What is the Jesus Seminar?
The writings on stempublishing.com predate the Jesus Seminar (founded in 1985), so none of the authors address it by name. However, several writers speak pointedly to the very same impulse behind it — the attempt to subject the words and Person of Christ to human critical judgment — and their observations are remarkably relevant.
The Jesus Seminar was a group of liberal scholars, founded by Robert Funk in 1985, who famously voted with coloured beads on whether the sayings attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were actually spoken by Him. They concluded that only about 18% of the sayings and 16% of the deeds attributed to Jesus were authentic. The project was rooted in the traditions of higher criticism and rationalism — the very movements these writers confronted in their own day.
W. J. Hocking directly addresses the spirit behind such enterprises — the claim that human scholars may sit in judgment on the words of Scripture and even overrule the testimony of Christ Himself. Writing against the "higher critics" of his own generation, he says:
W. J. HockingThe question involved in the denial of the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch is not one of merely correct literary and historical criticism. … It is not however the soundness of human theories, but the character of our Lord Himself that is involved. For if Moses did not write the first five books of the Bible — "the law" — as our Lord asserted more than once, but which the advocates of "modern criticism" deny, then the Holy Son of God stands convicted of ignorance or error, if not deliberate deception.
He further exposes the two strategies critics use to dismiss Christ's own testimony — "adaptation" (He knew better but accommodated popular belief) and "self-limitation" (He was simply ignorant) — and shows that both are attacks on the Person of Christ:
The "adaptation" theory declares our Lord was aware that Moses was not the author of the first five books, but that He said so in deference to the teaching of that age; while the "self-limitation" theory declares that our Lord was ignorant of the true author of the Pentateuch. … But it is impossible for both assertions to be right, though very possible for both to be wrong.
And with striking force:
1892_058_Lord's_Testimony__Mosaic_Authorship_PentateuchThe very attempt to limit the knowledge of "God manifest in the flesh" is, to say the very least, audacious in the extreme. And when He is thus reduced to the level of a poor ignorant Jew for the sole purpose of proving the vast superiority of nineteenth century wisdom, it is high time for such wolves to be stripped of their sheep's clothing that the flock may be warned.
Hamilton Smith, commenting on the Epistles of John, identifies the test by which all such systems are to be judged — their attitude toward the Person of Christ:
Hamilton SmithThe Person of Christ is the great test of every antichristian system. We may be deceived if we judge them by the Christian terms they may use and the practice they may pursue. The real test is, How do they stand in relation to the truth as to the Person of Christ? It will be found that every false system denies in some form the truth of His Person.
He also warns against any claim to have advanced beyond the original revelation given in Christ:
Any pretence of modernism, or any other false system, to give us further truth as to His Person is a denial that the full truth came out at the beginning. If that which we have heard from the beginning abides in us — if it governs our affections — we shall abide in the truth of the Son and of the Father.
And on the Apostle John's warning about "deceivers":
123_JOHNThese deceivers are exposed by their attitude to Christ. They may assert that Jesus Christ was a good Man, but refuse to confess that He is "come in flesh." … To deny that Jesus Christ is come in flesh is thus to deny His previous existence, and therefore the denial that He is a divine Person — God. The one who denies this great truth concerning Christ at once exposes himself as "a deceiver and an antichrist".
F. B. Hole, writing on the Laodicean condition in Christendom, identifies the mentality that produces movements like the Jesus Seminar — intellectual self-confidence that puts itself beyond correction:
F. B. HoleToday we have not only the high class intellectualist, who believes he has a modernistic version of Christianity, which is beyond all criticism, but also a mystical type, great on the experimental side of things, who feel they have entered into something which is also beyond all criticism.
In summary, while these writers never heard of the Jesus Seminar by name, they diagnosed its root problem with precision. The Jesus Seminar was a late 20th-century expression of a very old impulse: the claim that human reasoning may sit in judgment on divine revelation, and specifically on the words and Person of Christ. The writers here insist that this gets the relationship exactly backwards. It is not for scholars to vote on which of Christ's words are authentic — it is for Christ's words to judge the hearts and minds of scholars. As Hocking put it, the real question is not the soundness of human theories, but "the character of our Lord Himself." Any system that ends by reducing Christ to a figure whose words must be authenticated by a committee has, in the view of these writers, already denied what Scripture reveals Him to be.