Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium [Hardcover]

Robert Walter Funk (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1996

Robert Funk reveals how Jesus the iconoclast was transformed into Jesus the icon. Funk dismantles all the ancient gospels in his search for the rhetorical Jesus--the coiner of parables and aphorisms and the performer of symbolic acts. He finds in these more tha 100 authentic remnants a Jesus whose troubling vision of God's domain led him to Jerusalem and to his execution as a common criminal.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Honest to Jesus is far and away the best book about the goals and work of the contemporary Historical Jesus movement. Robert W. Funk is director of the Westar Institute, which sponsors an annual Jesus seminar in which scholars attempt to establish which events recorded in the gospels actually happened and which did not. In Honest to Jesus, Funk describes these scholars' professional methodologies and personal goals, and summarizes their surprising findings. His prose is clear, his passion is bracing, and his conclusions are challenging. Funk's Jesus, in the end, emerges as a revolutionary figure for a new age, without being the least bit New Age-y. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

In his 1963 book, Honest to God, Bishop John A.T. Robinson questioned the ways in which the traditional Christian doctrine of God could address the concerns of a church and culture that, Robinson said, had largely left the traditional doctrine behind. How could Christians, in his words, be "honest to God?" Now, Robert Funk, the provocative founder of the Jesus Seminar, asks a similar question about the ways in which late-20th century Christianity can be honest to Jesus in the light of work by the Jesus Seminar and other critics that argues that the traditional portait of Jesus as a supernatural miracle worker is neither supported by the Gospels nor meaningful to a contemporary technological society. Funk's Jesus is a person who "caught a glimpse of what the world is really like when you look at it with God's eyes and who endeavored to pass that glimpse along in disturbing short stories we call parables." But, the Gospels often conceal Funk's Jesus, so that he concludes that "the New Testament conceals the real Jesus as frequently as it reveals him." Funk proposes 21 theses, among them setting Jesus free from the "scriptural and creedal and experiential prisons in which we have entombed him"; abandoning the doctrine of the atonement based upon the blood sacrifice of Jesus; and "declaring that the New Testament is a highly uneven and biased record of various early attempts to invent Christianity." With this last declaration, Funk, exhibiting a self-assurance that often borders on self-righteousness, advocates revising the canon of scripture by which the Christian church has measured itself for the past 2000 years.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: Harper San Francisco; 1 edition (November 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060627573
• ISBN-13: 978-0060627577
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.5 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (28 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,052,249 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Glimpse of 21st Century Christianity, November 4, 2003

By 

Ian O'Neill (Stratford, Ontario) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (Paperback)

HONEST TO JESUS is a book about a topic that may be among the more important ideas of the early 21st century. It heralds a new chapter in the long, often obscure quest to verify the intellectual and moral integrity of the Christian religion.

In recent decades millions have sat quietly in church pews across the Western world with a growing realization that many of the doctrines to which they have been told to ascribe are at best suspect, at worst morally bankrupt. This consternation has been a key contributor to a dramatic decline in church attendance. For a growing minority, Christianity is no longer relevant at all. More often than not westerners hold a world view superficially anchored in the mythology of pop culture, which often promotes a steadfast denial of organized religion. 'God is dead' has been a cry often heard in the past one hundred years, a response to scientific advances on all fronts which systematically explode traditional Christian mythology.

HONEST TO JESUS covers a religiously charged topic with intellectual detachment, that is until Funk introduces his central idea. Easter and the apocalypse, he argues, have little, if anything to do with Jesus. They are, rather, merely what organized religion has encased him in, principally for the sake of power and popular appeal.

According to Funk the first thing Jesus had to say was a word against religion. Religion, Jesus must have declared, is defined by one's relationship to one's neighbor. Jesus of Nazareth led a life you could emulate if you cared to, but, unlike organized religion, there are inherently no rules to follow in so doing. For Jesus, Funk observes, 'God's domain' is already with us. It is not a place we go to after we die, but a frame of mind built in the context of selfless love. Life is to be celebrated as you would the sudden discovery of a cache of coins in a field. The needs of neighbor are the measure of everything while spontaneity and unselfconscious love are the hallmarks of a life well lived. The radicalism of these ideas are at once apparent, even today.

There is a smoldering anger in HONEST TO JESUS. In his comments in the Forward, the author indicates that among the expected readers of the book are a first group 'who are bitter from an initial deception by parent, clergy or the church. 'They once thought they were instructed in the truth, only to discover that their parents and the church had misled them. They had asked for bread but were given a stone. The bitterness and pain of that initial deception lingers on. They are the walking wounded.' Funk may or may not put himself in this class, but as the book goes on, his anger at the intellectual deceptions of modern Christianity becomes increasingly clear.

The great religious leaders of the 21st century will likely draw inspiration from Funk's body of work. To be successful, those leaders will have to capture hearts and minds without the beguiling and easy foment of Christian fundamentalism. That is a task that can only be accomplished with love, both a fearless love of the truth and a selfless love of humanity, two qualities which Jesus himself must have exhibited, but all too few have since. Funk's ideas, in short, call for a much deeper and more effective Christian faith, a faith which in light of the scientific possibilities of the new century, known and unknown, is absolutely essential.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Monroe, Michigan" (below) can be safely ignored., April 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (Paperback)

The Jesus Seminar of Robert Funk has been and hopefully will continue to be a contentious project. But while it is far from invulnerable to criticism, it is certainly unharmed by the comments of "a reader from Monroe, Michigan," below. Our critic makes several criticisms of varying clarity. The charge that, in a world of precarious or crumbling moral foundations, Funk and the Jesus Seminar have proceeded to salvage, within the limits of scholarship, the purely historical figure of Jesus heedless of the consequences to "our world," is basically true-- which is why the project is so significant. The new Scholars Version of the Gospels, and Funk's system of color grading the authenticity of words and deeds attributed to Jesus is not under the yoke of any religious organization or authority. To call the scholars involved "sanctimonious" is not only unwittingly ironic, considering that the obvious accusation would be "blasphemous" or "heretical," it is simply untrue. Their style of writing and presenting findings is usually quite restrained. As for the much mocked system of voting with beads, the method is as old as democracy itself and reflects the Seminar's commitment to representing the views of a large group scholars in a final result, though of course the Seminar Fellows' own books reflect their own views. (The statement that the Fellows "reject every word written in red" makes no sense, unless the critic is referring to previous red letter editions of the Gospels, in which case it is still confusing exaggeration, since they in fact reject exactly 82% of the words usually written in red.) The charge that Funk, Crossan and the others are so blinded by the their fascination with the historical Jesus that they are oblivious to the "purpose" of Jesus is both unfair and incorrect. First, the stated purpose of the whole project is to recover the historical Jesus. That this is in fact what it does, and that the reader is left to determine whether the Jesus of history is not a more engaging figure than the Christ of faith, is hardly an objection. Second, and more importantly, the attention paid to the "purposes" of Jesus is actually quite thorough. Time and again, the project and its members have exposed "purposes" found in the Gospels as belonging not to Jesus but to the evangelists and their communities, and revealed the New Testament itself as, in Funk's words, "a highly uneven and biased record of orthodox attempts to invent Christianity." This is exactly what anyone with a rational interest in Christianity -- which is, after all, an historical religion -- as exemplified by the life of Jesus, NOT by the theology of those writing in the decades after his death, should be interested in. (Also, a careful reading of 1 Corinthians 19:20, prescribed by our critic, is unlikely to prove fruitful since, as anyone not busy impressing himself by listing other authors might have noticed, there is no such verse, nor even chapter.) Beyond questioning what possible relevance a contrast between "authentic Christian faith" and "new age sophistry" (whatever exactly these two tortured labels supposedly mean) has for the discovery of the historical Jesus, I will not dignify the remainder of our critic's obnoxious complaints with responses. As stated above, and by Funk, the work of Funk and the Jesus Seminar in not infallible, and it could probably never give us a whole portrait of Jesus, but it is an oasis of clarity, reason and integrity in what will not cease to be a desert of wishful thinking and blissful ignorance anytime soon.

31 of 40 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Separating Fact From Fiction, October 2, 2000

By 

Edwardson Tan (.) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (Paperback)

Honest to Jesus is a no nonsense book that will delight the serious reader and quester for the historical Jesus. Out with mythology, out with theology, out with canonical boundaries. The There will be none of these in Funk's historical journey back to Nazareth to recover the identity of the real Yeshua.

Bob Funk, biblical scholar and founder of the Westar Institute which sponsors the Jesus Seminar project, has written a book that gives the layperson an inside look at what critical scholarship has unveiled thus far about the man we today know as Jesus. Funk avers that the Jesus whom Christianity has appropriated as its founder, god, messiah, savior, redeemer, miracle worker, etc. is hardly a good picture of the man who lived almost two millennia ago. The Christian Jesus/Christ is larger than life, a theologized and mythologized version. Funk asserts that the Apostle's Creed glaringly points to the importance the Church has placed on the life of Jesus--there is no mention of his life at all apart from his virgin birth, death and resurrection. The Creed turned Jesus into a god-man.

Funk's quest is to find the Jesus before all the layers of mythology and theology were piled on top of him. The quest for the historical Jesus is to determine what Jesus really said and did, what his vision of God was, what Jesus was trying to direct our attention to. Ultimately Christianity is not about Christ or Jesus but about God....