In 1986. John L. McKenzie, the world renowned scripture scholar, expressed himself very candidly:

I have been asked more than once whether I still believe what I profess as a Catholic, or whether I am a practicing Catholic, or why I do not resign from the Catholic priesthood and the Catholic Church and go where I belong, wherever that may be... I respond with two well worn anecdotes. You could call them parables. the first concerns the Irish writer, James Joyce. When asked whether he had abandoned Catholicism for Protestantism, he answered, "Sure it's me faith I renounced, not me reason." The second concerns two professional gamblers who conducted their business aboard Mississippi River steamboats.  When the steamer carrying them had put in for repairs at a small remote village for a number of hours, they went ashore with the other passengers and became separated. When they rejoined each other later, one found the other engaged in a local card game. The observer watched the game for a few minutes, and at the first opportunity he whispered to the player. "Listen, Jim, this game is crooked." Jim whispered back, "I know it's crooked, but it's the only game in town." That answer might not satisfy John Paul ll or the Roman Curia, but it satisfies me, and I have to live with myself, not with them.

The Gospels contain no teaching of Jesus; they give us collections of scattered and often disjointed sayings. These sayings can be arranged under headings, topics, or themes; but conclusions which can be drawn from such arrangements are the teaching not of Jesus but of his interpreters... one is aware of venerable "doctrines" proposed as the teaching of Jesus, such as the primacy and infallibility of the Roman Pontiff, the establishment of the monarchical episcopate and the apostolic succession, none of which has the slightest foundation in the sayings of Jesus, and one can take due precautions. The sayings attributed to Jesus can, with varying degrees of probability, be traced back to the words of Jesus himself; sayings so traced are called by my colleagues "authentic" sayings. Sayings not judged authentic are attributed to the early disciples and scribes who made efforts to reconstruct the sayings of Jesus by the use of imagination or to construct what they thought he would have said about situations concerning which the collective memory of the disciples preserved no authentic sayings.

The judgment of how faithful these collected sayings are to the historical Jesus is an area of theological warfare which has carried on for nearly two centuries.... I assume that the "real" or the "historical" Jesus is more responsible than anyone else for what is preserved of his sayings and his doings in the Gospels. I do not believe that the Jesus of the Gospels is the creation of the nameless and barely literate believers of the first century.