What Are The Odds?
The Jesus Seminar’s Quest for Objectivity
In: Journal for the Study of the Historical JesusSearch for other papers by Sean F. Everton in
Current site
Google Scholar
In 1985 a group of New Testament scholars, who came to be known as the Jesus Seminar, gathered to vote on the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus. Although the Seminar argued that it followed objective rules of evidence, critics have claimed that it did not. This paper investigates these claims using statistical models to evaluate the Seminar’s own voting records. It finds that although the Seminar’s Fellows did follow widely accepted criteria, they were also influenced by their own assumptions about who Jesus was. In particular, they appear to have assumed that Jesus was a non-apocalyptic enfant terrible who spoke in aphorisms and parables and occasionally uttered things that later embarrassed the early Church.
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4
Nate Silver, The Signal and the Noise: Why Most Predictions Fail but Some Don’t (New York: The Penguin Press, 2012).
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11
Funk and Hoover, The Five Gospels, pp. 36–37; Also see Marcus J. Borg, Jesus in Contemporary Scholarship (Valley Forge, pa: Trinity Press International, 1994), p. 162.
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12
See, for example, Jesus Seminar, ‘Voting Records: Sorted by Weighted Average’, Forum, 6 (1990), 139–91.
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13
Robert J. Miller, The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics (Santa Rosa: Polebridge Press, 1999), pp. 52–53.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
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| Abstract Views | 328 | 32 | 12 |
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What Are The Odds?
The Jesus Seminar’s Quest for Objectivity
In: Journal for the Study of the Historical JesusSearch for other papers by Sean F. Everton in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
In 1985 a group of New Testament scholars, who came to be known as the Jesus Seminar, gathered to vote on the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus. Although the Seminar argued that it followed objective rules of evidence, critics have claimed that it did not. This paper investigates these claims using statistical models to evaluate the Seminar’s own voting records. It finds that although the Seminar’s Fellows did follow widely accepted criteria, they were also influenced by their own assumptions about who Jesus was. In particular, they appear to have assumed that Jesus was a non-apocalyptic enfant terrible who spoke in aphorisms and parables and occasionally uttered things that later embarrassed the early Church.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 328 | 32 | 12 |
| Full Text Views | 208 | 4 | 0 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 48 | 5 | 1 |