Jesus seminar

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The Jesus Seminar was founded in 1985 as part of the Westar Institute in California by the American orientalist Robert W. Funk (1926–2005). According to its own statement, it is entirely dedicated to the search for authentic material about Jesus of Nazareth .

Methods and working methods

In order to collect knowledge about the historical Jesus , it wants to bring together international research and promote exchange. The aim is to check the facts and distinguish them from rumors and speculations. The Jesus seminar focuses on the time of Jesus' appearance around 30 to 200 AD.

International members' meetings are held every six months, at which research results are exchanged and discussed. These are also a public forum for laypeople. The debates are recorded and disseminated in the media. Research is therefore not only made in an elite circle, but also widely accessible and open to discussion.

The Jesus Seminar set very specific criteria for its work that most theologians (the "mainstream") do not accept. For example, a statement by Jesus is only considered authentic if it concerns individual sayings or parables, dialogues or lengthy speeches are excluded. Likewise, only those statements of Jesus are genuine if they do not otherwise occur either in the Jewish context or in the early Christian context.

Any controversial issue is put to a vote at the end of a debate to test how much relative historical plausibility researchers attach to one or the other answer. The average majority of the around 70 participants decides what will be accepted by the seminar as a verifiable database about Jesus. In this respect, the regular seminar reports represent a balanced judgment of all those involved, not individual opinions.

Positions

  • Jesus is considered a Hellenistic-Jewish traveling preacher, wise man and faith healer who preached a gospel of deliverance from all injustice by telling startling parables and giving aphorisms.
  • The members of the Jesus Seminar consider the Gospel of Thomas and the Logia source to be older than the Synoptic Gospels and to be 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 scholars and laypeople. From a scientific point of view, v. a. Criticized 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 .

In the USA there are voices who criticize the seminary as being too far left because of its political orientation or describe it as an “extremely liberal” spectrum of theology. For example, Professor Gregory A. Boyd of Bethel College (Kansas) describes the Jesus Seminar as "an extremely small number of extreme scientists [...] who stand on the extreme left wing of New Testament thought."

One harsh critic is William Lane Craig , who appeared in Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? (“Can the real Jesus get up, please?”) Debated with John Dominic Crossan, a prominent co-founder of the seminar.

The Catholic Bible historian John P. Meier , who has been researching the historical Jesus since the early 1990s and whose five-volume series A Marginal Jew is recognized across denominational and religious boundaries as a fundamental newer work of historical Jesus research, criticizes alongside the popular show character of the Jesus seminar and the presumption of wanting to measure scientific truth through voting, in terms of content above all the tendency towards a Hellenization of the figure of Jesus, which, as a Jew of the first century, does not take him seriously enough and in an unhistorical contrast to the contemporary one Judaism asked what about its attitude to the Jewish purity laws. “The historical Jesus is the halachic Jesus. A reconstruction of the historical Jesus, who lacks the serious halachic dimension, is ipso facto not the historical Jesus. "

The New Testament scholar Wolfgang Stegemann criticizes the Jesus seminar as a new edition of liberal hermeneutics , because of its adherence to the double criterion of difference , his preference for apocryphal texts and his special theses, such as the Cynical influences on the Jesus movement.

literature

Self-publications
  • W. Barnes Tatum: John the Baptist and Jesus: A Report of the Jesus Seminar. Polebridge Press, 1994, ISBN 0-94-434442-9 .
  • Robert W. Funk et al. a .: The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say? Harper 1997, ISBN 0-06-063040-X .
  • Robert W. Funk et al. a .: The Acts of Jesus: What Did Jesus Really Do? Harper 1998, ISBN 0-06-062978-9 .
  • Arthur J. Dewey, Robert W. Funk (Eds.): Gospel of Jesus. 2nd edition 2014, Polebridge Press, ISBN 1-598-15158-4 .
Other
  • Michael J. Wilkins, JP Moreland: Jesus under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus. 1995, ISBN 0-310-21139-5 .
  • Robert J. Miller: The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics. 1999, Polebridge Press, 1999, ISBN 0-94-434478-X .
  • Philip Jenkins: Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way. Oxford University Press, 2002, ISBN 0-19-515631-5 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover: The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (1993) Polebridge Press.
  2. ^ Robert W. Funk: The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus . Harper: San Francisco 1998, ISBN 0-06-062979-7 . Reprint 1996, ISBN 0-06-063040-X
  3. ^ Robert W. Funk: The Gospel of Jesus: According to the Jesus Seminar . Polebridge Press (Macmillan) 1999, ISBN 0-944344-74-7 .
  4. ↑ Michael J. Wilkins & JP Moreland (eds.): Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus . Zondervan 1995, ISBN 0-310-21139-5 .
  5. Jump up ↑ Dale C. Allison: Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet . Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 1998, ISBN 0-8006-3144-7 .
  6. ↑ The Corrected Jesus . In: First Things 43, May 1994.
  7. ↑ The Jesus Quest: The Third Search for the Jew of Nazareth . 2nd ed. Downers Grove 1997.
  8. ↑ Cynic Sage or Son of God? (1995), ISBN 0-8010-2118-9
  9. ↑ Five Gospels but no Gospel ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2004 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF; 185 kB) , 1999  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.ntwrightpage.com
  10. ^ Luke Timothy Johnson: The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels . HarperOne, 1997.
  11. ↑ Craig A. Evans: Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels . InterVarsity Press, 2006, ISBN 0-8308-3318-8 .
  12. ↑ Craig A. Blomberg: Where Do We Start Studying Jesus? . In: Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus . Zondervan, 1995, ISBN 0-310-21139-5 , p. 20.
  13. ↑ Paul Copan (Ed.): Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? A Debate Between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan . Baker Books, 1998, ISBN 0-8010-2175-8 .
  14. ↑ John Bookser Feister: Finding the Historical Jesus: An Interview With John P. Meier , Washington 1997th
  15. ^ John P. Meier: Surprised by Law and Love: Second Thoughts on A Marginal Jew with a Glance Forward. Lecture , Berkeley 2011, (Min. 57:35).
  16. ↑ Wolfgang Stegemann: Jesus and his time , Stuttgart 2010, ISBN 978-3-17-012339-7 , pp. 119f., 140ff., 173–176.

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