re: #317 vxbush

Walter:

My understanding is that the Jesus Seminar tried to identify those words that were actually said by Jesus, looking at gospels and potentially other texts. I would take this to mean that they thought the gospels and other documents had been either tainted via copying or fabricated by the early believers. To me, this minimizes the work of the early monks, copying the texts carefully to minimize errors.

I know what the Jesus Seminar’s purpose was (is?). I was just interested in your understanding of it. There purpose was to textually examine the gospels and decide, through all the tools available to textual critics, which words could be actually attributed to Jesus and which words and phrases were probably simply attributed to Jesus.

This had nothing to do with the monks, or copying or rally anything like that, since the Jesus Seminar dealt with the earliest texts available, and nothing beyond about 300 C.E. They also used gnostic text and partial text when available.

The whole purpose was to try to verify, using multiple sources, which words would have a better chance of being authentic. It certainly was not an iron clad study, and they have been criticized a number of times by other textual critics who found their methods to be heavy handed.

Bottom line, there is no way to assure anyone of the authenticity of barely any of the words of Jesus, since we are not even sure if anyone who wrote anything was even a first hand witness. Most biblical authors were certainly not.