What is the Jesus Seminar?
The Jesus Seminar is a modern group of scholars who met to vote on which sayings in the Gospels Jesus actually spoke, colouring the results by degrees of confidence. The writers in this collection never name it — they wrote before it existed — but they deal at length with the method behind it, and the questions they press are the ones that matter: who is qualified to sit in judgment on the record, and what is left of Christ when the sifting is finished?
The seat of judgment
The approach did not begin in 1985. Commentators describe an older habit of mind that grants Scripture value while reserving the final word for the scholar.
Samuel RidoutDo the critics, for instance, tell us that they are infidels? Do they tell us that they do not believe in the Bible? No, indeed, they say they believe in it more than we do. They say they bring their intellect to bear upon it, and sift out of it men's thoughts, so that, sitting in judgment upon it all, they tell us what is divine and what is human. So you have sinful man giving judgment upon the word of God.
Sorting genuine from myth
One writer describes the scholar's confidence in his own equipment, and the exact task he sets himself — which is very close to a vote on the sayings of Jesus.
Hamilton SmithAccording to his own estimate, he is rich in human ability and enjoys a monopoly of intellectual culture and ripe scholarship... Equipped with the wisdom of the ages, he undertakes to criticise Scripture with unbounded confidence. He assumes to know more about the Word of God than Christ and the apostles. He claims to have discovered the original sources of Scripture, and presumes to tell us how much may be discarded as myth and how little we may safely retain as genuine.
"Only what Jesus said"
The Seminar's programme sounds modest: go behind the church's teaching to the words of Jesus themselves. One commentator traces where that slogan leads, and why it cannot stop where it starts.
F. B. HoleThey begin by claiming that only His direct utterances must be quoted as having full authority; but they do not stop there long. There is no secure foothold in such a position, for every recorded utterance of His has been reported to us through apostolic or prophetic writings. So they soon reach the position of only "hearing" as much of His reported teaching as they wish. They end, therefore, by believing in their own powers of discrimination and selection — that is to say, in themselves.
What the sifting produces
Reviewing a writer who praised "Jesus" warmly while rewriting the Gospel story, one commentator asks the practical question: on what evidence was the story recast?
F. B. HoleHad our author access to some other document more reliable than the Gospels, that let him recast the story? He had not. There is no other authentic history... He fashioned a "Jesus" after his own ideas, and not once in his pamphlet did he speak of Him as his LORD.
The same article follows the method to its social outcome, when each person keeps the fraction that grips him. The picture it draws — believers graded by a show of hands — is uncomfortably close to a seminar with ballots.
F. B. HoleWe are thus presented with the depressing spectacle of "Christians," every one of whom, on a majority vote of other "Christians," would be condemned as foolishly credulous. If this were really the position, who would not be an out-and-out unbeliever!
Weighing sayings from outside the Gospels
The Seminar also treated sayings collections found outside the New Testament as evidence. That is not new either. When a page of sayings attributed to Jesus was dug up in Egypt, one review examined it line by line and judged it by its content.
The Bible TreasuryStill stranger is the fourth. "Jesus says, Wherever there are... and one alone, I am with him. Raise the stone, and there you will find me; split the wood, and there I am." Assuming this to be the sense, what mystical nonsense!... It seems nonsense, and certainly was never spoken by our Lord.
Why the four Gospels stand differently
Against a theory that the Gospels are recollections blurred by decades of retelling, commentators point to what Jesus promised His disciples on the night before He died.
Hamilton SmithHow important that those who by their words and writings were going to instruct others should have the Lord's words recalled to them by a Divine Person. In reporting these words to us they are not left to their own imperfect and failing memories.
Summary
- Seat. The Jesus Seminar is not named in these writers, but its seat is: man sitting in judgment on Scripture, deciding what is divine and what is human.
- Sieve. The claimed qualification is scholarship; the actual task is telling us how much to discard as myth and how little to keep as genuine.
- Source. "Only the words of Jesus" has no foothold, since every word of His reaches us through the same apostolic writings being doubted.
- Self-portrait. With no better document available, the recast story is a "Jesus" fashioned after the critic's own ideas — admired, but never called Lord.
- Safeguard. The record was not left to failing human memory; the Lord promised a Divine Person to recall His words to those who would write them.