I looked forward to this one, because I was told that it dissed my main man Ben Witherington, whose erudition and reading range is such that libraries call him to ask questions and borrow books. What I found in this slim volume was a real hoot -- the credits say Robert Miller, but for all the latent hostility, the cheap-shot psychologization, and the critical-thinking errors, they may as well say Robert Price, Jr.

Miller is one of the lesser-known members of the Seminar, that glee club of Jesus-revisers with the colored beads whose work would be better represented if they used those colored golf balls you usually find reserved for Putt-Putt. He peppers his work with weepy summaries of what oh-so-impressed him about the Jesus Seminar: how they debated honestly and respectfully, and how democratic it was that everyone from the best-trained scholar to the lowest Neanderthal got an equal vote. And therein lies the problem, the one problem Miller avoids like the plague, and should, or else doesn't have an inkling about: While he defends the Seminar against a variety of charges of incompetence, the one he misses is that it is utterly absurd to use a voting process in the context it is used by the Jesus Seminar. Two members vote black on a saying -- one may vote this way for scholarly reasons, another may vote that way because the aliens told them to. The most glaring flaw in the Seminar's system is that it pretends that competent critical evaluation has taken place and presents the results of their votes as though it is the product of such -- when what I want to know is why each member voted as they did, so that their methods can be critically evaluated individually and not presented as though a monolithic consensus. (That Miller does not see the need for this is ironic, since he acknowledges that "Biblical scholarship is highly specialized and so a scholar's position on an issue outside his or her area of specialization may not be all that informed." [69] The Seminar members may present papers and have discussions before meetings to help them decide votes, but that is far from enough to guarantee that an informed and critical choice has taken place.)

But, Miller is ever ready to defend his club with all of the usual psychologizations. The Seminar was attacked, he tells us, because they had "drilled into a nerve by speaking publicly and honestly about the historical Jesus" [3]; his critics, the pot says, are guilty of rhetorical manipulation [81] and of using "condescending rhetoric" -- this latter, said with reference to Luke Timothy Johnson, who does indeed only dismiss the idea of treating the Q document as though it were a determinable composition; Miller objects that Johnson "does not actually assert that it is wrong to aim for precision about Q, much less does he say why it would be wrong," but instead, "the mild ridicule insinuates that such pursuits are so obviously wrongheaded that one need only describe them to expose their stupidity." [81-2] To which I say: Exactly! Regardless of the "impressive erudition" of the Q-detailers, it is never more than an exercise in wrongheadedness to spin speculative fantasies about a document for which there is absolutely no hard evidence, nor even a relevant literary parallel, especially when other explanations for the data at hand are better. Erudition in the service of fantasy sounds impressive but is ultimately a waste of thought, and acting offended about being told this, as Miller does, isn't an answer to Johnson's charge (and Johnson does rather say more than Miller admits!).

Miller's attempts at practical defenses of the Seminar I found little more worthwhile. He defends the voting procedures by pointing out that the United Bible Society and some translation groups voted in a similar way when deadlocked [12] -- well, even assuming that the methods were precisely or sufficiently the same (we are not given any descriptions by which to make a critical evaluation), does this prove that the Seminar's methods are right, or only that the UBS might be mistaken in the procedures also? With only a sound bite delivered lukewarm to our door in a pizza box, who can tell? Differences among the Gospel writers, easily attributable to the vagaries of oral tradition and ancient literary practice, are said to show that the Gospel writers "adapted, embellished, updated, edited, and interpreted their material." (It proves all that? What we actually have here is a case of Miller "adapting, embellishing," etc. the data to fit a preconceived notion with no basis in fact, and offering a vague generalization for purely rhetorical purposes.) Verses like Matt. 18:20, in which Jesus proclaims himself to have divine knowledge, it is said "makes no sense at all as a saying by the historical, earthly Jesus, because it would put him in the impossible situation of being physically present in more than one place at one time." [33] (Can you say, "circular reasoning"?) And there are all the usual presumptions: the church saw no difference between earthly and risen Jesus, so attributed sayings of the latter to the former (this has yet to be proven in any sense; only assumed). Nothing new here for the mill.

More flaws? Got 'em. Miller patiently explains to us about differences in "burden of proof" by noting that O. J. Simpson was acquitted in his criminal trial, but found guilty in his civil trial [36]. He attributes this to the lesser burden of proof in civil court, but had he read his Bugliosi (Outrage, an excellent book), he would have known that the criminal evidence overwhelmingly indicted Simpson, and the actual problem was that the criminal-trial jury was composed of intellectually-challenged individuals. (I'll resist the temptation to directly say that this provides a good analogy where the Seminar is concerned.) Try also this plate of fudge: In response to criticism that the Seminar falsely claims to speak for a majority of scholars, Miller first admits that in "some places the Seminar expresses positions that it claims are those held by most New Testament scholars." [67] So far, so good. But he tells us that his "understanding" of "what the Seminar actually means by this claim" is that most scholars agree with the general idea that the Gospel writers put things in Jesus' mouth that he didn't literally say. Do I smell hot, buttered weasel? There is a vast continuum within NT scholarship which concerns the degree to which this has happened, as well as the reasons why it happened (Was it sheer invention for a community with a problem, or a terminological switch made so that an intended audience could understand the point from their perspective?). Once again this is a case of specious overgeneralization used to support a particular.

I'll reserve my final analysis for Miller's response to Witherington. It starts out with an interesting bit of Price-like psychologization for spinning purposes (Witherington "brokers the Jesus debate for conservative Christians and delivers the reassurance that evangelical orthodoxy has nothing to fear from the historical Jesus" [109] -- oh, we're all just shivering idiots out here, aren't we?) as well as a small footnoted apology to Witherington for an earlier edition of the chapter that appeared in Price's Journal of Higher Criticism in which Miller admits that "Several of my remarks there are mean-spirited and needlessly divert attention from the real issues." [109n] Miller is a hypocrite, but at least he's an apologetic hypocrite, and that might earn him some points if it was obvious he knew how to read. It's interesting to back-check his critiques of Witherington and see what's really happening. Here is an example:

Commenting on the criterion of dissimilarity, [Witherington] argues that it cannot be used as the "sole determinant of what is authentic among [Jesus'] sayings" (p. 46). Witherington gives no examples of the Seminar using it as the "sole determinant."

I have to conclude from this that Miller is a bad reader, because when Witherington makes this comment, his actual criticism is along my lines, that "the Jesus Seminar people do not tell us...what weight was given to the criterion of dissimilarity and by whom." In other words, we need the reasoning behind the results, or else the results are worthless. Witherington then goes on to say that this criteria cannot be used by itself, and he goes on to explain others, and then says that "we are not told whether the Jesus Seminar used a broad enough spectrum of criteria to reach their conclusions. In view of the fact that some of the sayings they rule out do meet important historical criteria but not the criterion of dissimilarity, we must conclude that some of their results might be explained by their overreliance on the criterion of dissimilarity." [47] In other words, Witherington's criticism is far more complex than Miller acknowledges, and what he says does not answer Witherington at all -- and he can't answer it, without providing critical access to the individual decision-processes of the members. Each of Miller's summary responses to Witherington misses salient points like these, either misrepresenting Witherington's critique or else answering the wrong question. Miller thinks it an insult that Witherington wants peer review on the Seminar's work; "as if the collaborative work of over seventy qualified scholars needs any more scholars to judge whether it is worthy of being published!" Well, Miller has proven just that with his inability to understand what Witherington is saying.