Introduction: Redrawing the Battle-lines

More than any other group of scholars, the Jesus Seminar courted historical Jesus controversy in both academic and popular culture in the 1980s and 1990s. Liberal, sage-like and shocking to certain wings of Christianity this Jesus may have been, the Jesus Seminar still had Jesus at, and perhaps in, its heart and it was essentially a Christian project. While Jesus may have been deemed a ‘secular sage’, and while some critics may have seen this Jesus as a product of secularization, it remained tied in with Christianity. John Dominic Crossan, like other major fellows such as Marcus Borg, is a well-known Christian of a liberal stripe. Crossan openly sees his historical Jesus work as a critique of the present, even to the extent of performing ‘open-heart surgery on Christianity itself’. Robert Funk's rhetoric remained religious and Protestant of a very liberal variety, a Christianity shorn of its dogma and miraculous stories. He may have come to challenge the worlds of traditional Christianity and right-wing Christianity, but he would do so by bringing a new Reformation and a new gospel, not least by posting ‘Twenty-one Theses’ on his website, a very modern spin on Luther's famous ‘95 Theses’ on the door of the Wittenberg church.