Marcus Borg 

A symbiotic link joins 'critical' Jesus scholarship with bad religion. What is Ernest Renan's treacly unitarian 'Jesus' but just bad religion? When you walk into a Unitarian-Universalist church nowadays, you are more likely to encounter a congregant who self-identifies as a 'Wiccan' or a 'Buddhist' than 'Christian,' because this scripture-defying ideology has no solid foundation and collapses once the founding generation passes from the scene. First generation unitarians still tell themselves legends about how bold and brave they are to defy orthodoxy, even if it has been a very long time since anyone was tormented on the rack, by either trinitarian Christians or by unitarian Muslims. But the second generation loses interest in these self-glorifying fables and turns its attention elsewhere. Yet even as 'liberal' Protestantism empties out the main-line churches, savants like Marcus Borg keep buffing and polishing up this unwanted product. Though unitarian 'scholarship' is neither more careful nor thoroughgoing than fundamentalist scholarship,— it differs only in that it is established on unbelieving principles,— they insist that this bad religion which no one wants must be subsidized by the tax-payers, as good religion cannot be.

Man, therefore Not God

Marcus Borg, formerly associated with the 'Jesus Seminar,' follows the well-worn pathway of assuring us Jesus Himself cannot have claimed to be God. Why not? Because no one ever claims to be God? To the contrary, very many people, even Jews like Sabbati Sevi and Jacob Frank, have claimed to be God. Amongst the pagans of classical antiquity, cases of outrageous imposture were downright common. It helped to be tall and good-looking:

"And Peisistratos having accepted the proposal and made an agreement on these terms, they contrived with a view to his a device the most simple by far, as I think, that ever was practised, considering at least that it was devised at a time when the Hellenic race had been long marked off from the Barbarian as more skilful and further removed from foolish simplicity, and among the Athenians who are accounted the first of the Hellenes in ability. In the deme of Paiania there was a woman whose name was Phya, in height four cubits all but three fingers, and also fair of form. This woman they dressed in full armour and caused her to ascend a chariot and showed her the bearing in which she might best beseem her part, and so they drove to the city, having sent on heralds to run before them, who, when they arrived at the city, spoke that which had been commanded them, saying as follows: "O Athenians, receive with favor Peisistratos, whom Athene herself, honouring him most of all men, brings back to her Acropolis." So the heralds went about hither and thither saying this, and straightway there came to the demes in the country round a report that Athene was bringing Peisistratos back, while at the same time the men of the city, persuaded that the woman was the very goddess herself, were paying worship to the human creature and receiving Peisistratos." (Herodotus, Histories, Book I, Chapter 60).

In contemporary times, Wallace D. Fard claimed to be God, and attracted more than a few followers, as did Father Divine. Far be it from me to point out this undeniable fact to discredit Jesus' claim; to the contrary, pointing to counterfeit currency does not prove there is no real currency. But the baseless assertion parrotted by 'Jesus Seminar scholars' that Jesus cannot have claimed to be God, because only later 'post-Easter' followers can have made such claims, is without historical foundation.

There are very few facts in history that are better attested than that Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be God. Not only does the New Testament so testify, so does the hostile Talmud.

The 'Messianic secret,'— the fact that Jesus sometimes tells people not to reveal who He is or what He did for them,— does not prove that Jesus made no extraodinary claims for Himself, but rather proves the contrary. If the 'historical Jesus' was a modest person, a 'Jewish mystic' making no unusual or out-of-the-ordinary claims, then what was the secret?

Perjury

"Were the empty tomb and the appearances of Jesus after his death the kinds of events that disinterested observers could have seen, that even Pilate could have seen? Do these stories purport to report the kinds of events that could in principle have been photographed?. . .This reasoning is a legacy of the Enlightenment, which led many in Western culture to identify 'the true' with 'the factual.'" (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' pp. 48-49).

In our society, we expect perjurors, if prosecuted, to receive a couple of years in the slammer. Under the Mosaic law, perjurors could be subject to the death penalty, depending on the character and consequences of their false accusation:

Does a fair assessment of ancient legal thinking on perjury confirm that the ancients possessed no mental categories which could differentiate between the factual and the imaginary? Lacking any such categories, how did they ever successfully prosecute perjury? Such prosecutions assume the events recounted could, in principle, have been photographed, though of course they had no such equipment, but instead had to rely upon the preponderance of witness testimony:

The Peasants are Restless

For "peasants" like Jesus and His family, Marcus Borg explains that true literacy was out of reach:

Was this indeed an oral culture, where simple peasants told one another stories and danced in the village square? Or does this 'peasant' paradigm grossly misrepresent the situation as reported in contemporary literature?:

The Vineyard

"In the second episode, Jesus takes the initiative. With the crowd and the authorities still present, he tells a parable about at vineyard owner who leases his vineyard to tenants (Mark 12:1-12)." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 237).

"Hear another parable: There was a certain householder, which planted a vineyard, and hedged it round about, and digged a winepress in it, and built a tower, and let it out to husbandmen, and went into a far country: And when the time of the fruit drew near, he sent his servants to the husbandmen, that they might receive the fruits of it. And the husbandmen took his servants, and beat one, and killed another, and stoned another. Again, he sent other servants more than the first: and they did unto them likewise. But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him. When the lord therefore of the vineyard cometh, what will he do unto those husbandmen? They say unto him, He will miserably destroy those wicked men, and will let out his vineyard unto other husbandmen, which shall render him the fruits in their seasons." (Matthew 21:33-41).

Admitting the authenticity of this parable gives away the game, because in it, Jesus plainly claims to be the Son of God in a unique sense. Strangely enough, the Jesus Seminar admits this parable is Jesus' own. It is odd that they do this because the 'Son' of the parable is plainly God's son in a unique sense, whereas it is more to their purpose to submerge Jesus' claim to the Sonship, if allowed at all, down with that of others, like Honi the Circle-Drawer, said to be God's "spoiled child:" "Shimon ben Shetach [the head of the Sanhedrin] sent [word] to him: 'If you were not Honi I would decree a ban upon you. But what shall I do to you, for you act like a spoiled child before God and He does your will for you, like a son who acts like a spoiled child with his father and he does his will for him?'" (M. Taanit 3:8).

The 'Jesus Seminar' got it right for a change. Some people foolishly think Jesus can never have told this parable, because it evinces knowledge of events to come. That 'Israel' is the vineyard is a not a very bold leap. Let us say we take ten test subjects, and ask them to call 'heads' or 'tails.' Those who call the wrong way, we leave alone. Those who call correctly, we corral, and sequester on the premise they must be time-travellers! How else can they have known it would be 'heads' or 'tails?' Please realize I don't for one minute suggest Jesus was 'guessing.' He knew the end from the beginning. But is it really possible to defend the premise upon which modern 'Jesus scholarship' rests, that 1.) no one ever makes statements about the future; or 2.) if they do, those statements are invariably false? How can one hundred percent of statements predicting a 50-50 event possibly be false?

There is an entire modern profession, 'economics,' whose practitioners bring to the market-place predictions about the future. Though Yogi Berra presciently warned of the danger of making predictions,— "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future,"— these highly-trained professionals wade bravely into the fray: They are generally wrong, which does nothing to erode the enthusiastic willingness of financial institutions to pay good money for their work product. President Jimmy Carter bitterly complained about the forecasts his economic advisors gave him, which did not pan out. But sometimes, wondrous to relate, the predictions come true. An after-the-fact report of such a successful prediction should not suffice to convince future 'scholars' it was never made. Even a stopped watch is right twice a day. Joseph Smith, reputed by some to be a prophet, predicted the Civil War. So did many others. Travellers observing the abolitionist fervor of the Northern population, who were also aware the Southern economy increasingly rested upon a foundation of slavery, might well have hazarded the guess that there was a collision coming.

First century prophets who consoled themselves with sanguine visions of a blissful, long-lasting marriage between the pagan Romans and the monotheistic Jews should have been the ones asked to explain themselves, not their more clear-sighted colleagues. It testifies to nothing so much as statistical illiteracy that some atheistic naturalists do not understand all they need posit is a company of prognosticators, some predicting doom, some predicting happy things, shake, then add just a pinch of selection bias to weed out the false predictions, and their assumptions about the world stand unshaken, although some speakers have said, in advance of the event, things which turned out to be true. How is this possible? Because those speakers who said, in advance of the event, things which turned out to be false, have been forgotten. The happy prophets, who either did not predict the Jewish War or predicted victory in the Jewish War (these were legion), have been forgotten. The fact that not all first century prophets have been forgotten should suffice to show that not all first century prophets were happy prophets.

Empty Tomb

"Before his death, they knew him as a finite and mortal human being. He was a flesh-and-blood, corpuscular and protoplasmic Galilean Jew; he weighed around 110 pounds and was a bit over five feet tall; he had to eat and sleep; he was born and he died. This Jesus, the pre-Easter Jesus, is a figure of the past, dead and gone, nowhere anymore." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 44).

What great Christian doctrine is our author here denying?:

Docetism

According to Marcus Borg, the Christian orthodoxy of two natures: the paradism that Jesus is very God and very man,— is actually docetic, though no one had realized this previously:

"Many of us have been asked by Christians who are quite sure they are orthodox, 'Do you believe Jesus was God?' But this view is actually one of the earliest Christian heresies, known as docetism (pronounced doh-sit-izm), from a Greek word meaning 'to seem' or 'to appear.' Jesus seemed, appeared, to be human, but really wasn't — rather, he was really God." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus, p. 9).

Taken at face value, he is alleging that people who say Jesus is God are saying He is not really a man; in other words, the two affirmations of orthodoxy are mutually contradictory.

What is Marcus Borg's argument against the deity of Jesus Christ? That people could not be urged to imitate Jesus if He were God, as they are urged in scripture:

"In addition to being docetic, this way of telling Jesus's story has an additional problem. Namely, if Jesus had superhuman power and knowledge, he cannot be a model for human behavior. Yet the New Testament often speaks of him as such. The gospels speak of following Jesus, and Paul speaks of imitating Christ and being transformed into the likeness of Christ. But if Jesus was really God (and thus not really human), it makes no sense to speak of mitating him and becoming like him." (Marcus Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 10).

This argument might carry more weight were it not that scripture instructs us to imitate God, "For I am the LORD that bringeth you up out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: ye shall therefore be holy, for I am holy." (Leviticus 11:45); "But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you; That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust." (Matthew 5:44-45). Oddly enough Mr. Borg himself realizes this:

"At the heart of his ethical vision was the imitation of God: 'Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate.' (Luke 6:36)" (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 109).

"In remarkably few words, theology and ethics are combined: 'Be compassionate, just as your Father is compassionate' (Luke 6.36). Found in slightly different form in Matthew 5.48, the passage affirms an ethic known as imitatio dei, 'imitation of God.' The ethical imperative is to live in accord with God's character." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 175).

"As we have seen, the central imperative in the teaching of Jesus is to live in accord with God's character: 'Be compassionate, as God is compassionate.' As an ethic, an imitatio dei, its associatinos are rich." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 184).

I make note of this because it is not often you find an author arguing so neatly and completely in a circle. For that, you need the 'Jesus Seminar.' And yes, the perfect circle is completed: "For John, Jesus is the revelation of God's love, and so the imitatio dei becomes an imitatio Christi, an imitation of Jesus." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 184). To summarize the argument: Jesus Christ cannot be God, and why not? Because we are instructed to imititate Him, an impossible command if He is God. And yet we are commanded to imitiate God. And this oft-repeated command elides into imitating Jesus as well; we are to imitate Jesus because He is God. Where can you find logic like that, outside of the 'Jesus studies' field?

"Jesus would not have known what the words 'second person of the Trinity' meant. And if we had explained it to him, he perhaps would have been able to understand it—he was very bright. . .I think he would have been amused. And troubled. I think he would have said, 'No, no—it's not about me.'" (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 321).

What is the truth about God's nature?:

Marcus Borg would have us emulate a counterfeit 'Jesus,' a man who, like us, can modestly reflect he is no more than a mere man, comparable with Honi the Circle-Drawer, a flea-bitten carnival attraction of the day who made it rain, but too much, like the Sorcerer's Apprentice. Like this 'Jewish mystic,' we should seek to be 'centered' in God, whatever that means. The reality of who Jesus is and to what He invites us is an all but infinite distance beyond this pallid unitarian spirituality. Jesus invites us into the very fellowship of God Himself. He was with the Father in the beginning: "And now, O Father, glorify thou me with thine own self with the glory which I had with thee before the world was." (John 17:5). And He prays for us, "That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me. And the glory which thou gavest me I have given them; that they may be one, even as we are one: I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me." (John 17:21-23). That is, that we, too, should enter into this eternal fellowship of love. What Marcus Borg is offering, even encompassed round about as it is with mental reservations and equivocal and ambiguous formulations, is far less than second-rate; it is not even in the ball-park. Liberal Protestantism, alas, supplies only enough religion to innoculate people against the real thing.

Notice the form of the argument: if Jesus is a man, then He is not God. If He is God, then He is not a man. That's it. This little gem is repeated often by this author, without any development or analysis. To put it another way: if Jesus is a man, then He is a mere man; if He is God, then He is God and not man. The orthodox doctrine teaches that Jesus Christ has two natures: He is both human and divine. Certainly if they wish Muslims and unitarians can argue these two natures, of such differing character, cannot co-exist in one person, but simply to keep pointing out the two natures are different seems rather pointless. The orthodox concede the two natures are different:

Just-So Stories

It is the common perception that there is a lot of 'noise' as compared in ratio to 'signal' in our world. Things happen more or less at random, or so people believe. It might surprise non-theists to realize that theists do not 'hear' any 'noise' at all, only signal:

"Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father." (Matthew 10:29).

According to the 'things-happen-more-or-less-at-random' school of thought, you can tell that a story is made-up as opposed to 'actually happened,' precisely by this measure. If the 'moral' fits just-so, then it didn't really happen, it was made up after the fact. Certain things were predicted of the Messiah in the Old Testament, and exactly these things happened to Jesus, and yet the disciples cannot have recognized these correspondences after the fact. . .because they cannot have happened!

"For John, the story is a metaphorical narrative about Jesus as spiritual food. And because the story is given this manifestly metaphorical meaning, there is reason to think that it is metaphor and not memory." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 74).

In other words, it means something, and therefore it cannot really have happened this way:

This school of thought is quite willing to legislate reality in accordance with their principles. Christians of course have always thought the contrary, that inasmuch as the event as well as the prophecy are both under the same Authorship, then there is no reason at all why they mightn't correspond perfectly:

"I answer that, The author of Holy Writ is God, in whose power it is to signify His meaning, not by words only (as man also can do), but also by things themselves. So, whereas in every other science things are signified by words, this science has the property, that the things signified by the words have themselves also a signification. [...] Hence it is plain that nothing false can ever underlie the literal sense of Holy Writ." (Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, P(1)-Q(1)-A(10)).

According to Borg, the reader who believes events occurred as reported has missed the point: "At noon, darkness comes over the whole land and lasts until Jesus' death three hours later. It is idle to wonder if this was an eclipse of the sun. . .if it were an eclipse, it would simply be a coincidental natural phenomenon. Nor does it help to suggest that this was a special darkness created by God. To see the darkness as something that happened risks missing the point." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 265). In other words, there cannot be meaning in anything that actually happens, but only in made-up stories. To theists, there is, of course, no such thing as 'coincidence.'

The First-born

If there is any fact better attested by history than that Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be God incarnate, it is that He called Himself God's Son. That the Messiah is God's Son is taught throughout both testaments:

Marcus Borg is willing to entertain the idea that the title 'Son' goes back to Jesus Himself, but only because it can be taken in a weak sense such as might be appropriated by any random Jewish charismatic. Jesus did not mean by this self-identification, of course, what Christians understand Him to mean:

"Jesus as a Jewish mystic—as one anointed by the Spirit, filled with the Spirit—is the germ, the generative impulse, for familiar Christian language about him. . .So also the Christian affirmation that Jesus is the 'Son of God' has its embryo in Jesus' s experience as a Jewish mystic, as seen in his calling God abba. Abba is  a parental metaphor whose male correlate is 'son'; if God is abba, Jesus is 'son.' Of course, it would not have been 'Son of God' in the later Christian theological and ontological sense, or the 'only begotten Son'. . ." (Marcus J. Borg, 'Jesus,' p. 135).

And why wouldn't it have been? Because, like all the myriad of 'Jesuses' spun off by modern 'scholarship,' this is the one he likes best. Personal preference is the bedrock for these 'scholars.' For purposes of brand differentiation, this is the 'Jesus' he hopes to market to the remnant congregation camped out in the ruins of the mainline church.

Theism

The young Marcus Borg grew up believing something similar to Joseph Smith's idea that God was an exalted man who lived on a planet revolving around the star Kolob. A novel element of young Mr. Borg's version of the ancient anthropomorphite heresy is that God's facial features are to be conformed to those of his elderly pastor. He realized that Christians believe God is omnipresent, but rejected this as inconsistent with the idea that God lives far, far away. This stranger god, who resided in such a distant locale that he could not often visit, was unipersonal, not a trinity. Mr. Borg no longer so believes but rather believes, not in simple pantheism which identifies the universe with god, but that god equals the universe plus a superimposed spiritual layer of some sort. His new view may not be compared and contrasted with Christian orthodoxy, but only with his earlier view, which he sometimes imagines as the theology of 'American Christianity.' Such features of Christian theism as 'supernaturalism:' that God does mighty deeds like parting the Red Sea;— are to be rejected as pertaining to his non-omnipresent childhood god, though 'supernaturalism' is in no way incompatible with 'omnipresence.' A set of heretical and orthodox ideas were bundled together by the young Marcus Borg and cannot now be teased apart but must be accepted or rejected as a package: if you accept a 'supernatural' god, then he must share the facial features of young Mr. Borg's childhood pastor. This confessional approach, oddly enough, is not limited to one rather confused author, but is common in modern 'Jesus' studies, where whatever odd-ball ideas these authors held as children are projected onto the blank screen of 'American Christianity.' It is then accurately pointed out that these views are heretical by traditional standards of Christian orthodoxy, but in fairness it should also be pointed out that these authors' current views are also heretical.

When all is said and done, is Marcus Borg too calm, too sedate, too sensible for you? Then you must be looking for. . .

"Christianity, because it grew out of Judaism, almost inevitably carried this 'anti-earth' attitude with it. Its Jesus was understood as one who had invaded the earth on behalf of or at the behest of the Father God  from the sky. . .Salvation was portrayed as escaping the earth, which was somehow evil. It was a human-centered but heavenward-bound religious emphasis. Ecological disaster was all but inevitable." (John Shelby Spong, The Sins of Scripture. pp. 55-56).