Defense of our faith

For review - http://thesounding.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-is-apologetics-track-2.html
and - http://thesounding.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-is-apologetics-cont_28.html

Doesn't the Church today do a good job of teaching people about God?

On one hand, many churches and leaders have given up on Jesus as a person and as God. The "search for the historical Jesus" is an example of how far things have gone with religious people that have sold out to a materialistic world view.

It is sufficiently worrisome to note that many churches are "liberalizing" the story presented in the Bible by dismissing most of the Bible's details as myths, gutting the heart from God's message.

John Crossan (author of The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, HarperCollins, 1991) is a member of the Jesus Seminar, a "scholarly" endeavor by a group of theologians who decided, by voting with colored marbles in a hat, how much of what Jesus might actually have said is contained in the Bible. At the front of the book are printed the sum total of those things that Jesus might have said, or probably said — on all of only 13 pages.

A major new work of scholarship is raising eyebrows in many quarters: The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? (Macmillan, 1993)[1] This is the product of six years of extensive consultation by a group of scholars known as the Jesus Seminar (hereafter JS), who have set out to determine the authentic words of Jesus.

The result is a book that (1) provides a fresh, colloquial, and at times racy translation of the five gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas); (2) colors every saying attributed to Jesus in these Gospels as either red, pink, gray, or black (red means Jesus said it; pink means it's close to what He said; gray means He didn't say it in this form but there are echoes of His teaching in it; and black means the saying didn't come from Him at all); and (3) provides passage-by-passage commentary explaining the JS's rationale for its decisions.

As the book jacket and popular press releases emphasize, only 20 percent of all the sayings of Jesus are colored red or pink and a good number of these come from Thomas! (CRI Journal, "The Seventy-Four 'Scholars': Who Does the Jesus Seminar Really Speak For? " November 10, 1994.)

Link to the source - http://home.houston.rr.com/apologia/sec1p2.htm