What is the Jesus Seminar?

The so-called Jesus Seminar is a group of 74 self-proclaimed scholars who met over 6 years, setting out to show that the Jesus of the Bible is not the real Jesus. This included publishing of The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus in 1993. As the name indicates, the group voted on what they though Jesus really said, as opposed to the made-up stuff they said was in the Bible. They did this by voting on each of over 1500 sayings of Jesus with colored beads:

• RED meant Jesus certainly said it
• PINK meant Jesus probably said it
• GRAY meant Jesus didn't say it, but it resembles what His thoughts
• BLACK meant Jesus never said anything like it at all

The seminar concluded that Jesus never said 82% of what the Gospels claim He did, and only 2% was absolutely authentic. Just how extreme is this? The only words of the Lord's Prayer the seminar said was authentic are "Our Father." Essentially, the Jesus Seminar concluded that Jesus was completely naturalistic--that is, the seminar claims that Jesus never said anything indicating He believed Himself to be God, or anything supernatural whatsoever. To them, Christianity completely misrepresents the historical Jesus. Jesus might've been a really great guy, but even His followers didn't see Him as God. To top it all off, they claim that the resurrection must have come about as a later myth.

The Truth About the Jesus Seminar

It requires the assumption that someone, about a generation removed from the events in question, radically transformed the authentic information about Jesus that was circulating at that time, superimposed a body of material four times as large, fabricated almost entirely out of whole cloth, while the church suffered sufficient collective amnesia to accept the transformation as legitimate.Craig Blomberg, Jesus Under Fire (22)

Scholarly?

Of the seventy-four "Fellows" of the Seminar, as they are called, about fourteen of them are among the leading names in the field of historical Jesus scholarship today. Roughly another twenty names are recognizable to New Testament scholars who keep abreast of their field, even if they are not as widely published. These, too, include several who have written important recent works on the ancient traditions about Jesus, particularly in various noncanonical gospels. The remaining forty, or more than half of the entire Seminar, are relative unknowns. Most have published at best two or three journal articles, while several are recent Ph. D's whose dissertations were on some theme of the gospels. For a full eighteen of the Fellows, a computer search of two comprehensive data-bases of published books and articles turned up no entries relevant to the New testament at all! Thirty-six of the group, almost half, have a degree from, or currently teach at one of three schools-Harvard, Claremont, and Vanderbilt, universities with some of the most liberal departments of New Testament studies anywhere. Almost all are American; European scholarship is barely represented. In short, the Jesus Seminar does not come anywhere close to reflecting an adequate cross-section of contemporary New Testament Scholars.Craig Blomberg, Jesus Under Fire

The Jesus Seminar presents itself as a group of scholars. They call their version of the Bible the Scholars Version, and claim that scholarship must accept their "seven pillars of scholarly wisdom." The problem is that these so-called scholars in reality represent only a very small, radical fringe group of vocal commentators on the subject of Jesus and the New Testament. Their work was not submitted to fellow scholars for review. Also, their seven pillars are full of a priori assertions and presuppose what the seminar is trying to prove. If anyone does not abide by their seven pillars, then according to this self-proclaimed authoritative group, they are not scholars. There is nothing scholarly or honest about the seminar's work.

A Priori Rejection of the Supernatural

The Jesus Seminar denies the historical reliability of the Gospels based largely upon their containing miracles. Because the seminar starts off assuming that anything supernatural is simply impossible, any supernatural claims are dismissed without fair and honest examination of the evidence. Rejecting the evidence (even ignoring it altogether) because it doesn't fit your conclusion is anything but scientific, and certainly isn't scholarly.

By definition, words ascribed to Jesus after his death are not subject to historical verification.The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels (398)

Co-founder John Dominic Crossan has no problem admitting the historicity of what he considers to be natural events in the Gospels, however, such as the crucifixion itself:

That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be.John Dominic Crossan, quoted in Habermas' The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus (49)

Marcus J. Borg, a fellow of the Jesus Seminar, in his Jesus: A New Vision, accepts the resurrection appearances of Christ as being historical and real. Even this skeptic cannot argue against the historical evidence of the appearances, which are accepted by the nearly every scholar. In his a priori rejection of the supernatural, however, he adds that, "[w]e do not know what form those appearances took." Wisely, he does not argue, as others desperately attempt, that the appearances were mass hallucinations, contagious delusions, or other such nonsense. He simply states that the appearances were real, in some form. Even this critical scholar seems to accept the evidence of the appearances, yet refuses to admit the only logical conclusion.

Wrong Burden of Proof

The Jesus Seminar assumes the church made up Jesus' sayings, unless there is good evidence to believe otherwise. This stems from their a priori rejection of the Gospels. This is not how historians operate, however. We assume that the testimony is truthful unless we have reason to assume otherwise. Otherwise, we'd know very, very little about history.

Rigged Criteria

The critera the Jesus Seminar used to determine authentication of Jesus' sayings were rigged. Further, the criteria are not seen as merely casting doubt on the origin of the saying, but as proving absolutely that Christ did not utter it:

DOUBLE DISSIMILARITY means that if the saying sounded like something a rabbi or the later church would say, Christ couldn't have said it, and the seminar assumes the saying came from a Jewish or Christian source. The problem with this should be obvious: Jesus was a Jew, and the founder of Christianity! So if Jewish Jesus, founder of Christianity, said something that sounded Jewish or Christian, the seminar claims that He didn't say it. Makes sense.

MULTIPLE ATTESTATION was used by the seminar to argue that, unless a saying was found in multiple sources, Christ didn't say it. To be fair, multiple sources does offer more confirmation of the authenticity of a saying, but the lack of multiple sources in now way disproves authenticity. Most of history is based off the testimony of a single source, so why should the sayings of Jesus be any different? The seminar said that if Matthew, Mark, and Luke all contained a saying, it only counted as a single source, because they assume Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source, despite the evidence and increasing number of scholars against this view.

The seminar also dismisses any saying that resembles the author's own style. It attributes (against evidence) a number of Jesus' sayings to other religious or cultural origins. Despite the fallacy in these attributions, this is an example of a genetic fallacy. That is, the seminar is addressing the source or origin of a saying without actually addressing the historicity of the saying itself.

Laughable Sources

John Dominic Crossan, co-founder of the the Jesus Seminar, likes the so-called gospel referred to as Secret Mark. A number of claims come from assuming the authenticity of this source. On this matter, Gregory Boyd says:

We don't have Secret Mark. What we have is one scholar who found a quote from Clement of Alexandria, from late in the second century, that supposedly comes from this gospel. And now, mysteriously, even that is gone, disappeared.

We don't have it, we don't have a quote from it, and even if we did have a quote from it, we don't have any reason to think that it has given us any valid information about the historical Jesus or what early Christians thought about him. On top of that, we already know that Clement had a track record of being very gullible in accepting spurious writings.

So Secret Mark is a nonexistent work cited by a now nonexistent text by a late second-century writer who's known for being naive about these things. The vast majority of scholars don't give this any credibility. Unfortunately, those who do get a lot of press, because the media love the sensational.Gregory A. Boyd, Ph.D., in The Case for Christ (122-123)

It's strange (read: dishonest) that Crossan would like such a poorly evidenced book while rejecting the well-attested, corroborated Gospels.

The Gospel of Thomas is another laughable source used by the Jesus Seminar. This book is dated by most scholars to the mid-second century. It strongly reflects Gnosticism, which teaches that salvation is through knowledge. In it, Jesus is quoted as saying that women who made themselves men would enter heaven. Of course, this is different from what Jesus and the early Church taught, yet the Jesus Seminar accepts the Gospel of Thomas as representing an earlier tradition than even the Gospels. This is interesting, given that the Gospels were completed before the end of the first century, and the Gospel of Thomas is dated to the mid-second century. They accept Thomas because they claim it represents the earliest, true view of Jesus, which they predetermined to be that Jesus was simply a good man. The reasoning here is clearly circular, and yet again, neither honest nor scholarly.

Laughable Claims

As noted above, co-founder Crossan believes that Christ's crucifixion is historically certain, yet then denies the Gospels' accounts of the event without justification. He claims that Jesus was left on the cross after His death, being either eaten by wild animals or buried in a shallow grave where his body would have been discovered by dogs, either way being eaten by animals. He concludes:

By Easter Sunday morning, those who cared did not know where it was, and those who knew did not care. Why should even the soldiers themselves remember the death and disposal of a nobody?John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (152-158)

This is a rather strange strategy on Crossan's part, seeing as how there is absolutely no evidence for his claim, while all four Gospels agree on the crucifixion account. Why would a self-proclaimed scholar reject all known evidence in favor of his own vision of the past? Further, it makes no sense to claim that the soldiers would have forgotten where they buried Jesus, as they would have likely remembered where they buried anyone. Besides, Christ was not a "nobody," as He caused enough fuss for the Jewish higher-ups to be after Him, and was hated enough that the mob chose Barabus over Jesus. These Jewish leaders also would have cause to be interested in the burial of Christ, having fought so strongly to kill him. On top of this, Both Tertullian and Justin Martyr agree with Matthew (in 28:11-15) in recording that the Jews' earliest argument, and their continuing argument, admitted the burial of Jesus in the tomb, along with the tomb being empty shortly thereafter. Crossan's absurd claim is further refuted by the early, critically accepted historical Christian creeds in 1 Corinthians 15:2-4 and Acts 13:29, which both claim that Christ was buried in the tomb. It also faces the problem of the appearances and testimony of the women, among many other resurrection evidences.

A Summary Critique

What do these scholars have? Well, there's a brief allusion to a lost 'secret' gospel in a late-second-century letter that has unfortunately only been seen by one person and has now itself been lost. There's a third-century account of the Crucifixion and Resurrection that stars a talking cross and that less than a handful of scholars think predates the gospels. There's a second-century Gnostic document, parts of which some scholars now want to date early to back up their own preconceptions. And there is a hypothetical document built on shaky assumptions that is being sliced thinner and thinner by using circular reasoning.

No, I'm sorry. I don't buy it. It's for more reasonable to put my trust in the gospels--which pass the tests of historical scrutiny with flying colors--than to put my hope in what the Jesus Seminar is saying.Gregory A. Boyd, Ph.D., in The Case for Christ (122-126)

Sources

• Blomberg, Craig L., eds. J.P.Moreland and M.J. Wilkins, Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus.
  Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1995.
• Funk, Robert W., Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar. The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.
  New York, NY: Macmillan, 1993.
• Habermas, Gary R. The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ.
  Joplin, MO: College Press, 1996.
• Habermas, Gary R. and Michael R. Licona. The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus.
  Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Publications, 2004.
• Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ.
  Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998.