Major Book Reviews -- the Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and the Jesus Seminar

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"LEADING SCHOLARS," a self-designation of The Jesus Seminar, have here cast themselves in a heroic truth-telling role, battling dark forces in the cause of honesty on the Bible. (This, in our anything-goes world? So it seems.) The Jesus Seminar dedicates this effort to Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, and David Friedrich Strauss. Darwin does not make the dedication, but is honored on page 1. The book thus locates itself in the nineteenth-century battle of Protestant liberal theology to free those "held captive by prior theological commitments" (p. 5).

In its quest of the authentic words of Jesus, the Seminar relies on seven "pillars of scholarly wisdom": (1) the distinction between the …