The Jesus Seminar « Westar Institute Westar Institute was launched about 1775, the same time the United States was being founded. Its progress is marked by milestones, landmark developments

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The Jesus Seminar was organized in 1985 to renew thequest of the historical Jesus and to report the results ofits research to the general public, rather than just to ahandful of gospel specialists. Initially, the goal of theSeminar was to review each of the sayings and deedsattributed to Jesus in the gospels and determine whichof them could be considered authentic.

Thirty scholars took up the challenge at the initialmeeting in Berkeley, California. Eventually more than200 professionally trained specialists, called Fellows,joined the group at various phases. As the editors ofthe Seminars 1993 book The Five Gospels explain in their

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Preface, the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar represent awide array of Western religious traditions andacademic institutions. They have been trained in thebest universities in North America and Europe. Moreabout Westar Fellows

The Seminar met twice a year to debate technicalpapers that were prepared and circulated in advance. Atthe close of debate on each agenda item, Fellows votedusing colored beads to indicate the degree ofauthenticity of the words and deeds attributed to Jesusin the gospels. Dropping colored beads into a box soonbecame a trademark of the Jesus Seminar. More aboutvoting

Among the findings is that, in the judgment of theJesus Seminar Fellows, about 18 percent of the sayingsand 16 percent of the deeds attributed to Jesus in thegospels are authentic.

The Jesus Seminar comprised three phases:

Phase 1, Sayings of Jesus (1985-1991)

Phase 2, Deeds of Jesus (1991-1996)

Phase 3, Profiles of Jesus (1996-1998)



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In the Beginning

Excerpt from opening remarks of Jesus Seminar andWestar Institute founder Robert W. Funk at the launchof the Jesus Seminar in March 1985 in Berkeley,California

We are about to embark on a momentousenterprise. We are going to inquire simply,rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what hereally said.

In this process, we will be asking a question thatborders the sacred, that even abuts blasphemy, for many in our society. As aconsequence, the course we shall follow may prove hazardous. We may well

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Become a MemberWestar Institutehome of the Jesus Seminarinvites members of thegeneral public and scholars of religion into conversation aboutquestions that matter in society.

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provoke hostility. But we will set out, in spite of the dangers, because we areprofessionals and because the issue of Jesus is there to be faced, much as Mt.Everest confronts the team of climbers.

Read complete text of opening remarks (PDF)

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Milestones in the Quest for the Historical Jesus Westar Institute Westar Institute

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Milestones in the Quest for the Historical JesusRobert W. Funk

From The Fourth RVolume 14-4JulyAugust 2001

The quest for the historical Jesus has been underway for more than twocenturies. It was launched about 1775, the same time the United States wasbeing founded. Its progress is marked by milestones, landmark developmentsthat represent the transition from one stage to another. The axioms that governthe current consensus emerged over that span of time.

One can of course discern these crucial advances clearly only in retrospect. The



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decisive developments that are taking place in the present scholarly debatewill not be known for certain until some future date. Meanwhile, we cansketch the contributions of significant precursors who contributed essentialitems to the current consensus. We can also risk a brief characterization ofrecent and current trends as we perceive them from the standpoint of the JesusSeminar.

Pre-Critical Reading of Scripture

Imagine what it was like reading the gospels with pre-critical eyes. Thatshould not be difficult; many still do it today. Andreas Osiander (14981552), acontemporary of Martin Luther, took the view that if an event is recorded morethan once in the gospels and in different connections, then it happened morethan once. For example, the cleansing of the temple is located by the Gospel ofJohn near the beginning of Jesus public ministry; in the synoptics it is placednear the end. He concluded that it must have happened twice. The daughter ofJairus must have been raised from the dead several times because it is reportedseveral times in rather different settings.

After the rise of biblical criticism, pietists tended to harmonize the differencesand discrepancies by inventing explanations to account for them. Recently, atelevangelist explained to his listeners that the bible does not contradict itself.As an example, he chose the death of Judas Iscariot. According to Matthew(27:3), Judas rejected the thirty pieces of silver and hanged himself. In Acts(1:1819), Judas bought a field with his silver coins and later swelled up andburst open so that his bowels gushed out. The televangelist took the view thathanging and evisceration are two accounts of the same event: Judas hangedhimself, then swelled up as he dangled in the air; since Jews were forbiddento touch a dead body, someone had to cut the rope, at which point he dropped

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to the ground and burst open, his bowels pouring out on the ground. Theevangelist did not explain the contradiction involved in Judas both returningthe coins and buying a field with them. In television land, the defense of thebible as an infallible source of history goes on unabated, as though historicalcriticism were the invention of the devil.

Distinguishing the Historical Jesus from the First Disciples

Hermann Samuel Reimarus (16941768) exhibits the first influences of theEnlightenment in an essay entitled, The Aims of Jesus and His Disciples(1778). The essay was part of a larger work in which Reimarus rejects outrightthe miraculous and the idea of revelation. Reimarus was the first to draw anabsolute distinction between what the historical Jesus did and taught and theteachings and aims of Jesus disciples. He accuses the gospel writers ofconscious fraud, fanaticism, and numerous contradictions. His work was socontroversial for his day that he decided not to publish it himself; sevenfragments from it were published anonymously following his death. Today,very few scholars would care to endorse Reimarus view outright, yet thedistinction he drew between the historical figure of Jesus and the views of hisfollowers as reflected in the gospels stands as a lighthouse warning againstthe shoals of harmonization.

Revolt against Ecclesiastical Control & the Rise of the Sciences

In the eighteenth century, church authorities became increasingly embattled asscientific knowledge challenged the bible. First astronomy and physics laiddown the gauntlet, and then geology and later psychology reshaped thecontours of human knowledge.

Three important steps were involved:



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1. The skies were swept clean ofdemons and spirits that werethought to control events anddestinies.

2. The dogmatic tyranny over thesciences came to an end,including the domination ofhistorical research; the freedomto explore the natural universeand history withoutecclesiastical censure was thengreatly expanded.

3. In the wake of these developments, the authority of scripture began toerode.

Galileo Galilei (15641642) was condemned in 1616 and again in 1632 forpropagating the views of Nikla Copernicus (14731543) that the earth revolvedaround the sun. Up until that time, the earth was assumed to be the center ofthe galaxy, indeed, of the universe, to the extent that the dimensions of theuniverse were known. Galileo might have been left alone had he not raiseddoubts about the interpretation of the mass and the doctrine oftransubstantiation. This put him on a collision course with the Catholicchurch.

The church and the sciences continued to be at loggerheads, even war, untilthe latter part of the twentieth century. The condemnation of Galileo wasfinally lifted on 28 December 1991 by John Paul II, after a delay of 359 years.

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The hegemony over knowledge once the exclusive prerogative of the Churchhad passed over to the sciences and technology.

The Emancipation of the Natural from the Supernatural

David Friedrich Strauss (18081874) produced a truly remarkable work, The Lifeof Jesus Critically Examined in 1835. It was both a theological bombshell and aliterary work of unparalleled excellence. The English translation by GeorgeEliot (Mary Ann Evans) is also a masterpiece. In his work, Strauss attempted toemancipate the natural from the supernatural. Like Reimarus, he rejected themiraculous and qualified revelation. Strauss illustrates the dictum of AlbertSchweitzer that critical scholarship turned to the historical Jesus as an ally inthe struggle against the tyranny of dogma (Quest, 4). The response to hiswork was immediate and violent. He lost his job as a teacher and was calledanti-christ and Judas by opponents. He was hounded by his critics until hisdeath in 1874.

The Priority of the Gospel of Mark

Christian Gottlob Wilke (17861854) first proposed the thesis that Mark wasthe first gospel in his work, The Original Evangelist (1838). His thesis laterbecame virtually axiomatic among critical scholars. Mark composed his gospel,in the judgment of most scholars, in the decade of the 70s, forty years after thedeath of Jesus. Mark collected anecdotes and teachings that had circulatedduring the intervening years by word of mouth and arranged themsequentially in a gospel. He did not have any real knowledge of the order ofevents.

Accompanying this hypothesis is the view that Matthew and Luke arerevisions of the Gospel of Mark. Since Matthew and Luke are basically




following Mark, they provide us with no additional independent informationabout Jesus, beyond a few stray oral traditions. These stray traditions doappear to contain important information about Jesus. Matthew and Luke alsoincorporate another written source, the so-called Sayings Gospel Q, anotherimportant discovery, to which we now turn.

The Emergence of the Q-hypothesis

Christian Hermann Weisse (18011866) is the author of The GospelHistory Critically and PhilosophicallyInvestigated (1838). Weisse is theauthor of the Q-hypothesis, which,together with the priority of Mark,became the cornerstone of the two-document explanation of gospelrelationships. The two-documenthypothesis holds that Matthew andLuke took Mark as the narrative basisof their revisions, to which theyinserted material from Q. The verbaloverlap of Matthew and Luke with both Mark and Q supplies impressiveevidence to support this general theory. The priority of Mark and the existenceof Q has been challenged over and over again in the history of scholarship,but they have repeatedly reasserted themselves as basic axioms in the quest ofthe historical Jesus.

It is remarkable in retrospect the extent to which the critical axioms of modernbiblical scholarship were formed in such a brief period in the early nineteenth

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century. Of course, the original proposals did not achieve wide acceptanceimmediately and some are still being debated on the margins of currentscholarship. Nevertheless, the critical landscape had already been formed bythe middle of the century.

The Preference of the Synoptics over the Gospel of John

Heinrich Julius Holtzmann (18321910) is responsible for recognizing thepriority of Mark plus Q over against the Gospel of John. He and other criticalscholars took John to lean more to the supernatural and mythical, relativelyspeaking. He published his views in a work called The Synoptic Gospels (1863).In addition to his defense of the two-document hypothesis, he is one of thefirst scholars to set the religion of Jesus and Paul into the religious world oftheir day. He treated Paul as the second founder of Christianity. The contoursof twentieth-century gospel scholarship were now firming up. Holtzmann wasa major influence in defining those contours.

The Rediscovery of Eschatology

Johannes Weiss (18631914) stands as a towering figure at the beginning of thetwentieth century. He was extremely influential with his Jesus Proclamation ofthe Kingdom of God (1892). Weiss reacted to the optimism of nineteenth-centurytheology by rediscovering Jesus as an eschatological prophet. As such, Jesusanticipated that God would intervene in history in the near future andestablish the kingdom. The kingdom could not be created by human endeavor;it would come in Gods good time. All humans can do is repent and preparefor it.

Weiss followed Holtzmann in setting Christianity in the context of otherhellenistic religions. He was one of the founders of the history-of-religions



school. He was also the teacher of Rudolf Bultmann, who would subsequentlyexert a powerful influence on the course of modern biblical scholarship.

The Messianic Secret in Mark

Wilhelm Wrede (18591906) advocated the thesis that Jesus repeatedadmonition to keep his messiahship secret is a theological construction of theauthor of Mark. He developed that thesis in The Messianic Secret in the Gospels(1901). Accordingly, the messianic secret in Mark has nothing to do withwhether Jesus regarded himself as the messiah. In fact, Wrede held, at the timeMark was written it was thought that Jesus was elevated to the rank ofmessiah at his resurrection/ascension. Mark conceived the messianic secret asa way to account for a life that was obviously messianic (in the portrayal of theNew Testament gospels) but not recognized as such at the time. Wrede dealt afatal blow to the view that Mark was a reliable historian of the life of Jesus.The evangelists were now to be understood as propagandists, to use thedescriptive term, or theologians, reflecting the convictions of their faithcommunities. Subsequent work on Mark made it clear that the supernaturalframework of Mark appearance of the spirit at baptism, transfiguration,empty tomb is largely fictional; it was borne of the faith convictions ofChristian storytellers and preachers.

The First Quest Comes to an End

Albert Schweitzer (18751965) produced one of the most admired and widelyread books on the historical Jesus in his The Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906).Schweitzer sketches the history of the struggle to identify and isolate thehistorical figure of Jesus during the nineteenth century. The title ofSchweitzers German edition is: From Reimarus to Wrede: A History of Research onthe Life of Jesus.



Schweitzer identified the basic either-or decisions that gospel scholars had tomake. The first was posed by D. F. Strauss: the gospels are either purelysupernatural or purely historical. This dilemma has to be understood againstthe options that were available to Strauss. The pietists insisted that the gospelswere pure, unalloyed history. The rationalists gave rational explanations forthe miracles thereby explaining them away. Strauss took the view that thegospels were essentially myth, which is a proper and necessary form ofexpression for the religious feeling. Strauss thus attempted to redeem thecategory of myth while separating the purely historical from myth.

Holtzmann posed the second: either the synoptics or the Gospel of Johnrepresents the historical figure. The Gospel of John began to lose out in thehistorical wars from an early time. It is so evidently mythical and mystical thatscholars were forced to doubt that it contributed much to the history of Jesus.

The third dilemma was adopted by Schweitzer himself: Either Jesus was aneschatological prophet or he was not oriented primarily to eschatology.Schweitzer decided that the eschatological prophet was the original Jesus. Buthe did not understand eschatology as the supernatural as the advent of thekingdom as the direct intervention of God. Rather, he understood theeschatological as Jesus the fanatic, as the nave dreamer. Schweitzers ownview of Jesus was heavily influenced by the work of Johannes Weiss.However, Schweitzer was not in a position to appreciate the work of WilhelmWrede; he was unable to see that Mark had woven a theological perspectiveinto his gospel. And Schweitzer did not adopt the two-document hypothesis.In fact, he based his views primarily on a straight reading of the Gospel ofMatthew. In the end, Schweitzer abandoned his theological career and spentthe rest of his life in Africa as a missionary doctor. While he put Jesus down



as a religious fanatic, he was nevertheless fundamentally influenced by Jesusethical views. He was awarded the Nobel prize in 1952 as a consequence of hiswork for peace, for the abandonment of atomic testing and his opposition tothe creation of weapons arsenals.

The Narrative Framework of the Gospels as Fiction

Karl Ludwig Schmidt is another precursor in the history of the quest. Hewrote a book on The Framework of the Gospels (1919), in which he demonstratedfor the first time that the reports incorporated into the first gospel, Mark, wereonce independent anecdotes that had been orally transmitted for severaldecades. He showed that their connection in the Gospel of Mark (and the othergospels) was purely arbitrary and did not reflect knowledge of the actualsequence of events.

The Oral Anecdote and the Redemption of Myth

Rudolf Bultmann (18841976) published two seminal works that have enduredthe test of time and heavy criticism. His History of the Synoptic Tradition (1921;2nd ed., 1931; English translation 1963) remains the basic reference work onthe history of the gospel tradition. His essay New Testament andMythology, in Kerygma and Myth (New York: Harper & Row, 1961), followsStrauss in accepting the mythological element in the gospels as ingredient tothe Christian message, while insisting at the same time that myth must betranslated into modern terms.

Bultmann was one of the pioneers of form criticism, which is the study of theform of oral anecdotes and sayings that constitute the means by which thegospel traditions were transmitted from the death of Jesus to the first writtengospel. His History of the Synoptic Tradition is still the basic text in the field



seventy-five years after its initial publication. A new history of the completeJesus tradition is now urgently needed.

His second contribution was his famous demythologizing essay publishedfirst in 1941. In that essay, he argued that the ancient gospel was essentiallymythological and had, as a consequence, to be translated into existentialistterms in order to be properly understood. Bultmann is often said to be themost influential New Testament scholar of the twentieth century.

The New Quest

Ernst Ksemann called for a renewal of the quest in 1953 in an article entitledThe Problem of the Historical Jesus. His point was that if we do notestablish some continuity between the preaching of Jesus and theproclamations of the primitive church, the church is left with a mythologicallord. But it was Gnther Bornkamm (19051990) who resumed the quest withthe publication of Jesus of Nazareth (1956; 3rd ed., 1959). The English translationappeared in 1963. It has been translated into eleven foreign languages. JamesM. Robinson interpreted Bornkamms work as a renewal of the quest over theobjections of Bultmann and other neo-orthodox theologians in his The NewQuest of the Historical Jesus (Allenson, 1959). The orthodox theologians, such asKarl Barth and Bultmann, held that it was impossible to recover the historicalfigure since the gospels were not histories, and they took the view that thequest was illegitimate in any case since it was an effort to provide a factualbasis for faith. The old quest had presumably ended in 1900 and the new onebegun in 1956 with the first edition of Bornkamms book on Jesus. However,the new quest died aborning because it attempted to establish some continuitybetween the historical Jesus and the early Christian proclamation. However,the discrepancy between the two grew greater as work on the gospels



advanced.

The Third Quest

In the judgment of some scholars, a third quest was inaugurated by GezaVermes in 1973 with his Jesus the Jew: A Historians Reading of the Gospel (2ndedition, 1983). Vermes concluded that Jesus was a Jewish hasid and thusbelonged to the category of charismatic holy men and healers.

The label third quest has been applied to a group of scholars whose workgives allegiance to a certain set of generalizations about the search for thehistorical figure of Jesus. The first of these generalizations is that Jesus was aneschatological prophet in the train of John the Baptist and Paul of Tarsus. Onecan draw a straight line from John to Paul and it passes through the heart ofJesus message. This is an extension of the thesis of Albert Schweitzer whoreacted against the liberal portraits of Jesus which made Jesus out to be anethical teacher advocating the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood ofhumankind. The second generalization, which is a twin of the first, is thatthere is overwhelming continuity between Jesus and the primitive church: wecan trust the canonical writers (with the exception of the Fourth Gospel)because they got it right; everybody else got it wrong. The third feature of thethird quest speaking generally is an apologetic undertow for orthodoxChristianity as defined by the canonical writers. This aspect of the third questis a rearguard action being fought against all who would distance Jesus fromJohn the Baptist, on the one hand, and the canonical books of the NewTestament, on the other. Third questers may acknowledge the Sayings GospelQ, for example, but make little use of it; they are vigorously opposed to anyregard for the Gospel of Thomas. And they tend to be apologists for the basictenets of traditional Christianity: the true faith was defined by the apostles



who correctly understood Jesus.

Those whose works might be categorized as belonging to the third questinclude the following:

E. P. Sanders, Jesus and Judaism (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985).

___________, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin Press, 1993).

John P. Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Vol. 1, The Rootsof the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991).

___________, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Vol. 2. Mentor,Message, and Miracles (New York: Doubleday, 1994.

Ben Witherington, The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth(Downers Grove, Ill., InterVarsity Press, 1992).

N. T. Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God(Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1996).

___________, The Original Jesus (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. EerdmansPublishing Co., 1996).

Dale Allison, Jesus of Nazareth. Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: FortressPress, 1998).

The Renewed Quest

The renewed quest is an attempt toreinstate the original aim of thequest, which was to distinguish theaims of Jesus from the aims of the




followers. Put more broadly, therenewed quest is designed todistinguish the words and deeds ofJesus from others attributed to himas his reputation grew in the faithcommunity. After all, the two lie sideby side in the gospels.

The renewal of the original aim comes to expression in two major ways. First,the renewed quest is focused on the vision of Jesus as formulated in his wordsand deeds rather than on the expressions of faith in him formulated by theearly community. To borrow Bultmanns phrase, the renewed quest is focusedon Jesus proclamation rather than on him as proclaimer. It is a radical shift inpoint of view or perspective. Jesus points to the kingdom; his disciples pointto him.

The second aspect of the aim follows from the first. A basic rule of evidence isto look for words and deeds in the gospels that represent his outlook ratherthan that of the evangelists. Jesus was not a Christian. However, the gospelsare Christian through and through. The residual fragments left behind in theirmemories of him are the only clues we have to his own point of view.

The renewed quest got quietly underway in 1964 with Amos Wilders TheLanguage of the Gospel: Early Christian Rhetoric. Wilder dew attention to the

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central importance of the parables and other forms of non-literal speech. Hiswork was followed by Robert W. Funk, who charted the history of neo-orthodoxy and analyzed two major forms of language in the New Testament,the parable and the letter. He published his studies as Language, Hermeneutic,and Word of God in 1966. A year later, Dan O. Via issued The Parables: TheirLiterary and Existential Dimension. A flood of articles and books followed andthe renewed quest was underway. John Dominic Crossans In Parables,published in 1973, was subtitled, The Challenge of the Historical Jesus.

There was then a hiatus of a decade before Marc Borg published his Conflict,Holiness, and Politics in the Teachings of Jesus (New York: Edwin Mellen Press,1984). Then Thomas Sheehan issued his trailblazing work The First Coming:How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity in 1986. Borg followed with Jesus: ANew Vision in 1987. Crossan came along with his massive The Historical Jesus:The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant in 1991. The flood of books and articleson the historical Jesus swelled to a torrent. Borg published his Meeting JesusAgain for the First Time, subtitled The Historical Jesus and the Heart of ContemporaryFaith in 1994, a book that set the stage for other treatments of Jesus as acontemporary. In the same year, Crossans Jesus: A Revolutionary Biographyappeared. Robert Funk published his Honest to Jesus in 1996; it contains, amongother things, his profile of Jesus based on the data assembled by the JesusSeminar.

The Jesus Seminar has produced two reports as part of the renewed quest. Thefirst, entitled The Five Gospels. The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus,appeared in 1993 under a Macmillan imprint (subsequently brought out in apaper edition at HarperSanFrancisco). The second, The Acts of Jesus. The Searchfor the Authentic Deeds of Jesus, appeared in 1998 (HarperSanFrancisco). Acollection of profiles of Jesus based on these two reports is scheduled to



appear under the editorship of Roy Hoover.

Other books related to the renewed quest include the following:

John Dominic Crossan, In Fragments: The Aphorisms of Jesus (San Francisco:Harper & Row, 1983).

___________, Who Killed Jesus? Exposing the Roots of Anti-Semitism in theGospel Story of the Death of Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).

Burton Mack, A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins (Philadelphia:Fortress Press, 1988).

___________, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins (SanFrancisco: HarperSanFranciso, 1993).

___________, Who Wrote the New Testament? The Making of the Christian Myth(San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995).

Leif E. Vaage, Galilean Upstarts: Jesus First Followers According to Q (ValleyForge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994).

Stephen J. Patterson, The Gospel of Thomas and Jesus (Sonoma, CA:Polebridge Press, 1993).

___________, The God of Jesus. The Historical Jesus and the Search for Meaning(Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press International, 1998).

This treatment of the Third Quest and the Renewed Quest represents theperspectives of the Jesus Seminar. The Third Quest does appear in its broadoutlines to be a further attempt to connect the historical figure of Jesus withthe proclamation of the primitive church as reflected in the New Testament



gospels. For this reason, the Third Quest tends to focus on the New Testamentgospels and slight the significance of Q and the Gospel of Thomas. It istherefore apologetic in demeanor a defense of critical orthodoxy. Criticalorthodoxy is an orthodoxy but one which adopts the critical scholarlyconsensus on many issues. Critical orthodoxy is to be distinguished fromuncritical orthodoxy and popular fundamentalism.

The Renewed Quest, on the other hand, is by and large dedicated to theseparation of Jesus from the views of his early followers, and thus to the goalset by Reimarus and endorsed by D. F. Strauss. The Five Gospels and The Acts ofJesus have attempted to carry that task to its logical conclusion. And it hasattempted to do so by rigorous adherence to the milestones sketched above. Ofcourse, like our predecessors, the Fellows of the Seminar are acutely awarethat some of their work is tentative and will require modification. At somefuture generation, it will be decided whether we succeeded sufficiently to beawarded a place in a new history of the milestones of the quest.

Want to know more? Try David Friedrich Strauss: Miracle and Myth byMarcus Borg or How Did Jesus Become God and Why? by Lloyd Geering.

Copyright 2001 by Polebridge Press. All rights reserved. May not bereproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyrightholder.

//

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Voting Westar Institute Westar Institute

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Voting

Why Vote?

First, Jesus Seminar Fellows had to agree how they would reach theirdecisions. After extended debate, they adopted voting as the most efficientway of determining the degree of scholarly consensus on a given point.

Voting also makes it possible to report the results to a broad public that maynot be interested in the arcane details and extended arguments that went intothose votes.

This is in contrast to the usual scholarly procedure of making up ones mindprivately, publishing opinions in some scholarly journal, and then waiting tosee whether other specialists agree. The process is glacially slow, painful, and






Red: likely authentic

Pink: somewhat likely

Gray: somewhat unlikely

Black: unlikely to be authentic

usually indecisive.

However, voting is not without precedent in biblical scholarship. Committeescreating a critical text of the Greek New Testament under the auspices of theUnited Bible Societies vote on whether to print a particular text and whatvariants to consign to notes. Translation committees, such as those that createdthe King James Version and the Revised Standard Version, vote in the courseof their deliberations on which translation proposal to accept and reject.

Voting does not, of course, determine the truthit only indicates what the bestjudgment is of a significant number of scholars sitting around the table. It wasdeemed entirely consonant with the mission of the Jesus Seminar to decidewhether, after careful review of the evidence, a particular saying or parabledid or did not fairly represent the voice of the historical Jesus.

How Voting Works

In an example from Phase 1 of the Jesus Seminar, Sayings of Jesus, JesusSeminar Fellows adopted four categories to indicate authenticity:

Each color was assigned a numberrating, so that votes could bequantified with a weighted average.

Voting for the Jesus SeminarPhase 1: Sayings of Jesus

Voting for the Jesus Seminar Phase 2: Deeds of Jesus

Video: Jesus Seminar Fellow Marcus Borg on voting

http://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar/voting/more-on-voting-for-the-jesus-seminar-phase-1-sayings-of-jesus/http://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar/voting/more-on-voting-for-the-jesus-seminar-phase-1-sayings-of-jesus/http://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar/voting/more-on-voting-for-the-jesus-seminar-phase-2-deeds-of-jesus/http://www.youtube.com/v/5_BfTlz0xME&rel=0




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Jesus Seminar Phase 1: Sayings of Jesus Westar Institute Westar Institute

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Parables

Jesus Seminar Phase 1: Sayings of Jesus

1985-1991

Goal

The first step in the work of the Jesus Seminar was to inventory and classifyall the words attributed to Jesus in the first three centuries of the CommonEra. The goal was to review each of 1500 items collected and determine whichof them could be ascribed with a high degree of probability to Jesus.

The Seminar collected more than 1500 versions of about 500 items sorted intofour categories:






Aphorisms

Dialogues

Stories containing words attributedto Jesus

Red (likely authentic)

Pink (somewhat likely)

Gray (somewhat unlikely)

Black (unlikely)

The inventory covers all the surviving gospels and reports from the period, notjust the canonical gospels. The Fellows adopted this rule: Canonical boundariesare irrelevant in critical assessments of the various sources of information about Jesus.

In other words, the Fellows refused to privilege the gospels that came to beregarded as canonical by the church, which is consistent with the canons ofhistorical inquiry.

Voting

After debate on each agenda item, Fellows voted using colored beads toindicate the degree of authenticity of Jesus words. Each color was assigned anumber rating, so that votes could be quantified with a weighted average.

The Fellows adopted four categories:

More about voting



Findings

The sayings the Fellows voted as most likely to be authentic were:

1. Other cheek (Q) Matt 5:39, Luke 6:29a

2. Coat & shirt (Q) Matt 5:40, Luke 6:29b

3. Congratulations, poor! (Q, Thomas) Luke 6:20, Thomas 54

4. Matt 5:3

5. Second mile (Q) Matt 5:41

6. Love of enemies (Q) Luke 6:27b, Matt 5:44b, Luke 6:32, 35a

7. Leaven (Q, Thomas) Luke 13:20-21, Matt 13:33, Thom 96:1-2

8. Emperor & God (Thomas, Mark) Thom 100:2b, Mark 12:17b, Luke20:25b, Matt 22:21c

9. Give to beggars (Q) Matt 5:42a, Luke 6:30a

10. The Samaritan (L) Luke 10:30-35

11. Congratulations, hungry! (Q, Thomas) Luke 6:21a, Matt 5:6, Thom 69:2

Jesus Seminar Fellows also came to consensus on the following:

Jesus of Nazareth did not refer to himself as the Messiah, nor did heclaim to be a divine being who descended to earth from heaven in orderto die as a sacrifice for the sins of the world. These are claims that somepeople in the early church made about Jesus, not claims he made abouthimself.



At the heart of Jesus teaching and actions was a vision of a life underthe reign of God (or, in the empire of God) in which Gods generosityand goodness is regarded as the model and measure of human life;everyone is accepted as a child of God and thus liberated both from theethnocentric confines of traditional Judaism and from the secularizingservitude and meagerness of their lives under the rule of the empire ofRome.

Jesus did not hold an apocalyptic view of the reign (or kingdom) of Godthat by direct intervention God was about to bring history to an endand bring a new, perfect order of life into being. Rather, in Jesusteaching the reign of God is a vision of what life in this world could be,not a vision of life in a future world that would soon be brought intobeing by a miraculous act of god.

The Parables of Jesus

This first report of the Jesus Seminar reviews the authenticityof all gospel versions of the 33 parables attributed to Jesus.Individual versions of each parable are grouped together andarranged for easy reference and comparison. In this red-letteredition, each parable is color-coded to indicate its authenticity.Read more

The Five Gospels

The complete results of the Jesus Seminardeliberations on the sayings of Jesus werepublished in 1993 as The Five Gospels: The Search for

http://www.westarinstitute.org/projects/the-jesus-seminar/jesus-seminar-phase-1-sayings-of-jesus/the-parables-of-jesus/http://www.westarinstitute.org/store/the-five-gospels/




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the Authentic Words of Jesus.

Read an example from Luke 6:29-37

This critical red-letter edition of the gospels is acompletely new translation from Greek andCoptic texts. Each saying attributed to Jesus is

color-coded to indicate its authenticity. The Fellows of the Jesus Seminardesigned it to be understood at a glance by the casual reader not familiar withthe history of critical scholarship over the past two centuries.

Eighty-two percent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the gospels were notactually spoken by him, according to the Jesus Seminar. How do scholarsaccount for this pronounced discrepancy? Read more from the introduction

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Jesus Seminar Phase 2: Deeds of Jesus Westar Institute Westar Institute

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Jesus Seminar Phase 2: Deeds of Jesus

1991-1996

Goal

After completing its work on Phase 1, Sayings of Jesus, in 1989, Jesus SeminarFellows undertook to evaluate the deeds attributed to Jesus in the ancientsources, as well as the reported events of his life.

During Phase 2 of the Jesus Seminar, the Fellows examined 387 reports of 176events, in most of which Jesus is the principal actor, although occasionallyJohn the Baptist, Simon Peter, or Judas is featured.

Voting






Red (likely authentic)

Pink (somewhat likely)

Gray (somewhat unlikely)

Black (unlikely)

After debate on each agenda item, Fellows voted using colored beads toindicate the degree of authenticity of Jesus deeds. Each color was assigned anumber rating, so that votes could be quantified with a weighted average.

The Seminar adopted four categories:

More about voting

Findings

Of the 176 events examined:

Only ten were given a red rating (indicating that the Fellows had arelatively high level of confidence that the event actually took place)

Nineteen were colored pink (suggesting that the event probablyoccurred)

The combined number of red and pink events (29) amounts to 16% of the total(176). That is slightly lower than the 18% of the sayingsprimarily parablesand aphorismsassigned to the red and pink categories in The Five Gospels.

The deeds of Jesus the Fellows voted as most likely to be authentic are:

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The Beelzebul controversy

A voice in the wilderness

John Baptizes Jesus

Jesus proclaims the good news

Peters mother-in-law

The leper

Paralytic and four

Call of Levi

Dining with sinners

Sabbath observance

More about these deeds

The Fellows concluded that the Jesus of history is very different from the iconof traditional Christianity: Jesus did not walk on water, feed the multitude,change water into wine, or raise Lazarus from the dead. He was executed as apublic nuisance, not for claiming to be the son of God. And in the view of theSeminar, he did not rise bodily from the dead; the resurrection is basedinstead on visionary experiences of Peter, Paul, and Mary.

The Acts of Jesus

The complete results of the Jesus Seminar deliberations on the deeds of Jesuswere published in 1996 as The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds ofJesus.

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Like The Five Gospels, this critical red-letter editionof the gospels is a completely new translation fromGreek and Coptic texts. The Fellows of the JesusSeminar designed the format to be understood at aglance by the casual reader not familiar with thehistory of critical scholarship over the past twocenturies.

Read an example from Mark 6:1-6

For those who believe the Bible to be the word of God a 16% historical accuracyrate may seem ridiculously low. Why did the Seminar end up with so manyblack (largely or entirely fictive) and gray (possible but unreliable) reports?Read more from the introduction

Westar Institute

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Jesus Seminar Phase 3: Profiles of Jesus Westar Institute Westar Institute

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Jesus Seminar Phase 3: Profiles of Jesus

1996-1998

Goal

After 12 years of systematicallyexamining the sayings (Phase 1) anddeeds (Phase 2) attributed to Jesus,Jesus Seminar Fellows turned theirattention to the question of what kindof figure was emerging from theevidence they had found to be mostprobably historically authentic.



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More than 20 Fellows presented papers over the two-year period from 1996-1998 in which they either drew a profile of Jesus based on the evidence orcritiqued important books on the historical Jesus by other scholars. The sixcritiques were published in Westars academic journal, Forum, in fall of 1998.

Findings

Profiles of Jesus comprises 9 of the 15 profiles written for Jesus Seminarsessions, together with three other profiles by Fellows that had previouslyappeared in Westars popular magazine, The Fourth R.

The authors, all Jesus Seminar Fellows, agreed on several points:

Jesus of Nazareth did not refer to himself as the Messiah, nor did heclaim to be a divine being who descended to earth from heaven in orderto die as a sacrifice for the sins of the world.

At the heart of Jesus teaching and actions was a vision of a life underthe reign of God (or, in the empire of God) in which Gods generosityand goodness is regarded as the model and measure of human life.

Jesus did not hold an apocalyptic view of the reign (or kingdom) of Godthat by direct intervention God was about to bring history to an endand bring a new, perfect order of life into being. Rather, in Jesusteaching the reign of God is a vision of what life in this world could be,not a vision of life in a future world that would soon be brought intobeing by a miraculous act of God.

Some of the profiles are based primarily on Jesus words, while others rely onJesus social location and/or religious typology as crucial to drawing hisprofile.

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Westar Fellows are critical scholars. Critical scholars make empirical, factualevidenceevidence open to confirmation by independent, neutral observersthe controlling factor in historical judgments, rather than putting dogmaticconsiderations first and insisting that the factual evidence confirm theologicalpremises. Westar Fellows who exemplify the ideals of a critical scholar may beinducted into the Order of David Friedrich Strauss. Strauss was an earlypioneer in historical Jesus research who lost his university position after

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publishing his Life of Jesus in 1835. He was only 27 years old. What is a critical scholar? Learn more about the Order of David Friedrich Strauss

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The Jesus Seminar « Westar Institute Westar Institute was launched about 1775, the same time the United States was being founded. Its progress is marked by milestones, landmark developments