By John Dickson
Unlike the issue of climate change, where public opinion has recently caught up with the decade-long scientific consensus, debates about Jesus continue to operate on two completely different levels.
It has been quite a year for Jesus. In the middle of last year a National Geographic documentary, The Gospel of Judas, announced the unearthing of a text, written in the second century, claiming that Judas was the real hero of the Jesus story; apparently the 11 other apostles got it badly wrong. Not to be outdone, the Discovery Channel then aired The Lost Tomb of Jesus (recently shown on Channel Ten), claiming that Christ's family resting place had been discovered in Jerusalem, complete with possible DNA samples of the Son of God himself.
And now Bishop John Shelby Spong enters the fray with Jesus for the Non-Religious, a full-scale explanation of his view that the major details of Jesus's life - his birth in Bethlehem, the names of his parents, the healings, the 12 apostles, the trial and crucifixion and, of course, the resurrection - are all fictional additions to an undoubtedly significant life.
When it comes to Jesus there is an incredible mismatch between popular perception and academic consensus, that is, between what theologians such as Spong can get away with when speaking and writing for a general audience and what mainstream historians discuss in their peer review literature.
Part of the reason for this mismatch is the public's (and hence the media's) love of the controversial. A HarperCollins press release accompanying Jesus for the Non-Religious trades on this unabashedly. The headline, "Twelve apostles: a fiction", is intriguing and therefore newsworthy, even if it does run counter to the scholarly consensus.
And there is most definitely a consensus. Even a scholar as critical as Professor Ed Sanders of Duke University, one of the leading names in the field and no friend of Christian apologetics, can write: "There are no substantial doubts about the general course of Jesus's life: when and where he lived, approximately when and where he died, and the sort of thing that he did during his public activity." The fact that Spong would have us believe that virtually everything in the Jesus story is up for grabs betrays his disengagement from mainstream scholarship of the past two decades (something also evident from his bibliography).
The fact that, to many observers, nothing seems to hinge on the Jesus question means there is little motivation, outside the churches, to correct the imbalance. The climate change debate comes to mind. When the ABC aired The Great Global Warming Swindle last month, it thought it prudent to follow up with a panel discussion of expert scientists. Those interested enough to listen to the discussion were left in no doubt about the marginal nature of the documentary. With no ecosystems in the balance, we are unlikely to hear from a panel of historians following the next sensationalist documentary or book on Jesus - there just isn't the sense of importance. And so the marginal voices continue to get the airtime.
I fear things may get worse before they get better. The more airtime the controversial fringe gets, the more reticent mainstream scholars will be to get involved in discussions marked by speculation and novelty rather than evidence.
I recently conducted a series of interviews (for a coming documentary) with a dozen of the leading figures in the historical study of Jesus. I was taken aback on several occasions by the evident suspicion many of these scholars harboured about popular-level productions on Jesus. "I am sick of the sensationalist approach to this topic," said one of them in a grandfatherly tone as we sat down for the interview. "I really must insist on seeing the finished interview before it goes to air," said another as he recounted stories of scholars being edited beyond recognition by otherwise reputable documentary filmmakers. The distrust was only slightly tempered when I explained that our documentary was attempting to redress this imbalance.
Books such as Jesus for the Non-Religious make for good news stories, but they do nothing to bring the clarity - the correspondence between academic consensus and popular opinion - we have recently come to enjoy with the climate change issue.
Dr John Dickson has been ordained as an Anglican minister and is an honorary associate of the Department of Ancient History at Macquarie University. A documentary based on his book The Christ Files: How Historians Know What They Know About Jesus will be released this year.