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Concept
Jesus Seminar
Summary
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. 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 Acts of Jesus (1998), and The Gospel of Jesus (1999). 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 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.
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