THE FIRST TIME I WENT LOOKING FOR the gospel truth, I got lost.
I was a 12-year-old altar boy, tremulously holding the heavy, red prayer book for Father O'Brien as he prepared to read aloud from the Gospel of Saint Matthew. For an altar boy, this was always a big moment, as close as you'd come to a co-starring role in the great mystery play of the Roman Catholic Mass. With your back to the congregation, you'd gently nestle the massive gilt-edged book against your heaving chest and hold it open for the priest who intoned the Gospel. For the next several minutes, you were little more than a glorified book stand, but it was impossible not to be gripped by the power of the words received under those circumstances. Father O'Brien's softly ancient face was about two feet away from your own, and it always seemed that his words--the words of Jesus--were flaming arrows aimed straight at your imperfect heart. If, in a moment of shame, you glanced down at the book as the priest was reading, you'd see the words of Jesus printed in red, searing a crimson trail across the page.
One Sunday, the words of Matthew 18:21-22 seemed to speak to me with unusual clarity:
"Then Peter came and said to him, 'Lord if my brother sins against me, how often should I forgive? As many as seven times?'
"Jesus said to him, 'Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy times seven.' "
For me, it was the long-hoped-for chink in the armor of Christian charity. For the next several days, I carefully counted the schoolyard offenses committed against me, in silent anticipation of the 491st sin, the one which, according to the inerrant arithmetic of the New Testament, I didn't have to forgive. For a while, I could hardly wait to dispense some real biblical justice, smite my enemy and cast him into the unquenchable fire, or at least into the big thorn bush behind school. But as it turned out, I lost heart in the count long before I got to 491. It seemed too small-minded, even then, to hold an eternal grudge against someone just because he butted in front of me in line.
My momentary view of Jesus, as a kind of Cosmic CPA in charge of Sin Counting, didn't ring true with the portrait of the infinitely forgiving Jesus painted so luminously in other Gospel accounts. It was my first struggle with the words ascribed to Jesus, a hint that The Gospel Truth could be very different from what the words of the Gospel seemed to be saying literally.
In a considerably more learned fashion, New Testament scholars today are searching for their own Gospel Truths. During the past few years, scholars have taken a new look at the New Testament and early Christian scriptures, viewing them through the lenses of history, social anthropology and literary analysis. The study has led to a consensus among scholars that differences, possibly significant ones, exist between what the historical Jesus is likely to have said and done and what was recorded by his followers. Their goal, in biblical terms, is to separate the wheat from the chaff.
"For Christians today, I think the quest for the historical Jesus is part of being a 20th-Century believer as opposed to, say, a 13th-Century believer," says Father John Meier, a Catholic priest and professor of New Testament studies at Catholic University of America in Washington and author of "A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus."
"Every age has to somehow weld together the prevailing cultural mood with the message of Christianity. We live in a period marked by a historical consciousness and historical change. As a result, I don't think that educated Christians have fully assimilated what their Christian commitment means if they have not probed the question of the historical Jesus."
In the secular world of publishing, Jesus is now a hot item. A. N. Wilson's "Jesus: A Life" speculates that Jesus was married, a scholar rather than a carpenter, who didn't seek to overthrow Jewish law as much as try to make his contemporaries true to it. "The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant," by John Dominic Crossan, a former priest, paints Jesus as a savvy Jewish peasant preaching a gospel of social and economic equality, and Meier's book seeks common ground in the often-contradictory conclusions reached by questers seeking the truth about Jesus.
