I had expected to find a small gathering of eccentric Episcopalians in a basement lecture hall. Instead, the National Cathedral was overflowing with a Christmas Eve-sized crowd. The draw was not a holiday but a debate between “Jesus scholars” Prof Marcus Borg of Oregon State University and the Rev. N.T. Wright of Litchfield Cathedral, England. Over 1,300 Washingtonians squeezed into the normally ample gothic sanctuary to hear these gentlemen debate whether the New Testament’s accounts of a divine Jesus are history or metaphor.

Borg and Wright are touring America to tout their joint book venture: The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions (Harper San Francisco). Wright is a theological traditionalist, although he does not like being called that. And Borg is a leader in liberal revisionism’s most fertile publicity machine, the Jesus Seminar.

Both are bearded Anglicans with erudite manners, but—their avuncular protests to the contrary—their similarities end there. Borg believes the “pre-Easter” Jesus was merely an heroic spokesman for social justice. The “post-F,aster” Jesus who claimed divinity and worked miracles was actually a creation of the early Church as a metaphorical expression of its faith. Wright counters that the first Christians placed their faith in a Jewish prophet who not only claimed equality with God, but whose Virgin Birth, miracles, and Resurrection from the dead lend credence to the claim. Both Borg and Wright agree that the Enlightenment stress on science and factuality has distorted Christianity. Borg critiques the Enlightenment as a postmodernist mystic, while Wright does so as a Christian classicist.

Their arguments have been published in USA Today and aired on National Public Radio, and their debate over Jesus is hyped as Something New. Actually, it is about 2,000 years old. Wright, although trying to speak the language of the academy rather than the pulpit, is still defending Christian orthodoxy. Borg’s Jesus, who is divine only in the hearts of His believers, differs little from the Jesus of Rudolf Bultmann 50 years ago, Albert Schweitzer 100 years ago, or Thomas Jefferson 200 years ago.

According to Wright, Jesus professed His divinity more through His actions than His words. “If we look long and hard at Jesus, we will find out who God is,” Wright said. This God is not a deist or New Age deity, but the “strange” God of Exodus and Deuteronomy. Jesus “was doing what God was supposed to do.” As to questions about the New Testament’s veracity, Wright said, “We know more about Jesus than how the Gospels got written.” But in general, Wright sees the miraculous events surrounding Jesus as history, not poetry.

In contrast, Borg sees the Gospels as “history remembered and history metaphorized.” Some stories happened, while others are completely metaphor. Tales about the Virgin Birth, miracles, multiplying bread loaves, and walking on the sea should be seen as the latter. Borg said scholarship (presumably as embodied in the Jesus Seminar) must decide which parts of the Gospels are “early” and which parts reflect the much later “voice of community.”

Borg disagreed with Wright about Jesus’s self-understanding, His death, and Easter. Jesus “probably” did not see Himself as messiah. His death was a “consequence” of His actions but not His vocation, making Him similar to the martyred Martin Luther King, Jr., or Mahatma Gandhi. And, in Borg’s view, the corpse and tomb of Jesus are “irrelevant.”

“Truth is founded in the continuing reality of Jesus among believers,” Borg claimed, rather than a strict reliance upon Scripture. He sees Jesus as a Jewish mystic or “spirit person,” like Buddha. And like Jesus or Buddha, we can experience God through “shamanic” or “altered states of consciousness.” Only the Enlightenment, Borg surmised, would deny the validity of such moments.

The early Church described its spiritual experiences in the language of miracles and resurrection, according to Borg, who thinks we distort their message with a literal reading. But Wright finds that approach misleading. “You’re saying the early Church took non-literal, non-concrete ideas and then historicized them,” Wright retorted. “Metaphor is being used to cover a multitude of sins.”

Borg asked Wright if there were any limit to what he would accept as history. For example, could anyone multiply loaves of bread? Wright said he rebels against the Enlightenment’s automatic dismissal of the miraculous. And he points out that the Gospel narrative uniquely equips Jesus with extraordinary powers. “It’s really hard to imagine these things without imagining an interventionist God,” Borg protested. Wright responded that it was an erroneous legacy of the Enlightenment to speak of a “split-level universe” in which God does or does not intervene. God’s miracles should not be seen as an intervention into His own universe, Wright said, but more appropriately as “unique” and “dramatic.”

Much of the discussion may have seemed too academic to the audience. Within an hour, many people left the cathedral, and within 90 minutes, nearly half the crowd had departed. A debate between Borg and Jerry Falwell might have been less cordial, but the sanctuary would have stayed filled.

The audience of Washingtonians appeared upscale. Episcopalian, and very “inside the Beltway.” I assumed that Borg, as the mystical postmodernist, would be the crowd’s favorite against a clever but still traditionalist cathedral dean. But most questions from the pews expressed dismay that Borg could profess Christianity while denying some of the faith’s key tenets. One questioner asked Borg if the Holy Spirit had misled the Church’s interpretation of Scripture for 2,000 years. “I don’t know if the Holy Spirit would be helpful in judging the factuality of the Gospels,” responded Borg. “The Holy Spirit is irrelevant in that decision-making process.” In response to another query about his view on the Resurrection, Borg surmised that the disciples safely waited until Jesus’s corpse was rotted beyond recognition before making their claims.

No cathedral columns collapsed in response to Borg’s impieties; obviously, the God of Episcopalians is patient and long-suffering. The remainder of the audience politely applauded and filed out to purchase copies of the debaters’ books in the lobby.

Borg professes to be a practicing Christian. His wife is an Episcopal priest. “Tom [Wright] and I share a vision of the Christian life. Our disagreements are in theology. Does it matter if Jesus thought He was messiah? Tom says yes. I say no.”

Good English gentleman that he is, Wright accepts Borg’s profession of faith. Although unmentioned in the cathedral, Borg has said that Christianity is a temporary “prism” through which to view the sacred, a prism which eventually will be displaced by other spiritualities. If the Christian faith survives at all, it will resemble Zoroastrianism as a quaint and tiny sect, he predicts. He describes himself as a “panentheist” who believes that all matter is a part of the great divine spirit.

One audience member asked Borg if he really believed in the biblical god Yahweh. “Sure,” he replied. Of course, asa good postmodernist, he reserves the right to define Yahweh as he chooses, Yahweh’s self-revelatory nature notwithstanding. Left unaddressed in this discussion was one central question: Does Yahweh approve of Borg’s consignment of Him to the realm of subjective imagination? The debate would have had more spark if Wright had suggested that Yahweh very well may not.