Enough of this frivolity! After the bizarre speculations of Thiering and Pullman it's almost a relief to come to something as scholarly as Robert W Funk's Honest to Jesus. Robert Funk was a serious American scholar, lifelong academic and biblical historian. His biggest claim to fame is as the driving force behind The Jesus Seminar , the work of which I have already alluded to in discussing James Robinson . However he is also the founder and during his life the director of the Westar Institute , "a member-supported, non-profit research and educational institute founded in 1986 and dedicated to the advancement of religious literacy. Westar's twofold mission is to foster collaborative research in religious studies and to communicate the results of the scholarship of religion to a broad, non-specialist public" as it's own website says. The first and most famous (or notorious) publication of The Jesus Seminar, edited by Funk, was The Five Gospels , a critica
'Contemplating the teeming life of the shore, we have an uneasy sense of the communication of some universal truth that lies just beyond our grasp.' - Rachel Carson