on the Jesus Seminar

I've been having a blast reading through the works of some of the most prominent liberal voices in gospel scholarship. Having finished Borg's Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time, I've started Dominic Crossan's Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. Many of these scholars were part of the Jesus Seminar and hold the Seminar in highest esteem, as the be-all and end-all of gospel studies. I've always found the Jesus Seminar to be more laughable than anything else, and here are a few reasons why.

The Jesus Seminar was a group of over one hundred gospel and bible scholars who came together to collectively vote on the gospel texts; each member cast a bead (ranging from red to black) to signify whether they believed the gospel text in question was historical (i.e. attributable to the historical Jesus). Since its conception and activity in the mid-1980s, the Jesus Seminar has been seen by some as the vanguard of gospel studies; and it's been seen by others as a laughable attempt to reframe Jesus in a pre-set mode. I take the latter approach. 

The scholars who participated in the Jesus Seminar were hand-picked, resulting in a narrow breed of scholars that excluded some of the most prominent names in gospel studies. The verdict was established before the trial even began: the Seminar started with the assumption that Jesus was a traveling sage and wonder-worker, and the authenticity of his sayings and stories were judged against this preconceived notion. Indeed, Jesus had to be a sort of sage for the Seminar to conduct its operation; sages tended to go around giving pithy phrases, aphorisms, and proverbs; the Seminar approached the gospel literature precisely as phrases, aphorisms, and proverbs. 

The Seminar can be seen, at its root, as a reaction against Christian fundamentalism; as such, the Seminar eliminated major themes and motifs in the gospels that the biggest gospel scholars (and even many of the members of the Seminar!) saw as integral and authentic to the historical Jesus. But because those themes and motifs were so fundamental to fundamentalism, they were done away with. My disgruntledness with the Jesus Seminar comes on a few other fronts: 

(1) the counting of the votes erred on the side of inauthenticity, so that if scholars were torn between whether a saying was authentic or inauthentic, the Seminar decided it was probably inauthentic; 

(2) the Seminar assumes that the Jesus tradition consisted of non-Jewish, detached sayings that the early church in the second generation affixed to Jesus in a Jewish setting. This is backwards; it makes far more sense that the early church would operate in the other direction, stripping Jesus of his Jewishness and turning him into some sort of Greek sage or philosopher. The Christian church, after all, became prominently Gentile by the second generation, and the destruction of Jerusalem and the squashing of the Jewish Revolt in A.D. 70 provoked Christians to keep their distance from a Jewish identity out of fear of suffering Roman reprisals. In order for the Jesus' Seminar's method to work, they have to ignore this logic and 

(3) create, almost out of thin air, a picture of the early church that fits with their model of the development of the gospels (disregarding the fact that a growing consensus of biblical scholars are questioning such definitive hypotheses as the Q Document, which supposedly serves as the backbone of the synoptic gospels).