How Do We Respond to the “Jesus Seminar”?
Question 1065
In the 1980s and 1990s, a group of scholars calling themselves the “Jesus Seminar” made headlines by voting on which sayings of Jesus in the Gospels were authentic. They used coloured beads—red, pink, grey, and black—to rate each saying, and concluded that only about 18% of the words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels were actually spoken by Him. The media loved it. But how should Bible-believing Christians respond to claims like this?
What Was the Jesus Seminar?
The Jesus Seminar was founded in 1985 by Robert Funk, a New Testament scholar, and John Dominic Crossan. It brought together a group of scholars (at its peak, about 150) who met twice a year to debate and vote on the authenticity of Jesus’s sayings and deeds as recorded in the Gospels.
Their method was dramatic. After discussion, each scholar would cast a vote using coloured beads. Red meant “Jesus definitely said this.” Pink meant “Jesus probably said something like this.” Grey meant “Jesus didn’t say this, but the ideas are close to His.” Black meant “Jesus didn’t say this; it was put on His lips by later Christians.”
The results were striking. The Seminar concluded that most of the Gospel of John was black—Jesus didn’t say any of it. The Lord’s Prayer? Mostly black, except for “Our Father.” The great “I am” statements? All black. “I am the way, the truth, and the life”? Jesus never said it, according to them. Even in the Synoptic Gospels, most of Jesus’s teaching about the Kingdom, His predictions of His death and resurrection, and His claims about His own identity were voted inauthentic.
Their conclusions were published in popular format, including The Five Gospels (which gave equal status to the non-canonical Gospel of Thomas) and The Acts of Jesus. The media attention was enormous.
The Problems with Their Approach
The Seminar Was Not Representative
The Jesus Seminar presented itself as representing mainstream scholarship, but this was misleading. The group was self-selected and skewed heavily toward radical conclusions. Many distinguished New Testament scholars—including evangelical scholars like Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock, and Ben Witherington, but also more moderate critics like Raymond Brown and John Meier—were not involved and strongly disagreed with the Seminar’s methods and conclusions.
Luke Timothy Johnson, a Catholic scholar, wrote a devastating critique called The Real Jesus, accusing the Seminar of sensationalism and shoddy methodology. Richard Hays of Duke University called their conclusions “embarrassingly shallow.” This was not the scholarly consensus; it was a particular group with a particular agenda.
Their Criteria Were Biased
The Seminar operated with criteria that virtually guaranteed sceptical results. One key criterion was “dissimilarity”—a saying was considered authentic only if it was unlike both contemporary Judaism and the early church. But think about what this means. If Jesus said something that sounded Jewish, it was rejected as coming from Judaism. If Jesus said something that the early church believed, it was rejected as coming from the church. The only “authentic” Jesus is one who was neither Jewish nor the founder of Christianity. This is absurd.
Another criterion was that Jesus couldn’t have predicted the future. Any saying in which Jesus predicted His death, resurrection, or the destruction of Jerusalem was automatically attributed to later Christians writing after the fact. But this isn’t a historical judgment—it’s a philosophical assumption that miracles and prophecy are impossible.
They Rejected the Gospel of John Almost Entirely
The Seminar’s treatment of John’s Gospel was particularly revealing. They concluded that virtually nothing in John was historically authentic—that the entire Gospel was a theological construction with little historical value. But this ignores the strong evidence that John’s Gospel contains eyewitness testimony, includes accurate geographical and cultural details, and was written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses.
The Gospel itself claims to be based on the testimony of “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (John 21:24). Either this claim is true, or the Gospel is a deliberate deception. The Seminar essentially opted for the latter without adequate justification.
They Created a Jesus in Their Own Image
The Jesus that emerged from the Seminar’s work was a wandering sage who told witty parables and challenged social conventions but made no claims about His own identity, performed no miracles, predicted neither His death nor resurrection, and had no understanding of Himself as Messiah or Son of God. In short, the “historical Jesus” of the Seminar looks remarkably like a 20th-century academic.
This should make us suspicious. When scholars claim to peel back layers of tradition to find the “real” Jesus, and the Jesus they find just happens to agree with their own theological preferences, something has gone wrong. As N.T. Wright (with whom I disagree on other matters) observed, such reconstructions often tell us more about the scholars than about Jesus.
Why We Can Trust the Gospels
Against the Seminar’s scepticism, we have strong reasons to trust the Gospels’ portrait of Jesus.
First, the Gospels were written within living memory of Jesus’s ministry. Mark was probably written in the 60s AD, Matthew and Luke in the 60s or 70s, and John by the 90s at the latest. This is remarkably close to the events—far closer than many ancient sources we accept without question.
Second, the Gospel writers had access to eyewitnesses. Luke explicitly tells us he consulted eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1–4). John claims to be based on eyewitness testimony. The apostle Paul, writing in the 50s, recounts traditions he received from those who knew Jesus (1 Corinthians 15:3–8).
Third, the early church was careful to distinguish between Jesus’s words and their own opinions. Paul, for instance, sometimes distinguishes between commands from the Lord and his own judgment (1 Corinthians 7:10, 12). This shows the early church didn’t simply put words in Jesus’s mouth—they knew the difference.
Fourth, the Gospels contain material that the early church would have been unlikely to invent. Jesus’s baptism by John (potentially embarrassing), His ignorance of the day of His return (Mark 13:32), His cry of abandonment on the cross—these “difficult” sayings argue for authenticity, not fabrication.
Conclusion
The Jesus Seminar made headlines by claiming that most of Jesus’s words in the Gospels are inauthentic. But their methods were biased, their group was not representative of scholarship, and their conclusions were determined in advance by naturalistic assumptions. The Gospels remain trustworthy accounts, written close to the events by people with access to eyewitnesses, preserved by a church that carefully distinguished Jesus’s teaching from its own reflections. We can read the Gospels with confidence that we are hearing the words and deeds of Jesus as they were remembered by those who knew Him.
“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word.” Luke 1:1–2
Bibliography
- Blomberg, Craig L. The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. IVP Academic, 2007.
- Bock, Darrell L., and Daniel B. Wallace. Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ. Thomas Nelson, 2007.
- Johnson, Luke Timothy. The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels. HarperSanFrancisco, 1996.
- Witherington III, Ben. The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth. IVP Academic, 1997.
- Wright, N.T. Jesus and the Victory of God. SPCK, 1996.
- Wilkins, Michael J., and J.P. Moreland, eds. Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus. Zondervan, 1995.
