The Jesus Seminar is a highly-publicized consortium of New Testament scholars (along with a handful of weirdly-chosen honourary members) whose stated agenda is to "inventory and classify all the words attributed to Jesus in the first three centuries of the common era," and then to "determine which of them could be ascribed with a high degree of probability to Jesus."1
The Seminar's methodology involved dividing quotations of Jesus in the gospels into units, and then voting on each unit's authenticity based on a variety of textual and historical criteria. There were roughly 1,500 units in all, and 76 scholars, called "Fellows," in the voting group (though many more contributed indirectly by speaking at conferences, writing journal articles, and so on).
Each Fellow voted on each pericope by putting a coloured bead into a box. Red was the strongest possible vote; pink was a "probably" vote; grey was a "probably not" vote.
That leaves black, the lowest possible rating for a saying, and the subject of this node. What a black bead represents could be worded in one of three ways. Two are official, and one is unofficial but included in the text of The Five Gospels because the editors thought it was "helpful":
- I would not include this item in the primary database.
- Jesus did not say this; it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition.
- There's been some mistake.2
When the Seminar published its annotated version of the Gospels in 1993 under the name The Five Gospels3, it printed each sentence attributed to Jesus in one of the four bead-colours according to a weighted average of votes from the Fellows. The whole idea was intended to be an ironic comment on red-letter Bibles, in which the words of Jesus are printed in red type. What the Jesus Seminar wanted was a red-letter Bible where only the things that Jesus really said would be printed in red. The words printed in black in the Seminar's publications have been attributed to Jesus by the Christian tradition, but for various reasons, the Seminar came to the conclusion that they had been composed later, by church officials or well-meaning Christians who did not know Jesus in person.
A first-time reader of the Jesus Seminar's work will likely be struck by just how much black there is in the book. The authenticity of some of Jesus' most famous sayings is rejected outright by the Jesus Seminar:
- Mark 8:34 and parallels: "Those who want to come after me should deny themselves, pick up their cross, and follow me!"4 Black.
- Mark 9:37 and parallels: "Whoever accepts a child like this in my name is accepting me. And whoever accepts me is not so much accepting me as as the one who sent me." Black.
- Mark 13:24-25 and parallels: "But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give off her glow, and the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly forces will be shaken!" Black.
- Matthew 12:30: "The one who isn't with me is against me, and the one who doesn't gather with me scatters." Black in Matthew, though the (identical) parallel in Luke is grey for some reason.
- Matthew 15:26 "It is not right to take bread out of children's mouths and throw it to the dogs." Black.
- Matthew 26:52 "Put your sword back where it belongs. For everyone who takes up the sword will be done in by the sword." Black.
If the Synoptic gospels seem to be stained by quite a lot of black ink, then the gospel of John is a veritable ocean of black. A flash of pink creeps into exactly one saying (John 4:43, "A prophet gets no respect on his own turf") and a bit of grey in another (John 13:20: "I swear to God, if they welcome the person I send, they welcome me"); both of these were accepted only because versions of those sayings also appear in the Synoptics or Thomas. Everything else in John is black. All of it.
Black, black, black, black, black.
The reasons for the Jesus Seminar's harsh judgements about these sayings are varied. Some are good reasons, and some are not. Some are based on observations that New Testament scholars have been making for centuries now, while others are unique to the Seminar and are not really accepted outside of it. The Seminar's distrust of John's gospel is not unusual among Biblical scholars, who generally hold that John is very late and represents a much more developed theology than Jesus' own. Even so, their flat declaration that Jesus said only one and a half sentences in the entire document is pretty radical, which delights skeptics and outrages evangelicals. That, of course, was precisely the Seminar's intention.
Footnotes
1 The Five Gospels, p. 35.
2 The Five Gospels, p. 36.
3 The fifth gospel alluded to in the book's title is the Gospel of Thomas, which the Seminar takes very seriously as a source of legitimate traditions about Jesus, and which is included in their translation.
4 The Five Gospels includes the Jesus Seminar's own translation of the Gospels, which they call the "Scholars' Version" or SV. I happen to think it's an awkward and ugly translation, just the sort of thing you'd expect to come out of a committee, with no ear whatsoever for the beauties of koine (or for the beauties of modern English, for that matter). But that's a rant for another node. I quote the SV here since its renderings are often relevant for the arguments that the Seminar makes about a saying's authenticity, but I don't have to like it.
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