Phase One
The Search for the Authentic Sayings of Jesus The Jesus Seminar was organized under the auspices of the Westar
Institute to renew the quest of the historical Jesus and to report the results of its research to more than a handful of gospel specialists. It begain its work in
1985 by addressing the authenticiy of words attributed to Jesus in documents dating to the time of Constantine, about 325 CE.
At its inception, thirty scholars took up the challenge. Eventually more than two hundred professionally trained specialists, called Fellows, joined the group.
The Seminar met twice a year to debate technical papers that were prepared and circulated in advance. At the close of debate on each agenda item, Fellows of the Seminar voted, using colored beads to indicate the degree of authenticity of Jesus' words. Dropping colored beads into a box soon became
a trademark of the Seminar.
In the BeginningThe renewed search began with the first meeting of the Jesus Seminar in March 1985 when founder Robert Funk addressed the assembled scholars in
Berkeley, California:
We are about to embark on a momentous enterprise. We are going to inquire simply, rigorously after the voice of Jesus, after what he really said.
In this process, we will be asking a question that borders the sacred, that even abuts blasphemy, for many in our society. As a consequence, the course we shall follow may prove hazardous. We
may well provoke hostility. But we will set out, in spite of the dangers, because we are professionals and because the issue of Jesus is there to be faced, much as Mt. Everest confronts the team
of climbers.
Complete text of opening remarks.
The Search for the Real Jesus
The complete results of the Jesus Seminar deliberations on the sayings of Jesus were published in 1993 as The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic
Words of Jesus. The Introduction to that book offers some important perspective on the "search for the real Jesus":
The Five Gospels represents a dramatic exit from windowless studies and the beginning of a new venture for gospel scholarship. Leading scholars—Fellows of the Jesus Seminar—have decided to update and
then make the legacy of two hundred years of research and debate a matter of public record. In the aftermath of the controversy over Darwin's The Origin of Species
(published in 1859) and the ensuing Scopes "monkey" trial in 1925, American biblical scholarship retreated into the closet. The
fundamentalist mentality generated a climate of inquisition that made honest scholarly judgments dangerous. Numerous biblical scholars were
subjected to heresy trials and suffered the loss of academic posts. They learned it was safer to keep their critical judgments private.
However, the intellectual ferment of the century soon reasserted itself in colleges, universities, and seminaries. By the end of World War II,
critical scholars again quietly dominated the academic scene from one end of the continent to the other. Critical biblical scholarship was
supported, of course, by other university disciplines which wanted to ensure that dogmatic considerations not be permitted to intrude into
scientific and historical research. The fundamentalists were forced, as a consequence, to found their own Bible colleges and seminaries in order
to propagate their point of view. In launching new institutions, the fundamentalists even refused accommodation with the older, established church-related schools that dotted the land.
One focal point of the raging controversies was who Jesus was and what he had said.
More from the Introduction to The Five Gospels
The Words of Jesus:
An Agenda and a Voting Process
The Five Gospels explains how the Jesus Seminar agenda was shaped, why voting on the sayings of Jesus was adopted, and how voting was conducted:
The goal of the Seminar was to review each of the fifteen hundred items and determine which of them could be ascribed with a high degree of
probability to Jesus. The items passing the test would be included in a database for determining who Jesus was. But the interpretation of the
data was to be excluded from the agenda of the Seminar and left to individual scholars working from their own perspectives. The Seminar had to agree on two questions that established the course
of its deliberations. It first had to decide how it would reach its decisions. It then had to determine how it would report the results to a
broad public not familiar with the history of critical scholarship over the past two centuries and more. Voting was adopted, after extended debate, as the most efficient way
of ascertaining whether a scholarly consensus existed on a given point. Committees creating a critical text of the Greek New Testament under
the auspices of the United Bible Societies vote on whether to print this or that text and what variants to consign to notes. Translation
committees, such as those that created the King James Version and the Revised Standard Version, vote in the course of their deliberations on which translation proposal to accept and which to reject.
Voting does not, of course, determine the truth; voting only indicates what the best judgment is of a significant number of scholars sitting
around the table. It was deemed entirely consonant with the mission of the Jesus Seminar to decide whether, after careful review of the
evidence, a particular saying or parable did or did not fairly represent the voice of the historical Jesus.
More on the Jesus Seminar voting from The Five Gospels
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