Dear John,

He who shouts loudest gets a hearing. This is certainly true when it comes to the work of the Jesus Seminar. Even though this group represents a very narrow cross-section of Christian scholarship, it still seems to get more media attention than practically any other religious group. However, the Seminar's claim to represent broad-based scholarship is untrue. As Richard B. Hays, Associate Professor of New Testament at the Divinity School of Duke University points out:

The membership of the Jesus Seminar does not include the overwhelming majority of the New Testament scholars who teach at the major graduate institutions in the United States. This may be verified by a check of the roster of seventy-four Fellows of the Seminar… Not one member of the New Testament faculty from Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Duke, University of Chicago, Union Theological Seminary, Vanderbilt, SMU, or Catholic University is involved in this project. It goes without saying that faculties of evangelical seminaries are not represented here. Nor are any major scholars from England or the Continent (Richard Hays, "The Corrected Jesus," First Things, No. 43, May 1994, p. 47).

In the introduction to their book, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus, the Seminar scholars assume "that the burden of proof now lies with those who want to claim that any utterance ascribed to Jesus is authentic. All of Jesus' words in the Gospels must be assumed inauthentic until proven otherwise" (D. A. Carson, "Five Gospels, No Christ," Christianity Today, April 25, 1994, p. 30). The text of the Five Gospels is then color-coded to represent the conclusions of the Jesus Seminar scholars in respect to the authenticity of the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels: red = authentic; pink = possibly authentic; gray = probably inauthentic; and black = certainly inauthentic. When the numbers are added up, it is discovered that 82 percent of the words ascribed to Jesus in the gospels were not actually spoken by him.

How do these scholars go about assessing the respective authenticity or inauthenticity of Jesus' statements? It is this methodology which is seriously flawed and leads to conclusions that do not represent the majority of biblical scholarship. Following are two ways in which their methodology is problematic.

First, the Seminar's selection of sources and subsequent dating of sources is suspect. The theoretical Q source (short for the German Quelle, meaning "source") and the extracanonical Gospel of Thomas are presented as the two earliest (and thus most reliable) sources. However, their early dating of the Gospel of Thomas is highly suspect and rejected by most scholars. This fact alone seems to undermine their claim to scholarly objectivity and consensus. "They claim that they want to make the results of the best critical scholarship available to the public, but their working method trades upon a controversial and implausible early dating of Thomas, without offering the reader any clue that this is a shaky element in their methodological foundation" (Ibid., Richard Hays, p. 43).

Second, the Seminar's assumptions concerning what Jesus could and couldn't have said highly influence their decisions regarding authenticity. They assume that anything found on the lips of Jesus that relates to Jewish tradition or to subsequent Christian tradition is an invention of the church and not an authentic saying of Jesus. This would also include anything that speaks of eschatological judgment, Jesus' claims to messiahship or deity, or anything related to his predictions of his death or resurrection. In short, "an a priori construal of Jesus and his message governs the critical judgment made about individual sayings" (Ibid., Richard Hays, p. 45). Thus, instead of offering a new view of Jesus, what we receive is the Seminar's view of Jesus that is carefully constructed by rejecting all statements that do not fit their assumptions. In short, we are left with a sage who is ultimately misunderstood and misrepresented by the early church as a prophet. Why anyone would want to murder such a person is left a mystery.

According to the Jesus Seminar, what we possess in the Gospels is a highly unreliable collection of inauthentic sayings. From their perspective, this is why we need their services so badly -- to sift the wheat from the chaff and save us from the early church's naïve ignorance.

If one takes a step back from the debate, it is easy to see the sheer lunacy of it all -- even if we accept their conclusion that Jesus was a brilliant but misunderstood sage. Mark Shea says it best when he writes,

Thus, the Jesus Seminar, like most modernists, asks us to believe that the Misunderstood Sage of Nazareth was a figure so riveting, inspiring, charismatic, and mesmerizing that he galvanized a movement of deeply devoted disciples into ignoring everything he said and did, utterly forgetting his unforgettable oratory and replacing it with reams of quotations and stories about him having the historical value of a fever dream… So deeply inspired by the awesome figure of Jesus were they that, out of profound reverence for Him, they obliterated virtually every trace of his memory and substituted in its place the ingenious fabrication called the gospel (Mark Shea, By What Authority? An Evangelical Discovers Catholic Tradition, Huntington, Indiana: Our Sunday Visitor Publishing, 1996, pp. 30-31).

© Richard J. Vincent, July 21, 2001