Marcus Borg
Recently I stumbled into a (fairly uncharitable) discussion on a Christian blog and one of the tangential subjects was Jesus Scholar Marcus Borg, one of the key members of the so-called Jesus Seminar. Since I had on my shelf a book that Borg co-authored, The Meaning of Jesus : Two Visions (with N.T. Wright) I thought I’d pop it open and see what Borg had to say.
Firstly, let me say that Borg seems genuine and nice. He regards himself as not just a scholar but also as a commited Christian who “loves Jesus.” The book is written in an amiable tone as Borg and Wright debate the central issues about Jesus – the gospel accounts, his vocation, death, resurrection, divinity, and birth.
The problems with Borg’s approach though are many. Admittedly I come to the book with a pre-existing bias against Borg’s “liberal” ideas, but even if I try and set that aside there just seem to be far too many holes in his arguments. I will mention a few. 
Firstly, although Borg professes to take Jesus’ Jewish context seriously, it seems to me that he gives it little more than lip service. Rather than trying to fit Jesus within first century Jewish categories, he delves into comparative religion and tries to fit Jesus into the same mould as other great religious teachers like the Buddha, seeing him as a “Spirit person” who had ecstatic experiences which can be seen in other figures in many different cultures.
Secondly, (and perhaps most crucially) Borg seems to constantly approach Jesus in terms of his own views on what Jesus should be like, and what qualities are attractive or unattractive to his own 20th century mindset. Anything that seems unnattractive to him, he dismisses as a likely invention by the early Christians and throws out – the real Jesus couldn’t have been like that. For example he sees the thought that Jesus saw his death as being a central part of his vocation, and hence spoke of it and moved purposefully towards is as “an unattractive notion to attribute to Jesus. I don’t want Jesus to have seen his own death as having the significance Tom gives it. As a Christian, I want Jesus to be an attractive figure.” (p82) Similarly, when discussing whether or not Jesus thought of himself as being the Messiah, Borg sees it as an unnattractive prospect that Jesus could have envisaged himself in such exalted terms, saying that “thinking that Jesus thought about himself in such grand terms raises serious questions about the mental health of Jesus” and more bluntly ”if you think you are the light of the world, you’re not. That is, perceiving oneself in such grand terms is a fairly good indicator that you’re off base.” (p146) Once again this argument rings true from the perspective of modern psychiatry where deluded people make such claims all the time. But, as C.S. Lewis pointed out many years ago, there is one instance where making such a claim, or believing such a thing about oneself, would not be a sign of insanity – that is if it were actually true. Doesn’t it seem likely that if a person were actually God’s Messiah, that God would actually communicate it to that person and give them a clear sense of that vocation. Borg goes on from there to discuss how “saints and Spirit persons .. typically don’t think of themselves in grandiose terms. I don’t think that people like Jesus have an exalted perception of themselves.” (p147) Once again Borg betrays himself by trying to lump Jesus into a category or stereotype of “religious figures” – if this were true then such generalizations might apply, but not if Jesus is the unique, once in history person that Christians have always believed him to be.
Ultimately, the point at which Borg’s views fall flat again and again is the way in which he chooses to read the gospels. He views a large portion of the gospel material as “history metaphorized” seeing them as stories with symbolic meaning but little or no factual basis. For example regarding the birth stories he says “I do not think they are historically factual, but I think they are profoundly true in another and more important sense.” This kind of oxymoronic ‘not true but true’ is typical of Borg’s attitude to most of the gospel material including the birth and resurrection of Jesus (though for some reason he chooses to affirm the historicity of Jesus’ healings) In many ways it takes more faith to believe Borg’s theories about the construction and genesis of the gospel stories than it does to believe that perhaps they do represent the essential gist of what happened, written down by the gospel authors from passed down oral tradition. For me just reading the gospels they do not read as “history metaphorized” or some kind of allegory – they come across as intending to convey history/biography (albeit with an intentional theological signifance.) The authors knew the difference between history and metaphor, as we can see from their retellings of the parables – the stories of Jesus himself just don’t come across that way.
I could go on and on – on almost every page Borg makes claims which are tantamount to a leap of skepticism, choosing to believe a complicated convoluted explanation for which there seems to be little evidence rather than the most simple and elegant explanation that “gets in all the data” as Tom would say – ie. that the gospel accounts are fundamentally historical. Wright does a fantastic job of debunking many of Borg’s points (whilst remaining civil and courteous at all times) but there were so many more holes in Borg’s ideas that he just didn’t have the space to touch upon whilst presenting his own case.I haven’t really touched much here upon what Wright has written (even though half of the book is his) but in addition to thoroughly challenging Borg’s ideas, he also manages to give a great summary of the main lines of thought in much of his other work. In fact if you wanted a good introduction to Tom’s thinking, reading his chapters in this book would be a great start. You could skip Marcus’ chapters if that were your goal but I’d recommend them anyway, to get an idea of how much modern scholarship views Jesus, and just how complicated and far-fetched it sounds.
Categories : Christianity, books | 3 Comments
