Jesus-Seminar

The Jesus Seminar was founded in 1985 as part of the Westar Institute in California by the American Orientalist Robert W. Funk ( 1926-2005 ). It is dedicated to his own words all search of authentic material about Jesus of Nazareth.

Methods and procedures

In order to collect knowledge about the historical Jesus, it aims to bring together the international research and encourage the exchange. So the facts are to be reviewed and distinguished from rumor and speculation. Here, the Jesus Seminar focuses on the time of Jesus' appearance by 30 to 200 AD

In the half- year cycle international membership meetings are held at which research results are shared and discussed. These are also a public forum for laymen. The debates are recorded and disseminated media. The research is thus made ​​not only in the elite circle, but widely available and discussed.

The Jesus Seminar has set very specific criteria for his work, which are used by most theologians ( the " mainstream" ) is not accepted. A statement from Jesus is for example only considered authentic when it comes to individual sayings or parables, dialogues or speeches longer be excluded. Similarly, only those statements of Jesus are real, if they do not occur anywhere else in the early Christian context in the Jewish context.

Each issue is presented at the end of a debate on the vote in order to test how much relative historical plausibility of one or another response attached by the researchers. The average majority of the approximately 70 participants decide what is accepted as verifiable data base about Jesus from the seminar. As such, the regular seminar reports represent a balanced judgment of all parties, not individual opinions.

Positions

• Jesus is regarded as Hellenistic- Jewish itinerant preacher, sage and miracle healer who preached a gospel of freedom from all injustice by telling startling parables and aphorisms was for the best.
• The members of the Jesus Seminar keep the Gospel of Thomas and the Sayings Source for older than the Synoptic Gospels and historically reliable.
• The Gospel of Mark is similar to the Gospel of John historically hardly be evaluated.

Criticism

The Jesus Seminar has been criticized for its method, its assumptions and its conclusions. The criticism comes from a wide spectrum of scientists and laymen. From the scientific side have a v. Richard B. Hays, Ben Witherington, Greg Boyd, NT Wright, William Lane Craig, Luke Timothy Johnson, Craig A. Evans, Craig Blomberg, Darrell Bock and Edwin Yamauchi critical of.

In the U.S. there are those who criticize the seminar because of his political orientation as too far left standing or designate as "extremely liberal " spectrum of theology. So called Professor Gregory A. Boyd from Bethel College ( Kansas), the Jesus Seminar as "an extremely small number of extreme scientists [ ... ] who are at the extreme left wing of New Testament thought. "

A sharp critic is William Lane Craig, who in the book Please Will the Real Jesus Stand Up? ( " Can the real Jesus please stand up again ?") John Dominic Crossan with, a prominent co-founder of the seminar debated.

The Catholic Bible historian John P. Meier, who has been dedicated to the early 1990s, the research on the historical Jesus and the scale five-volume series A Marginal Jew -denominational and religious boundaries is recognized as a fundamental recent work of historical Jesus research, criticism beside the popular show character of the Jesus seminar and the arrogance to want to measure scientific truth by voting, content, especially the tendency to a Hellenization of the figure of Jesus, who do not take seriously him enough as Jews of the first century and in a non-historical contrast to contemporary Judaism imagine what regards about his attitude toward the Jewish purity laws. " The historical Jesus is the halachic Jesus. A reconstruction of the historical Jesus, which lacks the serious halachic dimension, is ipso facto not the historical Jesus. "

The New Testament scholar Wolfgang Stegemann criticized the Jesus Seminar as a remake of liberal hermeneutics, because of its adherence to the dual criterion of difference, his favor apocryphal texts and his special theories, such as the Cynic influences on the Jesus movement.