| Through consensus voting, the
Jesus Seminar has concluded that only about 18% of the words
attributed to Jesus in the Gospels can accurately be assumed to be his own. Other votes rejected:- the virgin birth,
biblical statements that have Jesus proclaim himself the Son of God or the Jewish Messiah, and—the
cornerstone of the Christian faith—Jesus’ physical resurrection from the dead. The Seminar has also
concluded that Jesus
apparently had four brothers and may also have had sisters but no father
named Joseph.
The story of Jesus’ arrest, trial, and execution as recounted in
the New Testament, Funk has said, was suggested by prophecies in the
Hebrew Bible "that early Christian storytellers arranged to have
fulfilled as they told and retold the story."
What the Seminar has shown is a Jesus who was a social critic and sage. He
was a rebel who led a revolution against repression but who harbored no divine pretensions.
They arrive at their conclusions by scrutinizing the social,
literary, linguistic, political, and religious environment in which Jesus
lived, as well as that of the 75 years after his death, before the Gospels were written.
Most scholars know that Jesus' disciples did not
write the four gospels; much later advocates composed these gospels. They
worked from oral traditions and lists of sayings or miracles. They maintain that an early compilation of Jesus’
sayings existed, as well as some of those of John the Baptist, which the
writers of Matthew and Luke independently drew upon 75+ years later. They
explain the resurrection as "the internal experience of Jesus’
disciples" that was later misunderstood to be historical truth. |
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