur­rection. There is no need for walls when there is no foundation.

The only saying from Mark’s Gospel which is regarded as authentic is 12:27: “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and unto God the things that are God’s.” Only five of Jesus’ parables are con­sidered certain to go back to Jesus — the parable of the leaven (Matt. 13:33), the para­ble of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-35), the parable of the dishonest steward (Luke 16:1-8), the parable of the workers in the vineyard (Matt. 20:1-15), and the parable of the mustard seed as it is found in the Gospel of Thomas. The result is predictable enough. One of the Jesus Seminar partici­pants, Hal Taussig, presents a Jesus who speaks of attaining global peace, inter-faith harmony, ecology and feminism. It reminds one of Georg Tyrrell’s comment on the lib­eral Protestantism of Adolf von Harnack: The Christ that Harnack sees, looking back through 19 centuries of Catholic darkness, is only the reflection of a liberal Protestant face, seen at the bottom of a deep well. Nothing has changed — Taussig’s Jesus might almost have been a journalist who worked for the Religious Department of the ABC.

Some light relief is provided by the fact that the Jesus Seminar — showing a breath­taking disregard for commonsense, let alone critical scholarship — has ventured to take Barbara Thiering seriously. Over the years Thiering has perfected an almost A. A. Milne-like capacity for fantasizing. She believes that Jesus married Mary Magdalene, but she proved to be the mad unbelieving Rhoda of Acts 12 so Jesus divorced her. He later opened the heart of Lydia (Acts 16:14) and married her. This was a giant step forward for feminism as Lydia was a female bishop. There is more of the same — for example, the claim that the word increased (Acts 6:7; 12:24) means that Jesus had children!

John Dominic Crossan portrays Jesus as a wandering revolutionary Cynic philoso­pher who was willing to have table fellow­ship with anyone and who opposed any hierarchical structure in any social group­ings, including families. There is no room, of course, for anything like a resurrection, so Crossan asserts that “Christian faith is not Easter faith.”

Elisabeth Fiorenza portrays Jesus as one who saw God not as Father but as Sophia. Hence this Jesus pitted himself against patriarchalism; he was thus a first century precursor of Fiorenza and the feminist gospel. Abba becomes the Greek goddess of wisdom. Some time back Don Cupitt wrote Sea of Faith; he might have entitled it Faith at Sea.

We have descended into a bizarre kind of Gnosticism. History is being mangled, and faith becomes something created in the image of each individual, and divorced from any connection with reality. There are no boundaries left, and instead of our being conformed to the likeness of Jesus, He is conformed to our likeness.

In summary, the Jesus Seminar and its less than illustrious predecessors should not be viewed as part of a rarefied debate between competing scholars of somewhat equal standing. On the contrary, it is a modern expression of the age-old battle described in Revelation 12.

Kierkegaard once lamented:

It is so heartbreaking that Christ, who is the teacher of love, is betrayed — with a kiss.

So it is, and now we have the Jesus Seminar.