The Jesus Seminar and The Jesus People

[Michie]

Evangelicals love Jesus. They are Jesus people, and for that reason Catholics and Evangelicals are together. Catholics, as the people who partake of Jesus' body, blood, soul and divinity, cannot help but be endeared to them.



Examining the Dead Sea Scrolls: "I know the canon is in here somewhere!"At Devin Rose's blog, he posted an article about Bert Ehrman and his approach to "debunking" the Bible. Much like the Jesus Seminar, Ehrman believes that through textual criticism and the historical critical method, the Bible can be proved an unreliable source and therefore not a supernatural book. I want to share with you what I said to add to this discussion with a comment afterwards:

Devin,
​

I would like to add a caveat/caution. I’m going to number my comments to make it easier to respond to them.
​

1. Catholics and Protestants are on the same side of the table (same team) regarding the problems with the historical-critical method. Ehrman et al. make a decision regarding what import the textual variants have on the inspiration of Scripture and ignore evidence that is still overwhelming in favor of our ability to trust the texts we have today.
​

2. What Ehrman et al. are doing is deconstructionist/revisionist history. It starts with a theory and then makes a false deduction and then exports that theory and projects it onto the historical facts. This is a popular way “to do” history today. In this case, Ehrman et al. use this method to demythologize the text and in the end to make Christ no more than a tragic guru.
​

3. However, history does not take an infallible Magisterium to understand it or to know it with the certainty proper to our natural cognitive ability. It is not revealed religion but rather something we can apprehend through the right use of our reason. History is the unfolding and subsequent record of reality, not the in-breaking of the divine through accommodation and condescension as is the case for revealed religion.
​

4. Thus, the Catholic, employing the right use of reason, must acknowledge that there was not consensus regarding the canon in the early Church. No list nor set of lists sufficiently corroborates a Protestant or Catholic canon in such a way as to necessitate the assent of the intellect. In other words, it is not the same as the “sky is blue” and all one simply must do is look at the sky to confirm it.
​

Continued- http://www.almostnotcatholic.com/2011/08/jesus-seminar-and-jesus-people.html
​