The Jesus Seminar was a group of about 50 biblical criticism scholars and 100 laymen founded in 1985 by Robert Funk that originated under the auspices of the Westar Institute.Westar Institute accessed November 6, 2006Making Sense of the New Testament by Craig Blomberg (Mar 1, 2004) page 19 The seminar was very active through the 1980s and 1990s, and into the early 21st century.
Members of the Seminar used votes with colored beads to decide their collective view of the historicity of the deeds and sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. They produced new translations of the New Testament and apocrypha to use as textual sources. They published their results in three reports: The Five Gospels (1993),The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (1993) Polebridge Press (Macmillan), The Acts of Jesus (1998),The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus (1998), Harper San Francisco, and The Gospel of Jesus (1999).The Gospel of Jesus: According to the Jesus Seminar (1999), Polebridge Press (Macmillan), They also ran a series of lectures and workshops in various U.S. cities.
The work of The Jesus Seminar continued after the death of its founder (2005) and was succeeded by two seminars: The Seminar on God and the Human Future and The Christianity Seminar. The latter published its first report in 2022, After Jesus Before Christianity: A Historical Exploration of the First Two Centuries of Jesus Movements. The seminars are the scholarly program units of Westar Institute. Westar publishes a bi-monthly magazine for the general public, The Fourth R: An Advocate for Religious Literacy.
The Jesus Seminar has come under intense criticism regarding its method, assumptions and conclusions from a wide array of scholars and laymen.Michael J. Wilkins & J.P. Moreland, General Editors, Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus, Zondervan, 1995Allison, Dale C. (1998). Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. Fortress Press.
Search for the "historical Jesus"
The Seminar's reconstruction of the historical Jesus portrayed him as an itinerant Hellenistic Jewish sage and faith-healer who preached a gospel of liberation from injustice in startling parables and aphorisms. An iconoclast, Jesus broke with established Jewish theological dogmas and social conventions both in his teachings and in his behavior, often by turning common-sense ideas upside down, confounding the expectations of his audience: he preached of "Heaven's imperial rule" (traditionally translated as "Kingdom of God") as being already present but unseen; he depicted God as a loving father; he fraternized with outsiders and criticized insiders. According to the Seminar, Jesus was a mortal man born of two human parents, who did not perform nature miracles nor die as a substitute for sinners nor rise bodily from the dead. Sightings of a risen Jesus represented the visionary experiences of some of his disciples rather than physical encounters. While these claims, not accepted by conservative Christian laity, have been repeatedly made in various forms since the 18th century,Ehrman, B, (Feb 2, 2010), "Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them)" the Jesus Seminar addressed them in a unique manner with its consensual research methodology.
The Seminar treated the canonical gospels as historical sources that represent Jesus' actual words and deeds as well as elaborations of the early Christian community and of the gospel authors. The Fellows placed the burden of proof on those who advocate any passage's historicity. Unconcerned with canonical boundaries, they asserted that the Gospel of Thomas may have more authentic material than the Gospel of John.N.T. Wright, [Five Gospels but no Gospel] , 1999, p.5 PDF
The Seminar held a number of premises or "scholarly wisdom" about Jesus when critically approaching the gospels. Members acted on the premise that Jesus did not hold an apocalyptic worldview, an opinion that is controversial in mainstream scholarly studies of Jesus. The Fellows argued that the authentic words of Jesus, rather than revealing an apocalyptic eschatology which instructs his disciples to prepare for the end of the world, indicate that he preached a sapiential eschatology, which encourages all of God's children to repair the world.Fredriksen, Paula. Excerpt from "From Jesus to Christ". In particular, note the second footnote for a brief overview of scholars supporting an apocalyptic view, including Bart D. Ehrman and John P. Meier.
The methods and conclusions of the Jesus Seminar have come under harsh criticism from numerous biblical scholars, historians and clergy for a variety of reasons. Such critics assert, for example, that the Fellows of the Seminar were not all trained scholars, that their voting technique did not allow for nuance, that they were preoccupied with the Q source and with the Gospel of Thomas but omitted material in other sources such as the Gospel of the Hebrews, and that they relied excessively on the criterion of embarrassment.Catherine M. Murphy, The Historical Jesus For Dummies, For Dummies Pub., 2007. p. 60 – "The Jesus Seminar has come under a lot of fire from other scholars and clergy for a variety of reasons[...] The Jesus Seminar has generated a lot of debate because it finds little historical evidence for certain Christian beliefs, such as the virgin birth, the divinity of Jesus, and the resurrection.".Bruce Chilton & Craig A. Evans, Authenticating the activities of Jesus, Volume 2, BRILL, 1999. pp 83–99,110–120.Robert Joseph Miller, The Jesus seminar and its critics, Polebridge Press, 1999. pp 65–79
Use of historical methods The scholars attending sought to reconstruct the life of the historical Jesus.Yeshua in Aramaic Using a number of tools, they asked who he was, what he did, what he said, and what his sayings meant. Their reconstructions depended on social anthropology, history and textual analysis. The key feature was the rejection of apocalyptic eschatology. They used cross-cultural anthropological studies to set the general background, narrow in on the history and society of first-century Palestine, and used textual analysis (along with more anthropology and history) to focus on Jesus himself. They used a combination of primary sources, secondary sources, and archaeological evidence. Their methodology, as developed by a team of scholars (who expounded papers for the review of other Fellows and published many in Forum) and as explained in the book The Five Gospels (the four canonical gospels plus the Gospel of Thomas), involved canvassing the records of the first four centuries for traditions about Jesus and sifting them by criteria such as multiple attestation, distinctiveness, and orality.
"Seven pillars of scholarly wisdom" The Five Gospels lists seven bases for the modern critical scholarship of Jesus, claiming these "pillars" have developed since the end of the 18th century:Funk, Robert W., Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar. The five gospels. Harper San Francisco. 1993. "Introduction," p 1-30. Distinguishing between the historical Jesus and the stories that the gospels tell about him. Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) started the quest for the historical Jesus and David Friedrich Strauss established it as part of biblical criticism with his book Life of Jesus Critically Examined (1835). Distinguishing between the Synoptics and John. Since the 1800s, Bible scholars have distinguished between the Jesus of the Synoptic gospels (Mark, Matthew, and Luke) and the Jesus in John, generally favoring the synoptics as more historical and seeing John as more spiritual. Identifying Mark as the first gospel. By 1900, critical scholars had largely concluded that Mark came before Matthew and Luke and served as a source for each. Identifying the hypothetical Q document. By 1900, scholars had hypothesized this lost collection of Jesus' sayings, thought to be the source of material found in Matthew and Luke but not in Mark. Questioning eschatological (apocalyptic) Jesus. In 1906, Albert Schweitzer portrayed Jesus as a failed apocalyptic prophet, and this analysis virtually put an end to historical inquiry into Jesus. In the 1970s and 1980s, however, critical historians returned to the topic of historical Jesus. Some of these scholars identified the apocalyptic imagery in the gospels as originating with John the Baptist, and not authentic to Jesus. Distinguishing between oral and print cultures. Since Jesus lived and preached in an oral culture, scholars expect that short, memorable stories or phrases are more likely to be historical. Reversing the burden of proof. In his day, Strauss had to offer evidence to question the historicity of any part of the gospels because his audience assumed that the gospels were historical. Today, the assumption is nearly the opposite, with the gospels understood to be so thoroughly embellished that one needs evidence to suppose that anything in them is historical.
Noneschatological Jesus The Five Gospels says that the non-apocalyptic view of the historical Jesus gained ground in the 1970s and 1980s when research into Jesus shifted out of religious environments and into secular academia. Marcus Borg says that "the old consensus that Jesus was an eschatological prophet who proclaimed the imminent end of the world has disappeared", and identifies two reasons for this change:A renaissance in Jesus studies Princeton Theological Seminary, October 1988. Since the 1960s, some scholars have started to view the gospel references to the coming Son of Man as insertions by the early Christian community. Some scholars have begun to see Jesus' kingdom of God as a present reality, a "realized eschatology", rather than an imminent end of the world (cf. Luke 17:20–21).
The apocalyptic elements attributed to Jesus, according to The Five Gospels, come from John the Baptist and the early Christian community (p. 4).