"The message left on my answering machine by my brother-in-law, an attorney, sounded a tone of skeptical cross-examination: "I heard on my car radio today an interview with a New Testament scholar named Robert Funk. He's publishing a new version of the gospels that claims to distinguish what Jesus really said from what the gospel writers reported. Funk says it's based on the work of a group of leading Bible scholars. Are you involved in this? How can they claim to know what Jesus really said or didn't say? I have enough trouble proving in a court of law what somebody said six months ago! Should I take this book seriously?"

A semi tongue-in-cheek look at the Jesus Seminar, testing how well they stand up to the scrutiny of their own methods for analyzing scripture.

"As I will contend in this satirical essay, the Jesus Seminar is in reality a kind of Straussianism redivivus. The work of the Jesus Seminar is therefore, nothing remotely approaching new technology after all. It is simply the old Enlightenment anti-supernaturalism in Liberal Protestant drag."

Much modern critical biblical scholarship is based on an unexamined set of assumptions - how well do those assumptions stand up when critically examined by a philosopher?

"On the other hand, however, the final judgement regarding historical authenticity may turn out very differently if biblical scholarship is subjected to analysis and questioning by philosophers. Many cannot survive philosophical scrutiny, and bringing philosophical analysis to bear on biblical criticism often alters the historical conclusions which can be justified by that discipline."

"Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that many inventors would have concealed. No one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so lofty an ethic, and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospels."

For a good reading list on the subject, look here.