The Jesus SeminarThe Search for Authenticity
"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. At its inception in 1985, 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 had been 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 became the trademark of the Seminar and the brunt of attack for many elitist academic critics who deplored the public face of the Seminar."
Membership Notes
Literary Sources
Breakdown of the Results
Of the 387 reports of 176 distinct acts, 10% were voted red or pink On the other hand, sayings which were voted gray denoted no real consensus amongst the Fellows, although a number of members may have voted pink. Along with black, gray sayings were generally interpreted as church-appropriated teachings.
 (2) Criteria Used to Evalutate the Sayings Five criteria have been proposed by scholars in the past to isolate traditions which can be used confidently as evidence for the teaching and actions of Jesus of Nazareth.
"The first time these were presented for our review and approval was our final session on the sayings of Jesus. Contrary to the general public impression of our work, we did not set out with a preconceived notion of Jesus' characteristic speech and or behavior. Since the criteria emerged out of confrontation with the textual evidence, one could say they were inductive."
Multiple Attestation
"Surprisingly, multiple attestation proved to be a weaker criterion than most initially thought, since multiple independent versions of most sayings only revealed the extent to which virtually every saying of Jesus was subject to editorial redaction. Multiply attested sayings rarely got higher than a pink weighting since fellows could not often reach consensus on which version was prior and which versions were mutations."
Environment
Dissimilarity/Distinctiveness
"If a gospel tradition is dissimilar to the teaching and practices of early Judaism, then it can hardly have been taken over by the disciples or later followers of Jesus and attributed to him. And if a tradition runs counter to Christian teaching in the post-Easter period, it can hardly have been created then."
"One standard scholarly approach is to say that anything that is really odd or really eccentric that's attributed to Jesus must be authentic. Because no one would attribute anything really odd or eccentric to him, and therefore it is so. Its very oddity and eccentricity are testimony to its truth or to its historical veracity. This is a rather peculiar kind of argument, and what it means, of course, is that the only kind of sense that will emerge as historical are the man bites dog kind of sentences. Whereas the bulk of what he might have said, the dog bites man kind of sentences, will of course be rejected as simple commonplaces, the sort of thing that would be invented or projected upon Jesus by his followers. The result then is even if this method has some truth to it, it's going to wind up yielding by definition a very peculiar portrait of Jesus at odds with the world around him, and at odds with society around him, and at odds with the Judaism around him."
"Most everyone agrees that the criterion is especially helpful in principle, but applying it can prove troublesome in concrete cases. The criterion produces minimalist results; it cannot do otherwise. Jesus said and did more than what is historically verifiable with this criterion. The vexing problem is how we move beyond this minimum to include material that is not distinctive. The Seminar is divided on this question. For us it comes down to how we regard the material we've colored gray. The Seminar assigns two meanings to the gray vote: 1) 'I don't think Jesus said this, but some of its content might tell us something about him'; and 2) 'Jesus didn't say this, but it is based on his ideas.' An informal and unofficial meaning is, 'Well, maybe.' A gray vote can thus be considered either as a negative or a positive vote."
Embarrassment The criteria of embarrassment is equally applicable to the narrative material in the Acts of Jesus. Examples include: - Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Acts of Jesus, p 134
Coherence
"...After some sayings were voted red sayings, these were often invoked in arguments supporting or rejecting other sayings. So coherence proved to be a much stronger criterion than any of us originally imagined."
"The voters favored passages attested to by two or more sources. Since Jesus' culture was oral, not written, they assumed that shorter, punchier passages were more likely to be accurate. They also felt safer confirming idiosyncratic thoughts that ran against the social or religious grain of Jesus' day, involved role reversals or, in keeping with the style of the wandering wise men of the time, employed exaggeration, humor and concrete and vivid images. They preferred parables without explicit applications. By contrast, they shunned passages that they felt represented post-Jesus rationalizing by his disciples. That eliminated most language used to contextualize or connect; borrowings from the Old Testament (including most of what Jesus said on the Cross); and sayings expressed in explicitly Christian terms. Also taboo were monologues by Jesus to which there could have been no witness, verses expressing foreknowledge of events after his death and any claims on his part to be the Messiah. And one final admonition: 'When in sufficient doubt, leave it out'." "Jesus sayings and parables cut against the social and religious grain."
(3) List of Red & Pink Events
The following is a summary of "all the events or specific acts of Jesus that were designated red or pink, in whole or in part, by the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar."
* There was a Jesus from Galilee who was the son of Mary and Joseph.
Critiques of the Methodology(1) The Use of "Weighted Averages"
"If you consult the voting results, you can see that for many gray items there was a considerable percentage of red and pink votes. A few gray items even received a majority of red and pink votes. These statistical anomalies are the result of the Seminar's system for averaging votes (see p. 37 of The Five Gospels), a system that gives weight to everyone's vote, not only to the votes of those in the majority."
"In every red-vs-pink decision, the algorithm used by the Jesus Seminar has the inadvertent effect of giving each red vote three times the leverage of each pink vote. Also, in every gray-vs-black decision the Seminar's algorithm unintentionally gives each black vote three times the leverage of each gray vote." Lee Young provides a breakdown on the voting of eight sayings as proof of his contention:
"In each of the eight sayings listed above, the consensus of the Fellows was clearly for a gray rating. In seven of these sayings, gray outvoted black. In one case, gray and black are tied, but the pink votes pull the consensus into a gray rating.
"To remove this bias, and to achieve voter equity, 17 sayings of Jesus rated red (out of a total of 25) should be reclassified pink. And 160 sayings now rated black should be reclassified gray.
"There has been no 'error' in representing the Jesus Seminar consensus simply because the Jesus Seminar as a whole agreed to this method of determining and reporting its consensus and clearly explained the formulae it used to arrive at the results. The only error is in the interpretation of the Jesus Seminar statistics by those who did not participate in this process and insist on trying to make up their own definitions of what the colors should mean and where the statistical boundaries between colors should be set."
"The ranking of items was determined by weighted vote. Since most Fellows of the Seminar are professors, they are accustomed to grade points and grade-point averages. So they decided on the following scheme:
- Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels , p. 37
"The Seminar's statistics were never intended to measure the exact center of a set of uniform ideal digits. They were designed rather to report and promote consensus among a large group of highly individual scholars, with divergent perspectives on ancient history, the value and relationship of primary texts, and the criteria for establishing valid historical evidence.". This process can probably best be conceptualized as assigning credibility points to each color. (These would then be multiplied by the number of votes for each color, then the average taken to determine the final result.)
(2) Q as the Preferred Source
According to The Five Gospels only one saying in the Gospel of Mark is colored red:
In contrast, six sections or words ascribed to Sayings Gospel Q are red:
One saying in Matthew with no parallels and two in Luke are red:
*Thomas 54 has "Congratulations to the poor" only. Mt 5:3-4 and 5:6 are designated pink because the content has become "spiritualized" and "refers to religious virtues ['the poor in spirit'] rather than to social and economic conditions [just the 'poor']" (The Five Gospels, p. 139). References to 'the Poor in Spirit' in both the War Scroll and Community Rule, however, give weight to Matthew's version as being the more original. (Click here for more details.)
With the exception of one multiply attested instance, none of the authenticated sayings originate with Mark, and even here Thomas and the Egerton gospel are also listed as sources (although Egerton does not contain the critical quote.)
"In other words, no saying has been judged authentic by the Jesus Seminar which rests on the testimony of Mark alone, unsupported by the Double Tradition [material common to Matthew and Luke but not Mark]. Which amounts to saying: the authentic sayings are determined solely by their presence in Q. Mark has utterly vanished as a witness to which any authority is ascribed. This is in effect the Augustinian position on the value of Mark."
The argument for the Jesus Seminar's position is that Q (eventually embedded in Matthew and Luke), Signs (eventually embedded in John) and 1st Thomas were all written more than a decade before the Mark, which The Five Gospels places as being written after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 C.E.
"Those of us who suspect the reality of Q, while retaining the substantial present scholarly consensus on Markan priority, will be likely to feel that this complete rejection of the earliest Gospel merely means that the Jesus Seminar are forming their idea of Jesus exclusively from the second and third generation Gospels, and are thus getting the results of, among other things, any internationalizing tendencies in early Christianity."
"It is multiple attestation rather than an a priori preference for Q that gave an edge to these passages. Multiple attestation, of course, depends upon the independence of these sources. IF there was no Q and Thomas and John were dependent on the synoptics, then the argument from multiple attestation falls to the ground. Not all fellows of the Jesus Seminar accept Q other than as a convenient designation of double tradition in Mark and Luke; and not all are convinced of the independence and antiquity of Thomas. Hence, arguments from distinctiveness and embarrassment weighed more heavily in the Jesus Seminar deliberations." Mark's rougher style and less economic use of words support the conclusion that its narrative material is earlier and more authentic than the other canonical gospels. The question then arises - why can the authors of Matthew or Luke, who both evidently ammended and added to Mark's narrative material, be more trusted when it comes to the sayings material?
The Validity of Historical Reconstruction(1) In Opposition
Timothy Johnson is an ex-priest and New Testament scholar at Emory University. He is also the author of the recently published The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels which attacks the methods used by the Jesus Seminar.
"Although Johnson approves of some of the criteria the group applies to Scripture, he is derisive of its elimination of most long passages (members of oral cultures, after all, are renowned for memorizing epics) and fails to find a historical basis for its preference for quotes that flout the established order. Most important, he is dismayed by what he calls the Seminar's refusal to consider the Gospels' general 'pattern' in favor of isolated passages. 'What is left,' he writes, 'is a small pile of pieces.' Pieces which the unscrupulous can then reassemble as they see fit. Although it is impossible to prove any of the Gospels false, so little of them can be historically proved to be true, Johnson suggests, that by emphasizing that fact, scholars like Crossan and Funk have put themselves in the position of 'jigsaw-puzzle solvers who are presented with 27 pieces of a thousand-piece puzzle and find that only six or seven of the pieces even fit together.'"
"In my book, I observe that, with some variations, historical Jesus books do five things.
"The fourth and fifth steps make perfectly good sense, once the first two steps are made. The reason? A pile of pieces--sayings, deeds--do not constitute a story, and without story there cannot be character, and without character, there cannot be meaning. Once that given by the gospels is abandoned, another must be imported. All the sifting and sieving of the individual pieces leads nowhere by itself. Crossan calls the opening selection of authentic traditions in his HISTORICAL JESUS a 'score to be played.' More accurately, it is a set of notes that still needs scoring, which is what his social reconstruction does, put the notes into a score. Now, Paul is also notoriously lacking in specific references to the incidents of Jesus' life (except for a few sayings). But Paul does confirm, in various asides, the fundamental elements of the story-line as found in the Gospels. More significant by far, Paul adverts with some frequency and in key places to the same NARRATIVE PATTERN as that found in the Gospels. He also shares the understanding of Jesus as a Jew who in obedience to God gave his life in service to others."
"For I received from the Lord what I also delivered to you, that the Lord Jesus on the night when he was betrayed took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it, and said, 'This is my body which is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.' In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, 'This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.'"
"Paul and the canonical Gospels precede all other evidence about Jesus by a long stretch. They agree on this critical point of Jesus' character. And when Paul in 1 Cor 11:23-25 quotes the words of Jesus at the last supper precisely to remind the Corinthians of the essential pattern of self-giving that should be theirs if they are to have the 'mind of Christ' (1 Cor 2:16), pattern and specific memory coalesce."
"Johnson...counsels believers to ignore the search for the historical Jesus altogether."
(2) In Defense
John Dominic Crossan was born in Tipperary, Ireland, then moved to America and was ordained in the Servite order in 1957. He left the priesthood to marry in 1968, but his departure was also in part due to his controversial biblical views.
"Our disagreement is actually the contemporary restatement of a very, very ancient debate, one as old as Christianity itself, the fight between Catholic or Universal or Incarnational Christianity and Docetic or Gnostic or Spiritual Christianity. Do not confuse that ancient term Catholic with the contemporary term Roman Catholic. Catholic/Universal/Incarnational Christianity believed that the material universe was created by the one and only good God and was radically good. The human body was therefore profoundly good. And Jesus was utterly, fully, and totally human just as we are, and that to confess his divinity could in no way diminish his true humanity. Docetic/Gnostic/Spiritual Christianity distinguishes between the Good God of pure spirit and the Evil God or Godling who created the material universe which, so created, was therefore radically evil. We humans were good spirit trapped in evil matter. Jesus' body could only be a docetic, apparent, or seeming one (dokein is to seem in Greek), and that to confess his true humanity was to render his divinity absurd....Historical Jesus research is theologically necessary for Christianity or, at least, for Catholic as distinct from Gnostic Christianity."
"There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus."
"I cannot imagine a simpler summary of what Jesus meant by the Kingdom of God as the radical justice of Israel's God in this world."
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