The Jesus Seminar

Remember the Jesus Seminar? Ever heard of it? Occurring in the early 1990s, it was a highly-publicized collaboration and project by a group of uber-liberal Bible scholars and theologians to determine "what Jesus really said from what the gospel writers reported." The fruit of the Seminar was a book, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus. Below is an excerpt from a review of the book by Richard B. Hays, a first-rate New Testament scholar and theologian teaching at Duke Divinity School. Read the entire review here.

Indeed, a new book called The Five Gospels-the fruit of the labors of the much-publicized "Jesus Seminar"-claims to provide definitive new answers to the question, "What did Jesus really say?" A panel of New Testament scholars, meeting over a period of several years, has given us a new red-letter edition of the four canonical gospels plus the Gospel of Thomas, with the words adjudged by a poll of these scholars actually to have been spoken by Jesus printed in red type. Other colors reflect their shadings of judgment about the historical reliability of the other sayings attributed to Jesus: pink for possibly authentic, gray for probably inauthentic, and black for certainly inauthentic. The introduction to the book suggests breezily that an "unofficial but helpful interpretation of the colors" would be as follows:

Red: That's Jesus! Pink: Sure sounds like Jesus. Gray: Well, maybe. Black: There's been some mistake.

The results are offered up in a fresh translation-dubbed the "Scholars Version"-that seeks to "produce in the American reader an experience comparable to that of the first readers" by approximating "the common street language of the original."