An editorial’s reaction to the news that our nation’s youth have at best a casual attitude toward truth is interesting. The column begins by citing a news report that “76 percent of the nation’s brainy 16-, 17- and 18-year olds admit to cheating,” that is “88 percent of those listed in Who’s Who Among American High School students also admit to the sin,” and that 60 percent of those explain their response by saying that “It didn’t seem like a big deal.” Now for the interesting part. The editors begin their next paragraph by observing that, “This spells out a frightening message: Today’s teenagers apparently have not been brought up with a sense of values about right and wrong” (“Students don’t get it: Cheating is wrong,” Atlanta Journal, November 17, 1997, A10). To borrow a popular response from the teen culture, “Well, duh!” While I appreciate the call the editors make for character education, and specifically for teaching that “cheating is spelled W-R-O-N-G,” I am more than a little puzzled at their apparent surprise in learning that “today’s teenagers apparently have not been brought up with a sense of values about right and wrong.” We have long lived in a culture where it is not only taught that truth is relative, but where that notion has been absorbed. Once we accept relativism, it is a small step to the conclusion that whether or not we are truthful is no big deal. It’s not as if we’ve not been warned. In the mid-80’s,

They are among the greatest words a parent can hear.  “Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb is a reward.  Like arrows in the hand of a warrior, so are the children of one’s youth.  Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them; they shall not be ashamed, but shall speak with their enemies in the gate” (Psalm 127:3-5, NKJV).The psalmist reminds us of both the blessing and responsibility of parenthood.  We see that every child matters greatly and should be cherished as a gift from God.  Since children are so special, they can make a difference.  Whether that difference is for good or evil depends on how seriously parents take the responsibility of spiritual nurture. To rear a child who stands mature in faith has never been easy.  Today, it is a task which is further complicated by the rush of modern life, the amount of things to which children are exposed and the number of competing ideas which can be broadcast right into our homes in our media-driven society. I write as a parent of two teenage sons when I ask, “What are we to do?”  How are we to go about the all-important task of nurturing our children into mature men and women who have their own faith in God?  It is because I have lived the rigors of parenting even as I have continued a lifetime of biblical studies that I am more convinced than ever that

What are we to do?  How shall we make headway in our quest to persuade others to follow Jesus in a world such as ours?  A world where all manner of religions, philosophies, and cults flourish.  A world which does not so much disbelieve Jesus as scorn him and all else that cannot be explained by human senses and reason.  A world where the church finds itself challenged by the work of false prophets whose error does not just misunderstand the teaching of Jesus, but which actually discredits the primitive view of him as Son of God.  A world just like that which confronted the earliest Christians. That’s right.  Though this summary describes the world we face, it also describes the Greco-Roman world faced by Peter, Paul, James and John.  Thinking specifically of the latter, John’s writings, particularly his first epistle, were written against the backdrop of a world of diverse views and challenges.  The views he faced which would become gnosticism came from attempts to mix various religions and philosophies, each of which posed a challenge to Christianity in its own right. That these views affected the church is seen in the themes stressed in 1 John.  He wrote to a church facing apostasy and false prophets (1 John 2:18-19; 4:1).  A major issue which challenged them revolved around questions about the nature of Jesus himself.  So, John wrote to reassure them, reminding them above all else that Jesus was the Christ (2:22; 5:1), the Son of God (4:15;

In part 1, we noted the publicity, goals and major claims of the Jesus Seminar along with a brief critique of their scholarship. In this article, we will offer a response to one of their major claims as regards the New Testament writings. No Knowledge of the Original Text? Most of what the Seminar has concluded about the reliability of the New Testament’s account of Jesus is based on the premise that the gap between the original time of writing and the copies of the New Testament writings which have survived is too great for those documents to be trusted. In their own words: We do not possess autographs [the originals] of any of the books of the entire Bible. The oldest surviving copies of the gospels date from about one hundred and seventy-five years after the death of Jesus, and no two copies are precisely alike. And handmade manuscripts have almost always been ‘corrected’ here and there, often by more than one hand. . . . Even careful copyists make some mistakes, as every proofreader knows. So we will never be able to claim certain knowledge of exactly what the original text of any biblical writing was (Robert Funk, et.al., The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, 6). Space permits only the briefest of responses to this claim here. But we can present enough to show that they have not told the whole story and to wonder why, in light of their claim to represent current

If Will Rogers was correct that all we know is what we read in the paper, then there is much to learn about a recent challenge to the New Testament’s view of Jesus. Over the last several years, a group calling itself the “Jesus Seminar” has gotten considerable press. In existence since being formed by founder Robert Funk in 1985, the Seminar’s work drew increased attention with their 1993 publication of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, a book which has been supplemented by individual volumes by various Seminar members, and augmented by the 1998 publication of The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus. The Seminar’s claims have not gone unchallenged. Michael P. Wilkins and J.P. Moreland edited a series of essays by conservative scholars which were published in 1995 in Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus. Luke Timothy Johnson’s 1996 book, The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels, also critiques their work. Others have also contributed to the response. But if the Seminar’s claims have not gone unchallenged, neither have they abated. In the metropolitan Atlanta area, where this writer resides, there are a number of popular bookstores, including representatives of the Barnes and Noble, Borders and Media Play chains. For several years now, a casual perusal of their shelves has revealed numerous books by Seminar members and others who espouse similar views. A visit to local popular Christian