5 Ibid., p. 5.
6 Rudolf Bultmann, “New Testament and Mythology,” p. 5.
7 Ibid., p. 38.
8 John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, p. 82.
9 Ibid., p. 95.
10 Jarl Fossum, “Understanding Jesus’ Miracles,” Bible Review, Vol. X, No. 2 (April 1994), p. 50. It should be noted that Fossum is notlisted as a Fellow of the Jesus Seminar.
11 Funk, Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, Five Gospels, p. 25.
12 Ibid., p. 398.
what evidence could be adduced to show that the resurrection was an objective-historical event. He assumes that it is a myth.”^13
Bultmann’s rejection of the resurrection really does appear to be arbitrary and a priori. He does not even think that we should be interested in the historical question at all.^14 Interestingly, the Jesus Seminar takes a similar route. We have already noted that they are honest enough to state at the outset their aversion to the supernatural, including the deity and resurrection of Jesus, preferring to think that the modern scientific worldview simply rules out such matters.
By way of explanation and justification, the Seminar scholars provide more than three dozen “rules of written evidence”^15 and often report that various sayings of Jesus are editorial summations. To be fair, we should not require that they always provide reasons for their comments. But the fact is they seldom attempt to provide reasonsin order to justify their opinions. Rarely is there an attempt to verify their rules, except to say that certain things are accepted by scholars. Throughout, like Bultmann, their theological method is assumed and their conjectures can be thoughtfully challenged throughout. In short, we might say that these scholars exhibit a flare for the a priori.
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