Bible Belter

David Light

Da Funk: Jesus Seminar scholar Robert Funk is shaking up religious convention.

The Gospel according to Robert Funk

By Patrick Sullivan

ONCE UPON A TIME, Robert Funk was a teenage evangelist preaching to packed revival meetings. “I did that when I was starting out, sort of being a hotshot. I knew how to make people laugh, make them cry,” Funk recalls with a self-deprecating chuckle, voice tinged with regret. A lot has changed since those evangelical days.

Now, as he sits in his busy Santa Rosa offices, the bespectacled, white-haired Funk is preaching a new gospel … literally. The architect of a collaborative scholarly effort called the Jesus Seminar, Funk is the focus of a massive firestorm of controversy over the group’s radical reinterpretation of the heart of the New Testament.

Essentially, the Jesus Seminar places Jesus Christ under the scholarly microscope. The deeds and words of Jesus as portrayed in the gospels are collected and evaluated by experts from various fields in an effort to establish their historical authenticity. The results then have been published in the seminar’s 1995 bestseller The Five Gospels and in the newly released The Acts of Jesus (HarperSan Francisco; $35).

The shock waves generated by the final tallies have yet to quiet down. “We found that only 16 percent of the events we evaluated from the gospels were likely to be authentic,” says Funk, a distinguished biblical scholar.

Indeed, the portrait of Jesus that emerges from the two books is deeply at odds with Christian orthodoxy. Forget the miracles: Funk dismisses anything like the idea of Jesus walking on water or raising the dead. Even the cozy stable in Bethlehem is out; it seems Jesus was actually born in Nazareth. More seriously, the historical Jesus is portrayed by the Jesus Seminar as a charismatic iconoclast who attacked contemporary religious institutions and social mores with revolutionary zeal and biting humor.

Of course, scholarly challenges to religious doctrine are nothing new. Riven by uncertainty, fraying into fundamentalism, Christianity might seem to some to be an easy target. But Funk argues that the Jesus Seminar’s findings constitute an important new crisis for the faith.

“The rediscovery of who Jesus really was has powerful implications for the Christian tradition, for the institutions that grew out of this figure,” Funk says. “If we allow him to have something to say about those institutions, they’re going to suffer a new and sweeping reformation.”

THIS CONTROVERSIAL effort had its beginnings here in California in 1985, when Funk, troubled by religious doubts and hungry for truth, put out a call for scholars to come together to discuss biblical issues. He was pleasantly surprised to have 35 people show up to the first meeting.

“Nobody had ever inventoried all the words attributed to Jesus or collected all the stories told about him, so I wanted to do that first,” Funk says. “I guess I have the Tom Sawyer approach to painting fences. You have a big fence to paint, you get a bunch of people to help you paint it.”

The big question tackled by the Jesus Seminar concerned the origin of what we now accept as the standard accounts of the life of Jesus. The first written narrative gospel, the Gospel of Mark, wasn’t put down on paper until 50 years after the crucifixion. So how was information about these remarkable events transmitted across this half-century gap?

Circulated by word of mouth, subjected to reinterpretation and distortion, the discrete stories and sayings of Jesus were further shaped and augmented by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John when the evangelists turned the tales into coherent narratives.

“They were told and retold and passed around as single anecdotes,” Funk says. “The same thing happens in the transmission of jokes today. We hear them and retell them and change them a little every time.”

The scholars of the Jesus Seminar attempted to evaluate how much truth survived by watching for anachronisms, historical inaccuracies, and narrative impossibilities. They also asked medical experts to help explain accounts of miraculous healing and came up with some surprising theories, including the notion that Jesus may have exercised his powerful charisma to cure what we would today consider psychosomatic afflictions.

To people of faith unsettled by all of these revelations, Funk offers his compassion. For decades, he has struggled to hold on to his own deeply held religious beliefs, and he knows how troubling it can be to see them slipping away. While he still considers himself a Christian, he also knows that every day new scientific discoveries punch holes in the old framework of belief.

“I have a very deep sympathy for those people who are losing their faith,” says Funk. “The myths that we live by have deep emotional roots–they’re wrapped around our hearts.”

Of course, not everyone accepts the Jesus Seminar’s findings. Critics argue that the portrayal of Jesus as an iconoclastic opponent of religious institutions is suspiciously close to exactly what the seminar might be expected to find–God in their own image. To that criticism, Funk replies with some heat. “Most people who criticize that way never stop to think that the same thing also applies to them,” he argues.

“The thing to do is to look at the actual evidence.”

But he also acknowledges that the uncertainty among religious scholars holds true even among his allies. No one is sure what Christianity will look like in the new millennium. “I know many of the theological leaders of the churches, and I know they’re at sea, as all of us are,” Funk says. “We’re about to cross a watershed of enormous significance. What’s on the other side is difficult to say.”

From the May 7-13, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.

Stand and Deliver

Michael Amsler

Syntax for sale: Open-mike poetry night at Actors’ Theatre.

Poetry night: An up-and-down world

By Marina Wolf

ALLITERATIVE swear words are fired from the stage like fusillades from an angry rifle. The 40-odd audience members, in attitudes ranging from beat nonchalance to literary ecstacy, absorb the spoken-word rant with easy aplomb. On stage, the young woman in the brown corduroy jacket is just warming up, hips rolling in time to her verbal jabs, a radiant mist of sweat emerging under the bright theater lights.

The new poetry slam night at Santa Rosa Actors’ Theatre, scheduled for the second Monday of each month, is going well. The leisurely open-mike period has set the tone as “rowdy casual,” and the shoot-from-the-hip energy of the poetry slam fits right in, pitting artists’ on-the-spot performances against each other for 10 bucks and the chance at advancing to the final “Grand Slam.”

Afterward, praise washes over the lobby like wine spilling out of a too-small paper cup.

Meanwhile, over in Sonoma, the butcher paper hangs thick and impenetrable over the windows of the former Tin Can Coffee Company. After more than two years of dispensing coffee and comfort to two groups of open-mike readers, the owner closed the doors and sold the space less than a couple of months ago to the local chain of Johnny’s Java.

Welcome to the world of open-mike readings: feast or famine, with no rhyme or reason. A couple of long- termers keep going, but a recent one-two punch of closure and relocation has shaken the followers of this noble institution, and suggests that it’s not as secure as could be.

Certainly if love of literature were enough, Gail D’Arcy would still be in business. She opened the Tin Can Coffee Company in 1996, and started the open-mike poetry reading first thing. She kept the coffee flowing, and even passed the hat. But the cost per square foot was too high. “You’ve got to have a situation where you can afford to do it … . In order to stay in business you have to break even,” she says. “The open mikes don’t do much to increase revenue.”

Revenue is invariably the reckoning point for new or low-traffic locations; noise is another, and almost as difficult to deal with. Writers are generally sensitive people, who want the attention of the audience on them, not the whooshing of the espresso machine. Owners just want to keep the business moving. The reading at Lucy’s Cafe in Sebastopol, which ran for three short months, came to an end over that very issue. As William Judd, the reading organizer, has it, the very first event was heavily punctuated by the workers doing dishes. He then suggested trying an after-hours session, but people not involved in the reading were still coming in. In the third session, Judd put his foot down and asked the servers to keep quiet, and the next week the owner called off the Sunday afternoon experiment, offering different times, all during working hours, or perhaps a rental fee, which Judd declined. (At press time Judd still had not found a replacement venue.)

Other cafes fare a little better. The Copperfield’s Cafe in Petaluma has had an open-mike reading hosted by Geri Di Giorno for about a year. Her involvement with the Petaluma Poetry Walk and other literary events pegs her as a prime candidate for facilitator fade–“I am looking for someone to take over the Copperfield’s reading,” she admits–but that the reading still happens is a testimony to her commitment in the face of indifference. “[Here] we are at the mercy of regular patrons and the machines,” she says ruefully. “We’re coming in to read poetry, and the owners are doing something to generate business.”

On the other hand, there is Sally Spittles, owner of the Willow Wood Market Cafe. Spittles has been hosting, and often participating in, monthly open-mike readings in the back of her Graton market for over two years. Based on the few coffee cups and many water glasses that stood on her tables at the end of the most recent gathering, she probably takes in just enough money from her readers to pay for the coffee grounds. But it’s not a problem.

“The building is already there, the business is already there–all we have to do is open the doors,” she says. “We don’t make any money off of it, but I don’t have any employees working then, either. So it’s negative income, but it’s not a financial burden.”

EVEN GIVEN IDEAL open-mike conditions–strong coffee, a good sound system, rent paid through the end of the year–veterans of the literary scene know that open mikes have always come and gone. The Russian River Writers’ Guild has been hosting open mikes for years at locations all over Santa Rosa and the west county: Garbo’s in Guerneville, Copperfield’s in Sebastopol, Johnny Otis’ now defunct nightclub, Mudd’s Cafe, Higher Grounds.

Clearly, keeping the readings going in one place is a challenge.

“It doesn’t bring much money in,” says 20-year guild member and poet David Bromige, veteran of many a reading. “Or perhaps it disrupts things too much for the other patrons… . I think poetry is a profound disturbance, so it draws profoundly disturbed persons sometimes. Maybe the other patrons just get up and go to another cafe.”

Psychiatric assessments aside, Bromige has a point. Open-mike poetry is not toe-tapping jazz. People do not pack the house for unknown writers. To sustain a reading, the owner or proxy has to be committed to the concept, and have a certain amount of largesse to offer as a business entity. Because when the crunch of running a business hits, readings are often the first things to go.

But open mikes never seem to fade away entirely. Bromige has been approached about organizing something at Incredible Records in Sebastopol, just next door to Lucy’s Cafe. Over in Sonoma, even while the displaced readers from Tin Can mourn the loss of their space, writing-support groups at the Writers’ Center offer free-write, followed by open reading, for a very reasonable session fee.

And those with their ears to the track can always find open mikes at community events and festivals.

No matter where or how long.

From the May 7-13, 1998 issue of the Sonoma County Independent.

© Metro Publishing Inc.