The 18% Pure Pink Bible?


July 20, 2010

One of the most innovative ways to question the words of Scripture was formulated a number of years ago by a group dubbed The Jesus Seminar. The group was put together by biblical scholar Robert Funk in an attempt to find the authentic words of Jesus in the New Testament. But the group was anything but objective, or scholarly. At the initial meeting, held on the campus of Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California in 1985, Funk laid out his agenda. In the very first meeting of the Seminar he said:

Those of us who work with that hypothetical middle [between creation and the end of all things] —Jesus of Nazareth—are hard pressed to concoct any form of coherence that will unite beginning, middle, and end in some grand new fiction that will meet all the requirements of narrative. To put the matter bluntly, we are having as much trouble with the middle—the messiah—as we are with the terminal points. What we need is a new fiction that takes as its starting point the central event in the Judeo-Christian drama and reconciles that middle with a new story that reaches beyond old beginnings and endings. In sum, we need a new narrative of Jesus, a new gospel, if you will, that places Jesus differently in the grand scheme, the epic story. 

So much for objectivity. Deciding what you are going to find before you do the research is a little one-sided. And searching for a “new fiction” sort of throws out the “scholarly” part too. Nevertheless, the project proceeded. Meeting twice a year, each member came prepared to “vote” on a certain saying of Jesus in the New Testament. Of the seventy five “scholars” invited to participate, only fourteen held credible teaching positions in theology. An average of thirty voted at each of the meetings for the next six years. The voting was done by each person placing colored beads in a box after a discussion of a certain issue. A red bead meant “He said it,” a pink bead meant “He probably said it,” a gray bead meant “He probably did not say it,” and a black bead meant “He did not say it.” In a critique of the methodology, Ben Witherington notes that the Jesus they ended up with was a benign, witty, and humorous Jesus who seemed a much better candidate for a visit to Letterman or Leno than the incarnation of God. 

Their whimsical voting method, which ignores tons of biblical research, ends with some predictably disastrous results. For example, the book of John ended up with nothing red (historically accurate), and the heretical Gospel of Thomas garnered enough red votes to regard it as the new fifth Gospel. Amazingly, the Jesus Seminar concluded that only about 18% of the sayings attributed to Jesus by the gospel writers were really His. No wonder scholar Peter Jones concludes they succeeded in creating “a canon within the canon, dismissing much of what the Church has considered canonical as secondary accretion, at best.”  Imagine, only 18% of the words of Jesus read and trusted by millions of people over the past two thousand years now considered trustworthy. What’s left to read?

You would think the “scholars” would either be embarrassed by their findings or simply conclude that whatever Jesus really said, it was completely useless. But no, they had the audacity to publish the book of Matthew from their 18% pure pink Bible in 2005 under the name “Scholar’s Bible.” Wonder how many lives that will change?

So – how much of the Bible really is the Word of God? We can start with the assertion in 2 Timothy 3:16 – “All Scripture is inspired by God . . .”  Literally, the words “inspired by God” is one word in Greek. It is theopneustos. The first part, theo, means “God.” The second part, pneustos, means “breath.” It’s the same word we get “spirit” from. So the phrase, “inspired by God” literally means “breathed out by God.” How much of it? I’m thinking that “All Scripture” means all of it. That sounds like 100% to me.

Now, if you really want to get technical, the doctrine of inerrancy means that we believe the Bible is 100% accurate in the original writings. That is, when God dictated the Scripture in the original Hebrew and Greek (with a few chapters in Aramaic), He gave the exact words He wanted to use 100% of the time. 1 Cor. 2:13 indicates the Bible came to us “not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, combining spiritual thoughts with spiritual words.” I’d say the “human wisdom” of the Jesus Seminar doesn’t compare with the words from the Holy Spirit, wouldn’t you?

But we don’t have the original writings. With the process of document degradation in the early years of the church, copies had to be made of the original writings. That means that there were various copies of these early writings that survived for later examination. But not only did more copies of the New Testament documents survive than any other writing of antiquity, the variants reveal amazing accuracy. Geisler and Nix report that:

…only about one-eighth of all the variants had any weight, as most of them are merely mechanical matters such as spelling or style.  Of the whole, then, only about one-sixtieth rise above 'trivialities,' or can in any sense be called 'substantial variations.' Mathematically this would compute to a text that is 98.33 percent pure.