Last night at a gathering, Marcus Borg said (twice), \u201cJesus trumps the Bible.\u201d\u009d<\/p>\n
This is an extraordinarily irresponsible thing for a scholar and leader in the church to say. It can\u2019t be said often enough: we have no access to knowledge of Jesus except through the Bible and its interpretation. There is no record of him outside the Bible until years after his death. The only way to understanding who he was is through the witness of the New Testament apostles. Therefore to suggest that he \u201ctrumps the Bible\u201d\u009d is to suggest that we can cut loose from the Scriptures and construct a Jesus according to the perspectives of our own time. It has been shown over and over again that attempts to construct a \u201chistorical Jesus\u201d\u009d or \u201creal Jesus\u201d\u009d apart from the faith-based witness of Scripture end in failure because such attempts are grounded, not in the text, but in the bias of those who undertake them….<\/p>\n