Jesus Seminar Description

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 meets twice a year to debate technical papers that have been prepared and circulated in advance. At the close of debate on each agenda item, Fellows of the Seminar vote, using colored beads to indicate the degree of authenticity of Jesus' words or deeds. Dropping colored beads into a box has become a trademark of the Seminar.

Complete text of opening remarks from the
Jesus Seminar

In the Beginning

The 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.

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

The Deeds of Jesus

The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds reports the Jesus Seminar deliberations on the historicity of events surrounding the life of Jesus. The Introduction to The Acts of Jesus discusses these deliberations:

The Acts of Jesus is an assessment of the reports in the ancient gospels of what Jesus of Nazareth did and what was done to him. These events together constitute the acts of Jesus.

During the second phase of the Jesus Seminar, which lasted from 1991 to 1996, the Fellows examined 387 reports of 176 events, in most of which Jesus is the principal actor, although occasionally John the Baptist, Simon Peter, or Judas is featured. Of the 176 events, only ten were given a red rating (red indicates that the Fellows had a relatively high level of confidence that the event actually took place). An additional nineteen were colored pink (pink suggests that the event probably occurred). The combined number of red and pink events (29) amounts to 16% of the total (176). That is slightly lower than the 18% of the sayings—primarily parables and aphorisms—assigned to the red and pink categories in The Five Gospels.

For those who believe the Bible to be the word of God a 16% historical accuracy rate may seem ridiculously low. Why did the Seminar end up with so many black (largely or entirely fictive) and gray (possible but unreliable) reports? The results should not be surprising to critical scholars—those whose evaluations are not predetermined by theological considerations. Nevertheless, it is important to both the general reader and the scholars who participated in the Seminar to be as clear as possible about the reasons for this result.

Voting on the Deeds of Jesus

Voting on the deeds of Jesus followed the process used in reviewing the sayings:

As in the first phase (1985–1991), the Fellows of the Jesus Seminar continued the practice of voting. Voting is the most efficient way of determining whether a consensus currently exists among the Fellows on a given point. The usual scholarly procedure is to make up one's mind privately, publish opinions arrived at in some scholarly journal, and then wait to see whether other specialists agree. The process is glacially slow, painful, and usually indecisive.

Voting also makes it possible to make a report that is readily understood by a broad public; that public, after all, may not be interested in the arcane details and extended arguments that went into those votes. The Seminar once again employed colored beads for voting purposes. As in the first phase, the four colors—red, pink, gray, and black—represent degrees of judgment.