The following is a chapter taken from the book, "Jesus at 2000", a collection of papers edited by Marcus Borg. This book includes work by important contemporary Jesus scholars such as Marcus Borg, Harvey Cox, John Dominic Crossan, Alan Segal, Huston Smith and Karen Jo Torjessen. "Jesus at 2000" is © copyright 1998 by Westview Press, ISBN 0-8133-3253-2

Highly Recommended.

 For fifteen years I have taught a course at Harvard College on Jesus. Designed mainly for undergraduates, it begins with a careful review of the life of Jesus as it unfolds in the synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke). It then moves on to two principal foci. The first is the effort currently being made toward the historical reconstruction of Jesus in the work of people such as Marcus Borg, Dominic Crossan, and John Meier. The other focus might be called the cultural resymbolization of Jesus in current theologies, poetry, literature, and the popular arts. This second focus includes the appearance of indigenized interpretations of Christ among Asian, African, and Latin American Christians; the ways Jesus is understood in non-Christian religions such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism; and, finally, the persistent reappearance of Christ figures in contemporary films, music, novels, and even MTV.

The whole thing began in 1982 when a college administrator asked me to design a course that could be offered in the "moral reasoning" division of the newly devised core curriculum. The next fall I began teaching'Jesus and the Moral Life," at first in the basement auditorium of the Fogg Art Museum. To the astonishment of the people on the college administration who thought Harvard students were not too interested in religion, and of outside critics who thought of Harvard as a den of agnosticism, from the outset the course drew enormous numbers of students. Usually from four hundred to eight hundred enrolled. One year registration topped one thousand, and I had to move the lectures to Sanders Theater, where visiting orchestras and rock groups perform.

Although I would like to attribute the enormous interest in the course to my own eloquence, honesty compels me to say that the real reason probably lies elsewhere. Although Harvard students, like their counterparts elsewhere, had begun to evidence a growing interest in religion during the 1980s, one that continues unabated today, they had been given little opportunity to pursue this inquisitiveness at our school. In checking old catalogs, I noticed that no course specifically onjesus had been taught at Harvard College since Professor George Santayana offered one just before he left Harvard for good in 1912. I was merely filling a very wide and continuous gap.

Like any course, this one has evolved over the years as new scholarship and new interpretations of Jesus continue to appear. Also, any teacher is constantly looking for new ways to present material so that it makes some connection with the changing student mentality; so while I was teaching, I was also carefully monitoring term papers, listening attentively to the questions students asked in class, leading discussion sections, and studying the evaluations students wrote at the end. I probably learned as much about them as they learned from me, and since the nearly four thousand students who have taken this course are now the twenty-somethings or the Generation X of so much recent analysis and speculation, I think I know at least a little about their minds and spirits.

I especially include the word "spirit" here because it quickly became evident to me that most of the students had not enrolled in the course merely to fulfill a moral reasoning requirement (there were forty other courses they could have taken to do that) or just to satisfy their idle curiosity. They were looking for something else, something more existential. I know this because after a few years, in addition to the exams and book reports, I also began requiring a paper at the end of the semester in which each student was invited to answer, entirely in his or her own terms, the question Jesus put to his disciples at Caesarea Phillipi: "Who do you say that I am?" (Mark 8.27). I assured them that they could be as orthodox or heretical, as appreciative or critical, as they chose, and that, although the paper was required, it would not be given a grade. I also announced that I would personally read and respond to as many of the papers as I could. Later on I also permitted those students who wished to, to submit a self-made video, poem, musical composition, or some other expression as long as it constituted their own response to Jesus' question.

As a result of what I have learned (and continue to learn) in this course, the purpose of this presentation is to record some observations about Jesus and Generation X. My data, therefore, do not consist of a clutch of dusty new manuscript finds from Nag Hammadi or the latest results of the Jesus Seminar polling. Instead, I rely on the stacks of term papers, tapes, songs, and poetry I have received from my students in the past decade. I want to address such questions as:

Who is Generation X?

What attracts (and repels) the members of this generation about Jesus?

Why do they feel and think the way they do about religion and spirituality?

How can the message of and aboutiesus be most effectively communicated to them?

What can those of us who are not part of this generation learn from it about life, about Jesus, and maybe about ourselves?

Who is Generation X?

The label itself suggests an anomalous conglomerate, a demographic blip with no distinct identity. These young men and women are certainly not Gertrude Stein's "lost generation" of the 1920s. They are not interested in fighting either bulls in Madrid or fascists in Barcelona. They are not the activist/hippie/dropout cohort of the 1960s. They are not even the narcissistic "me generation" of the 1980s. They are something different. Indeed, there is something indefinable about these twenty-somethings (some of whom are now early thirty-somethings). They are neither rebels nor conformists, neither libertines nor ascetics, and-perhaps most germane for our purposes -- neither believers nor nonbelievers. They are something sui generis.

Perhaps the first thing to register about Generation Xers is that they are certainly not indifferent to religion. A 1994 Gallup poll reported that fillly 86 percent of Generation X say that religion is "important" and 43 percent that it is , "very important" to them. In these respects they do not differ markedly from the findings about the American population as a whole. Yet there is something else going on, for 83 percent of the Generation Xers questioned said they thought religion was losing influence in our society, while somewhat fewer (69 percent) of the general population think it is. As the baffled Harvard administration --and I myself -- discovered from the experience of my course, this is not a generation that is bored or blase about religion. But this generation is interested in religion, as I was to find out, in a quite different way.

Nevertheless, statistics cannot tell us much. Music does. One of the features I introduced in my course was that as the students entered the lecture hall, I would always have music playing. I played parts of a wide variety of selections during the ten minutes before the class actually began: hymns; Gregorian chant; the sacred music of Bach, Mozart, and contemporary composers; Mahalia Jackson; gospel choirs. After a while, students began requesting their favorites, then bringing in their own tapes. Now and then among these would be songs by rock groups that focused on Jesus. I was grateful for this introduction into a musical idiom with which I was not familiar.

But as I listened to it, I found I was learning something important about my students. For one thing, they are painfully aware of their lostness and confusion, and they know their dilemma has something important to do with the fact that they have a hard time believing anything. They see their situation in spiritual terms, a kind of latter-day "dark night of the soul." I learned this when a student brought in a tape by a group called the Goo Goo Dolls that to her seemed very germane to a course on Jesus:

don't it make you sad to know that life is
more than who we are
we grew up way too fast
and now there's nothing to believe
and reruns all become our history

Indeed, for Generation X the admixture of confessing a sense of confusion with a wistful longing for something else is a central quality of much of the music. Take this lyric, for example, from the rock artist Sting:

You could say I lost my faith
In science and progress.
You could say I lost my belief
In the holy church.

As this song shows, the most striking quality about the young people of Generation X is that, although they may have lost faith in traditional religion, they have also lost faith in the adversaries of traditional religion. They have lost faith both in holy church and in science and progress. It is hard to imagine a member of Generation X losing his or her faith "like a sudden ascending whirl of dust particles" after reading Charles Darwin or Robert Ingersoll, as did the Reverend Clarence Wilmot in 1910 in John Updike's new novel "In the Beauty of the Lilies." Also, the fact that they have lost faith in traditional religion does not mean they have lost interest or even deep concern. They are willing to rely on science for the limited things it has proved it can do, but their heads are already crammed with images of dead fish and seagulls immobilized by oil spills, lists of endangered species, and the rancorous debate over global warming. They are grimly aware, as their parents sometimes were not, that science cannot answer their most pressing questions. They remain enormously intrigued with the traditional religions, especially with their mystical expressions, but not with conventional churches. They want to pick and choose and are less willing to accept religions either as full-blown systems of truth or as authoritative institutions.

But there is another equally impressive quality about Generation Xers. They are fully willing to admit that they have lost their sense of direction, even willing to sing about it. The lyrics of their songs contain neither the caustic polemics of the Grateful Dead nor the loopy fantasies of the Beatles. Their amorphous indeterminacy has its positive side. They appear ready to move on and are on the lookout for a more promising map of reality. Furthermore, as I also found out, although they have their doubts about doctrines and rituals, ministers and theologians, they retain a continuing fascination for Jesus. Sometimes Christ appears in a disguised form, but often his appearance is quite explicit, as in these lines from a rock tune entitled "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," which was sung by the wildly popular group U2:

I believe in the kingdom come

when all the colors will bleed into one ...

you broke the thorns

and loosed the chains

carry the cross of my shame

you know I believe it

but I still haven't found what I'm looking for ...

Strangely attracted to the figure ofJesus, but still looking for something indefinable, Generation Xers see Jesus as beyond or before churches and different from the doctrines they have heard about him. Let us examine a couple of the most salient qualities of Generation X and note how they correlate with its "take" on Jesus.

1. Generation Xers are famously suspicious of all institutions, including governmental, educational, and religious ones. But they are looking for a Jesus they can trust. I think this explains some of the enormous popularity of the recent books about the "new quest" for the historical Jesus. Whatever Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg and John Meier and the others think they are doing, I am convinced that what the young (and not-so-young) people who read them are looking for is a deinstitutionalized Jesus, one who does not come bearing any institution's imprimatur.

The problem, of course, is that if they take the current quest for the historical Jesus with any degree of intellectual seriousness, they often soon become more confused than they were before they started. No wonder. A few years ago in a widely influential article, Jesuit biblical scholar Daniel J. Harrington suggested that there were at least seven plausible contending portraits of Jesus in scholarly circulation. One was E. P. Sanders's picture in "Jesus and Judaism" (1985) of an eschatological prophet bent on reforming the temple and Jewish national life. Another was the revolutionary Jesus of S.G.E Brandon's "Jesus and the Zealots" (1967). In 1978 the recently deceased historian Morton Smith published "Jesus the Magician," in which he claimed to discern behind the gospel stories -- especially the exorcisms and the sojourn in Egypt -- a popular wonderworker who disturbed the religious establishment. Harvey Falk in "Jesus the Pharisee" (1985) situated Jesus within the School of Hillel during its struggle with the School of Shammai (two Pharisaic "schools" of interpretation) for control of the Jewish community in Palestine. Geza Vermes portrayed Jesus as a Galilean charismatic in "Jesus the Jew" (1973), and Bruce D. Chilton in "The Galilean Rabbi and His Bible" (1984) saw Jesus as a teacher of Torah.

Since these books appeared, a new generation of scholars has further multiplied the options. There has probably never been a period in which so many scholars -- stimulated by new manuscript finds, the refinement of archaeological procedures, and new analytic methods -- have been so preoccupied with the debate about who Jesus really was and have churned out so many options. Indeed, one of my students, puzzling over this cast of characters, told me it seemed to him like an old-fashioned police lineup in which a random gaggle of men is positioned against a height marker under bright lights while someone tries to identify the real culprit.

But where does all of this leave Generation X? Still baffled. Paradoxically, perhaps the most positive result of the "new search," its cumulative failure to answer the existential question about Jesus, is also its greatest success. Students -- and the rest of us -- discover that, despite all the splendid efforts of those committed to the new quest for the historical Jesus, the exisistential question about Jesus remains just as pressing as ever. Thus, any lingering misplaced confidence that science (in this case the "science" of history informed by the various archaeological, text-critical, anthropological, and associated disciplines) can answer our deepest spiritual questions is frustrated again, and we are back where we began: "But who do you say that I am?"

Well, not quite where we began. One of the most attractive features of the scholars engaged in this renewed quest is that they realize their best efforts fall short of answering the most important questions. I particularly appreciate Dominic Crossan's report that after he had finished his massive and brilliant work, he asked Jesus whether he had done enough. The Master answered, "No, Dominic, you have not. " The fact is, of course, that for Generation X and for the rest of us, the question of who Jesus was is only half-and maybe not even half-of the story. The question of who Jesus is remains the big one. For this reason, I have devoted most of my course not to the historical retrieval of Jesus but to contemporary appropriations of him.

 

2. Generation X is the first to come of age in an America characterized by radical religious pluralism. I became graphically aware of this a few years ago when a student in my course-a typically hardworking premed studentsought me out during my office hours to inquire about courses on the other religions of the world. When I asked him what had prompted him to want to take a course that would pull him away from physiology and quantitative analysis, he said, "Well, my roommate is a Muslim, my girlfriend is a Buddhist, and my lab partner is a Hindu. I'm beginning to think it's time for me to find out where they're coming from"

As a consequence of this awareness of the religious heterogeneity of the world, and a discomfort with the traditional exclusivist claims of Christianity, students are fascinated by the section of the course that deals with the understanding of Jesus in non-Christian religions. They often seem relieved when they find out that Jesus continues to be religiously and morally significant for millions of people today who are not Christians. They are surprised to learn that Mohandas Gandhi, who remained a Hindu his whole life and explicitly refused to allow himself to be called "Christian," claimed to have been influenced by Jesus more than by any other single figure and by the Sermon on the Mount in particular. When Gandhi's biographer Louis Fischer visited the mahatma in 1942 in his simple cottage at the ashram, Fischer found only one picture on the wall. It was a picture of Jesus, with the words "He is our Peace" (from the Epistle to the Ephesians) underneath. This should not be surprising. As Indian scholar M. M. Thomas pointed out several years ago, Jesus was an important ethical and symbolic figure for many of the makers of the modern Hindu renaissance.

Meanwhile, many Buddhists celebrate Jesus as a consummate bodhisattva, one who refuses to abandon this world of suffering and illusion until all sentient creatures can accompany him. A recent large painting by a Buddhist artist from Sri Lanka depicts Jesus sitting in the lotus position, surrounded by the ugly demons of ego, but with his right hand touching the earth, as the Buddha's did at his moment of enlightenment. For the more philosophically inclined Buddhists, such as Masao Abe of the Kyoto School, the idea that God "emptied himself," as Saint Paul writes, suggests that the Buddhist idea of God as emptiness or even nothingness may not be as foreign to Christianity as it first appears.

Among Jewish thinkers, there has also been an explosion of writing about Jesus in recent decades. The works of David Flusser, Pinchas Lapide, and Geza Vermes are probably best known. But there is much more. In fact, by now a survey of this literature by Protestant scholar D. A. Hagner, which was first published in 1984, is already out of date. Why this enormous new interest? Rabbi Alan Mittleman explains it this way:' Beginning with Moses Mendelssohn and his contemporaries, Jewish writers were already departing from the caricatures of Jesus that their medieval predecessors had favored and were discovering in him instead "a like-minded Jew." Jesus, Mittlemarl says, has been in a sense "returning to his ancestral home" This homecoming is an important part of the modern discovery by Jews of their own history, an aspect of the currentJewish search for "essence and definition."

This is obviously true, but let it be noted that a Jewish artist, namely, Marc Chagall, was decades ahead ofJewish scholars in attempting to reclaim Jesus for Judaism. I always project a slide of Chagall's "White Crucifixion" sometime during the course. It depicts a bearded, crucified Jew wearing a Jewish prayer shawl and surrounded by drawings of the expulsions, pogroms, and murders that have pursued the Jewish people for centuries. Jesus is seen as a part of this history of suffering. Year after year students tell me that if they forget everything else, they will never forget that image.

As time went by, however, I found that I was devoting more time in the section of the course on Jesus in non-Christian religions to Islam. There are several reasons. One is that Islam appears in the media far more than any other non-Christian religion and is usually associated with terrorists and fanatics. Also, the Muslim students at Harvard seem unusually well informed about their faith and quite willing to talk about it. Islam is, next to Christianity, the largest religion in the world, and it is my personal conviction that the dialogue between Christians and Muslims is becoming the most important interfaith frontier for the next century. Indeed, in some quarters the polemic is heating up in an ominous way. There is a virtual civil war between Muslims and Christians in the Sudan. In addition, the dialogue here in America has sometimes fallen into the wrong hands. Recently, a Christian student showed me a videotape of a debate between Jimmy Swaggart and one Ahmad Deedat. It brimmed with polemic and caricature, not the kind of dialogue I want to see happen. Consequently, I have made a special effort to understand current Muslim views of Jesus, relying frequently on my students to bring me summaries and translations of works in Arabic, a language I cannot read. In doing this work, I have made some surprising discoveries.

First, it is clear to me that whether Christian historical scholars are aware of it or not, the recent work they have done on Jesus has made a considerable impact on Muslim scholars. It is not hard to see why. Historically, Muslims have always contended that the Christian Gospels are corrupted versions of earlier and more accurate accounts. This contention supports the orthodox Muslim conviction that Jesus was never crucified, that a disciple took his place, or that Judas was crucified instead. Now as these alert Muslim scholars (who can read English more often than we can read Arabic) peruse current historical Jesus studies, which are marked by a deep skepticism about the historicity of whole portions of the Gospels, it is natural for the Muslims to say, "See, this is just what we've been telling you all along. The Gospels were written many years later by people who weren't even there and who invented Jesus' claim to be God. Look, your own people say so!"

Nor do Muslim critics restrict their reading to historical Jesus studies. Jamal Baduri, after reading John Hick's "The Myth of God Incarnate," wrote that the book confirmed that Christians were at last coming to see what Muslims have always held: that Jesus was not God in the flesh but a prophet and that the atonement, which has been a scandal to Muslims for centuries, is a fiction. The Muslim scholars' conclusion, however, which would not be pleasing to most members of the Jesus Seminar, is that the account of Jesus in the Koran is more trustworthy.

How all this will eventually affect the Christian-Muslim dialogue remains to be seen. Ironically, the portrait of Jesus that Muslims seem to favor -- the miracle worker and ascetic mystic -- is often the one that Christian historians find least attractive. However, some Christian biblical scholars have recently suggested that, given what we now know about the variety of views of Jesus that were alive and well during the first five centuries of Christianity, the Muslim view is not all that different and no more or less justified.

Once again, it seems to me that the best hope for a breakthrough in the Muslim-Christian contention about Jesus may not come from the historical critical scholars but from those Christians and Muslims who try to express the contemporary significance of Jesus in novels, poetry, and plays. Naguib Mahfouz is the Nobel prize-winning Egyptian novelist who has evoked both praise and condemnation from his fellow Muslims. His novel "Children of Gebelawi" tells the story of a reclusive old man named al Jabalawi who rules over a section of Cairo. Since he rarely shows himself in public, those he authorizes to make decisions in his name often abuse his authority for their own purposes. It is clear to most readers and critics that aljabalawi is God and that those who speak in his name are the prophets, Satan, and, more recently, scientists. There is also a figure in the novel named Rifa'ah who is obviously meant to represent Jesus. He is a gentle and loving man who is killed by his hateful enemies. The prophets do not succeed in their purposes, and finally a scientist stealthily enters aljabalawi's palace to examine his credentials and his deed to the property. In a scuffle that follows, the old man is killed. The prophets have failed, the gentle mediator has been killed, and science has killed God.

Mahfouz received stinging criticism from conservative Muslims both for suggesting that the prophets have failed and that God is dead and for making a figure who obviously symbolizes Jesus the most attractive character in the book. But Mahfouz is hardly alone. Although for centuries Muslims wrote almost nothing about Jesus, they now seem to be making up for lost time. In an article recently published in "The Muslim World," Hugh P. Goddard has catalogued literally dozens of articles, books, plays, and novels about Jesus written by Egyptian Muslims alone in recent years. These authors seem to favor biographies, interpretations of Jesus as a teacher of wisdom, comparisons between Christ and the Prophet, and stories and plays in which a Muslim young man falls in love with a Coptic Christian woman, or vice versa, and catastrophe is a verted when they come to see (at least in the minds of the writers) that there is no real contradiction between the two faiths.

What attracts Generation Xers to this flowering of non-Christian interpretations of Jesus? Is it that they can retain their belief in him, however they may parse that belief, without appearing to claim some spirituality superior to that of their Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist classmates? I think that is part, though only part, of the answer. The fact that non-Christians see something of immense value in Jesus helps make Jesus the truly universal figure students somehow feel he must be.

Therefore, they are happy to discover that some Christian scholars, instead of merely dismissing non-Christian interpretations of Jesus as unwarranted intrusions, have begun to see them as valuable insights that can be selectively integrated into a Christian's own understanding of Jesus. This is important because Generation X is the first to come of age in an era when religious pluralism is not somewhere across the globe but at the desk next to yours in the lab and across the hall in the dorm.

Maybe another explanation for this unprecedented openness to "outside" voices on what used to be considered the most "inside" of all topics -- Christology -- is that so many new constructions and reformulations of the meaning ofJesus have appeared within the Christian community itself. With Christians themselves talking about Jesus as the liberator or the goddess-within, why lock the doors against avatars and bodhisattvas? At the meetings of the section of the American Academy of Religion that deals with Christology, one hears very few discussions nowadays about the Chalcedonian formula, but papers abound on the importance of feminism, liberation theology, interfaith dialogue, and religious pluralism in understanding the significance of Jesus. The lesson for me in all of this is that one can no longer first work out one's doctrine of Christ without reference to the religious heterogeneity of the world and then, as a subsequent step, enter into the interfaith dialogue. Rather, the dialogue must help shape the Christology from the outset.

The exuberant eclecticism of Generation X may sound novel at first, but that is hardly the case. After all, from the beginning, Christians have drawn freely on the philosophical categories and religious images of the cultures around them to express who they thought this man Jesus was. We borrowed the idea of the Logos from the Hellenistic environment of the early church. We took the images of a sacrificial lamb from Jewish temple worship and the idea of a dying and rising savior from ancient mystery religions. Some historians have contended that Christianity is at its most vigorous when it can boldly utilize the cultural imagery of its time and place, and at its weakest when it rigidly rejects this material and clings defensively to previously defined formulations. If so, then we are presently in a vigorous period indeed, and what some fearfiil defenders recoil from as syncretism is in fact a venturesome willingness to plunge in and take risks. If previous generations took this leap, why should Generation X not be allowed to jump in as well?

3. Generation X believes in picking and choosing, not in swallowing the whole package. This quality, of course, enrages some theologians and religious leaders, who inveigh against "cafeteria-style" religion. But selective appropriation (which also entails selective leaving out) has gone on throughout the history of Christianity and every other religion. In the case of Generation X, selective appropriation manifests itself in the fondness many of them show for Stephen Mitchell's "The Gospel According to Jesus." Mitchell, like many members of Generation X, is a mischling. He was raised Jewish, attended a private Christian school as a boy, and later underwent horrendously difficult training to become a Zen adept. He is also (unlike, alas, an increasing number of Generation Xers) a gifted linguist and has already published renditions of other religious texts. But the book is not a new translation of the Gospels. Rather, it is a highly selective rereading and interpretation of those parts of them that engage Mitchell's own very demanding and finely honed spiritual sensibilities. Like Thomas Jefferson, who once used a pair of scissors to snip out the portions of the Gospels that did not appeal to his deist leanings, Mitchell has culled the synoptic writings and given us brisk and accurate renderings of several portions, paired with his fascinating reflections on them and some wellsuited comparisons to philosophers, Zen masters, Hasids, visionaries, and Poets.

This may sound like a risky approach, and it is. But it seems to reach many Generation Xers at the core of their spiritual sensibility. For this reason, Mitchell's approach provides us with an invaluable insight into them, if not into Jesus himself. Jesus, or at least Mitchell's attractive portrait of him, seems to fire the interest of believers and nonbelievers alike. His treatments of the account of the woman taken in adultery, the parable of the prodigal son, and the healing of the Syrophoenician woman are particularly engaging. Students resonate with Mitchell's work because it is not exclusivist and it relates the gospel stories immediately to contemporary life experience.

But I have to admit that I have my doubts about this Jeffersonian approach to the texts. I do not suggest this comparison offhandedly: Mitchell himself compares his snip-and-paste method to that of Jefferson, the sage of Monticello, in the book's introduction. Can we really deal with the New Testament on the basis of such unapologetically subjective criteria -- take what you like and leave the rest? On the one hand, I suppose there is no reason that we cannot. In fact, people have been doing so for centuries, often with considerably less candor than Mitchell. After all, the canonization process itself, by which the leaders of the early church put some Gospels in the New Testament and consigned others to the dustbin (or more accurately, to desert caves where quite a few have shown up in recent years) was a highly selective one. And as Elaine Pagels has argued in "The Gnostic Gospels, " the people who made that selection were hardly evenhanded. They were all celibate men who, in effect, scissored out embarrassing references to Jesus' relationship with Mary Magdalene and texts that suggested that God might be female or that one could find him or her without the mediation of a hierarchy. Jefferson was not the first to take the shears to the Scriptures.

The process, in fact, goes on all the time. Ever since the canon was closed, every theologian has had a "canon within the canon," working some of the teachings of Jesus to death while ignoring others. How many times have I heard opponents of liberation theology spout the verse about the poor being always with us or about leaving things of this world to Caesar? But they seem to ignore Jesus' constant condemnations of the rich and his promise of the first fruits of the Kingdom of God to the poor, the sick, and the prisoners. So maybe Mitchell is simply being more up front about a subjectivity that is always operative in these matters.

But I am still uneasy. As it happens, I almost always resonate with Stephen Mitchell's choices of what to include, though I am sorry he did nothing at all with the resurrection stories. This decision puzzled me since his is no ultrarationalistic edition. For example, he offers a wonderful reading of the Annunciation -- the story of the angel Gabriel informing Mary that she is to have a child -- and throws in a marvelous description of his own experience with angels during his 100-day Zen meditation ordeal. But even though Mitchell and I are attracted to the same passages, I could not help wondering as I read his collage of excerpts (for that is what it is) what Stephen King's scrapbook of gospel stories would look like. Or Madonna's. Or Rush Limbaugh's.

If we are to avoid the danger of the "a-thing-is-what-l-say-it-is" morass, then it is important for people with Mitchell's daunting capabilities to wrestle precisely with the episodes in Jesus' life they find most intransigent and unattractive. What do we do with his cursing of the innocent fig tree, his ordering his disciples to equip themselves with a sword (a sort of embarrassment to pacifists), and other instances of abrasive behavior and speech? Was he serious when he said that even to look at a woman with a lustfiil eye was as bad as adultery? Or was he engaging in hyperbole? Or demonstrating vividly that when it comes to sins of the flesh, we are all pretty much in the same boat, so there is no room to gloat, no excuse -- as the Buddhists would say -- for "moral aggression"? These are all intriguing questions. They leap out at you when you read the Gospels. I would love to hear Mitchell's ideas on them. But since he discusses only the passages he takes a shine to, we are deprived of that exchange. And that, in my view, is too bad.

As the never-ending task of interpreting and reinterpreting Jesus moves into the third millennium, the two waves I have touched on will surely continue as well. The historical reconstruction ofJesus will sharpen more and more precise analytic instruments and theoretical constructs. Only the most naive investigator could believe that we have seen the last of the "new" quests. The cultural resymbolization of Jesus will undoubtedly continue and, I think, expand. But a very critical question remains: What is the relationship between the historical reconstruction of Jesus and the imaginative resymbolization of Jesus? What is the proper interplay between historical studies, on the one hand, and poetry, iconography, and cinema, on the other, for the spiritual life of twentyfirst-century Generation Xs to come? Do the historical records and the canonical Scriptures set any limits on the freewheeling play of the religious imagination? Do the new imaginative portraits suggest anything about what historical research might be most appropriate? In short, do these two trajectories have anything to do with each other?

I think they do. One might be struck at first by the variety of historical Jesuses that Harrington catalogs, but a second look reveals that they all have one very important thing in common: They are all recognizably Jewish. The Jesus they describe is a participant in one of the many Jewish subcultures of first-century Palestine. The God that Jesus talks about and whose will he tries to make known is not the deity of some generalized theism but the God of Abraham, made known through the covenant with the Jewish people as one who has active compassion for the outsider and who promises justice and healing to all nations. This Jewish parameter, though one may disagree on its exact boundaries, provides the playing field within which new images of Jesus must be worked out, unless they surrender all claims of being connected to the historical figure whose name they bear.

Also, however, since we all know that historians do not set out on their tasks with no intuitive inspiration or cultural presuppositions, how can we evaluate the impact that the prevailing cultural-theological climate has on their findings? I love the Jesus whom Dominic Crossan has recovered. But is it really a pure accident that his Jesus strongly resembles the Jesus of contemporary liberation theology, which I also like? The question is a very large one. It will fuel the new christological debate for some time to come, and it is hard to forecast what answers will be forthcoming.

This brings me to the most startling thing I discovered about myself in teaching these many years about Jesus. I found that as a person who holds to the central religious -- call it existential -- significance of Jesus, the old creedal formulas began to become oddly important. This came as a surprise to me because I was raised in a noncreedal denomination and heard about Nicea and Chalcedon only when I went to seminary. I had always been puzzled and a little put off by the creeds. But what I have come to see is that what they were trying to say, in their clunky Greek metaphysical categories, is that Jesus was a real historical figure, not a phantom, and that his continuing moral and spiritual meaning -- his power to reveal God to us (his "divinity," if you will) -- is integrally linked with his historicity. For me, this means that the Jewishness of Jesus and his identification with the outcasts and impoverished of his day, which led to his fatal clash with the imperial authority, are not optional elements in a future Christology. They have theological significance because they are historical.

But the significance of Jesus for people such as the students in my course (and for me) is not merely historical. That would be antiquarianism: Interesting, perhaps even intensely interesting, but not existentially crucial. Maybe this stubborn recognition that Jesus must be both fully historical and yet somehow much more is what sparked those curious resurrection stories -- so fugitive and incongruous -- with which the four Gospels all come to their strangely postmodern endings. This is why I am so sorry that Stephen Mitchell, who was not afraid to take on the angel at the Annunciation, backed away from the one who confronted the women at the tomb and asked them, "Why seek ye the living among the dead?" Perhaps, like Jacob, Mitchell should have wrestled with that one as well, even if it took him all night. I think his Zen master would have approved, and I think the likable, searching, inquisitive young people of Generation X, in their fetching disquietude and distress, should do that wrestling, too. There is no way, in the end, to escape the question that Jesus himself puts to every succeeding generation, including Generation X: "Who do you say that I am?"

Questions and Responses from the Symposium

Q: What would you say in response to the question you asked your students to write on: "Who do you say that I am?"

A: I knew this question was going to come sooner or later. I'd like to hear all of the par ticipants in this conference-speakers and audience alike-respond. My answer would be very much like the answer 91 . ven by Peter to the question when it was first posed: "You are the Christ, the Son of the living God ' " That allows me a lot of space be cause yesterday I was given a big license by Karen Torjesen to redefine divinity in a very refreshing, new, and expansive way.

My response to your question is always in process. I have no final answer to it. But it's a question that I will never cease to try to respond to, not just verbally but in the way I lead my life. Remember what happened after Peter's response: Jesus told him what it was going to involve, namely, confronting the corrupt power structure in Jerusalem. Peter balked and said, "Oh, no, that's not what this is about." The two steps are both very important: both the affirmation and the existential step, which has to be taken.

Q: You said that Generation X was looking for a Jesus that they can trust, and I think that partially means that we don't believe in heroes anymore. I was wondering what kind of flaws the students come up with in Jesus or what you come up with-what kind of failings you see in the historical Jesus.

A: Paradoxically, the discovery that Jesus bad moments in which he lost his temper and cursed the fig tree or did other things that seemed questionable, I sometimes find are very attractive to my students. They humanize a figure who for many of them has been too elevated, too much in a stained-glass window. That be had some of what you have called "flaws" is often a helpful point of entry into understanding what he's about.

And I think the first part of your question -- that we don't believe in heroes any more -- is very significant. It causes me to doubt, sometimes, the whole enterprise of my course, maybe this symposium, and the whole historical project that it's based on.

We are in a period in which hero worship is perhaps legitimately fading, and our confidence in the "great man," whether it's the great political man or the great musician man or the great religious or spiritual man (I use "man" here very deliberately), is declining.

Dom Crossan has said that if he were making a movie on Jesus, he would show a very realistic picture of the crucifixion and then have the camera pan out across a wide field and show dozens, maybe hundreds, of other crucifixions going on because thousands of people were crucified in Jesus' time. He was part of a movement that was there before him and that continues. There's something that has begun to disturb me a little bit about the singularization of the figure of Jesus, which does border a little bit too much on this kind of heroizing. And I think we have to be careful about that, and that suggests a new kind of quest that moves beyond heroization.

Q: I wanted to comment on your request for a dialogue. What is the problem with uncertainty? Why is it a danger for confidence? Religions in general may be characterized as inventions to corner certainties. Maybe the intra- and interfaith dialogue could be most effective by exploring and even exalting the uncertain middle ground, wherein might lie more effective ways to answer the question on how to live-more effective, that is, than asserting and buttressing arbitrary truths.

A: If I were to speculate on the future of our discussions about Jesus, his significance, and his historicity, one word that would come to my mind would be "pluriform" or "heterogeneous" or "multiple." I do not see a firm consensus emerging either in the historical reconstruction or the cultural resymbolization or the spiritual retrievals of Jesus. I think we're going to see multiplications of these, and I think your position is entirely right. Why should we want to have something that all parties agree on? I am refreshed by the wonderfully interesting studies of the early centuries of Christianity, by which a monolithic unitary view of the early church has now been completely demolished. Early Christianity was Pluralistic; there were a lot more options, a lot more Christologies, a lot more forms of church life, devotion, and spirituality, than we have generally thought. Maybe we're moving into a period now that is paradoxically more like that than the fifteen centuries of Christendom have been, with their rigidly structured doctrinal systems and ecclesial institutions. I welcome that. You call that uncertainty, that's fine. I think it's a bracing climate.

Q: Christianity so often ignores and even excludes the divine as revealed by other leaders and other religions. I suspect Generation X would trust Christianity more if the search for the divine would examine or at least be open to other paths as well.

A: I agree entirely. We now live in a period in which the recognition of the presence of the spirit of God in other religious traditions has to be part of our own spiritual mentality and our faith. I think this is a providential gift of God, a step toward recognizing a much wider and more fathomless mystery than we often allow. We have the opportunity for this conversation now because of the way we've been pushed together in this small world, elbow to elbow with people from different religious traditions. And I'm very encouraged that what is centrally important to me as a Christian, namely, Jesus, is not necessarily a barrier but can be an opening to talking with people in other traditions.

Q: Your statement that Jesus' Jewishness must be central to the search for Christ leads to this question. Our Christianity has resulted in a persistent annihilation of millions of Jews. Is this relevant to the search for Jesus?

A: The anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism that have been present in Christianity are probably the single most catastrophic, embarrassing, and humiliating aspects of Christian history that those of us who are Christians have to deal with. They have made their contribution to various kinds of pogroms leading up to and including the Holocaust. That's terrible, terrible news for all of us. Jesus himself as a Jew, would have been rounded up by the SS and sent to Auschwitz. That's where he would have been. Not outside looking in, not maintaining his Aryan purity -- he would have been inside and incinerated. Once that sinks in, then our recognition of the dismal, catastrophic record of Christianity in this regard, which has been transformed, I hope, at least in many of our minds, by the Holocaust and the recognition of its impact, allows for an understanding of Jesus and of Jews as our brothers and sisters who share the same covenant in a way that has not been possible before.

Q: If Jesus were to return to earth today, how would he react to what we call Christianity, particularly to its diversity?

A: I think he would be very puzzled by Christianity. He didn't know the term; it was only invented later. To some extent, the term "Christianity," as a way of talking about that which Jesus introduced into history and wants us to be a part of, is only partially helpful. In some ways it's even misleading. So we have to be careful not to identify Christianity with Jesus.

I think he would love the diversity. He reveled in diversity and meeting different kinds of people (including people he wasn't supposed to meet as a respectable rabbi) and rubbing shoulders and conversing with people who were on the margins and edges.

Q Religious institutions often claim the authority of God so that the selection of certain texts and doctrines is the "work of the Holy Spirit." That seems to be at odds with the openness to pluralism you commend. What are the implications for the immediate future of the institutional churches and Generation X?

A: Caution, bordering on suspicion of the institutionally or doctrinally prepackaged version of Jesus, is justified. I think that the claims that religious institutions have made to speak for God, or to give us the last word on who Jesus is or what he means, are arrogant and unacceptable. We simply have to question that. And I think that as the diversity breaks out and opens up, there's going to be more intransigent circling of the wagons on the part of religious institutions and hierarchies and leaders.

Q: I believe that the Jesus of history and the Jesus of faith, the pre- and post-Easter Jesus, are one divine revelation. Seeking to understand Jesus Christ by attempting to unearth the historical Jesus is like trying to understand a tree by digging up its roots. The result is that you will get to know the roots, but you may also kill the tree. Do you think it is possible that some root diggers fail to see the tree for the roots?

A: I think the metaphor, when carried to that extent, is a little unfortunate. What most historical Jesus scholars are doing is, in fact, helpful because it clears away a lot of the rubbish and garbage and false interpretations that have been laid over Jesus and provides a refreshing beginning for understanding who he was.

If there is a problem, it's if people are misled into thinking that this is going to give them the answer to the question I have posed -- Who do you think that I am? -- it's not going to provide the answer. Theologically, I agree with you. The whole process, the seed, the root, the trunk, the leaves, and, I would go on to say, the birds that land in the tree -- is a disclosure of God. It is a revelation. So I don't question the historical enterprise; I only question some of the false expectations that have been attached to it.

Q: Why are many in Generation X turning to alternative religions or fundamentalist Christian groups for spiritual guidance?

A: The environment in which Generation X lives is full of alternative religions, and not all of them bear the name religion. Some of them bear the name of the vision of a free-market world or the global expansion of capitalism or the flat tax. There are a lot of religions around nowadays claiming our allegiance. About fundamentalism: Fundamentalism (and not just Christian fundamentalism, but other kinds as well) takes so much energy. Constantly to fight against the reality that's breaking in on you becomes exhausting. I don't believe it can last long in the life of most individuals. Experiences, encounters, and ideas come along that simply don't fit the grid, and finally your energy for resisting begins to fray, and you have to begin to look for something else.

Q: My father is a priest and has just been diagnosed with HIV and is symptomatic. I cannot see beyond tomorrow. His impending death has made me question all my beliefs. What can the historical Jesus show me about trying to deal with this tragedy?

A: I'm not sure that I'm in a position to respond to your question. What leaped into my mind, of course, is the stories of how Jesus touched the sick, even the people who had leprosy, which in his day, I am told, was thought to be a little like AIDS in our time-not just as a sickness, but seen by some people as a curse and proof that you have fallen into divine disfavor. Jesus not only spent time with these people; he also touched them, ate with them, and made himself part of their lives. I think the most important thing for you to do is simply to be present with your father, as close as you can be, as open as you can be. Be with him. And have confidence that something is going to happen that will enable you to do that. More than that, I think, would be intrusive of me to say.