A Religion News Service press release today announced that the inaugural meeting of the “Jesus Project” will take place next month in Amherst, N.Y.

What’s the Jesus Project? It’s a new initiative drawn from the same school of scholarship that gave rise to the “Jesus Seminar.”

And it appears to have much the same agenda as does the Jesus Seminar — to suggest that the historical evidence about Jesus refutes foundational Christian beliefs like the resurrection of Christ. (Go here, for an amusing spoof of the methodology that animates the Jesus Seminar.)

But the Jesus Project takes the Jesus Seminar approach one step further: According to R. Joseph Hoffmann, who chairs the “Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion” that is sponsoring the Jesus Project, it “is the first methodologically agnostic approach to the question of Jesus’ historical existence.”

A clear idea of the biases of the participants in the Jesus Project can be gleaned from the fact that the “Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion” is a branch of the Center For Inquiry, whose chief executive officer Ronald A. Lindsay doubles as the executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism.

Lindsay will also chair the opening session of the Amherst conference. Other sessions will be chaired by a roster of academics whose work, by and large, questions the assumption that the teachings of orthodox Christianity are rooted in historical evidence. 

The Daily Blog does not wish to impugn the individual scholarship of all of the participants in the Jesus Project, nor to suggest that the historical-critical methods they employ to analyze the Gospels are completely invalid.

But Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out repeatedly about the profound limitations of the historical-critical method — most notably in his 2007 book “Jesus of Nazareth” — and of the need to counterbalance those limitations by also making use of a theological methodology that takes into account the unity of Scripture and the living tradition of the Church.

The absence of this theological perspective can result in a crippled understanding of the Christian faith, the Pope observed at last month’s synod in Rome.

“The first consequence of the absence of this second methodological level is that the Bible becomes a book only about the past,” the Holy Father said. “Moral consequences can be drawn from it, history can be learned from it, but the Book as such speaks only of the past, and exegesis is no longer truly theological, but becomes pure historiography, the history of literature. This is the first consequence: the Bible remains in the past, it speaks only of the past.

Continued Benedict, “The second consequence is even more serious: where the hermeneutics of faith indicated by ‘Dei Verbum’ disappears, another kind of hermeneutics seems to be necessary, a secularized, positivist hermeneutics, the fundamental principle of which is the conviction that the Divine does not appear in human history. According to this hermeneutics, when it seems that there is a divine element, it must be explained where this impression comes from, and everything must be reduced to the human element.”

Said the Pope, “In consequence, interpretations are proposed that deny the historicity of the divine elements. Today the so-called ‘mainstream’ of exegesis in Germany denies, for example, that the Lord instituted the Holy Eucharist, and says that the body of Jesus remained in the tomb. The Resurrection is no longer seen as an historical event, but as a theological view. This takes place because of hermeneutics of faith is missing: a profane, philosophical hermeneutics is therefore asserted, denying the possibility of the entry and real presence of the Divine within history.”

Will this crippled understanding of Christianity afflict the Jesus Project? Given the perspectives of its participants, that seems virtually certain.

— Tom McFeely