Fleming Rutledge recently responded to a Marcus Borg lecture on her blog Generous Orthodoxy. Here is a sample of what she said.
Last night at a gathering, Marcus Borg said (twice), “Jesus trumps the Bible.”
This is an extraordinarily irresponsible thing for a scholar and leader in the church to say. It can’t be said often enough: we have no access to knowledge of Jesus except through the Bible and its interpretation. There is no record of him outside the Bible until years after his death. The only way to understanding who he was is through the witness of the New Testament apostles. Therefore to suggest that he “trumps the Bible” is to suggest that we can cut loose from the Scriptures and construct a Jesus according to the perspectives of our own time. It has been shown over and over again that attempts to construct a “historical Jesus” or “real Jesus” apart from the faith-based witness of Scripture end in failure because such attempts are grounded, not in the text, but in the bias of those who undertake them.
Take a look at the whole post at Generous Orthodoxy. It’s well worth the read.