And the final score is 78 to 22!
Oh wait! We need clarity for this to mean anything.
78% to 22%, does that help?
No, I guess not. More details are needed...
A GROUP OF SCHOLARS (the Jesus Seminar) concluded after years and years of investigation, debate, analysis and historical sifting that
The Seminar consisted of 150 critical scholars and laymen.
78% of the sayings Jesus is purported to have said are, in fact, NOT historically accurate.
That's the bad news!
But, the good news is that 22% probably are historically accurate.
Should we come to realize that by choosing a particular denomination and insisting it contains the only TRUTH we are really saying
"My religion is 100% true about a 22% content which is 78% false information."?
If you were sitting on a jury trying to decide on life or death and 8 out of 10 pieces of testimony were false---what right would you have
to assert a confident verdict either way??
CONFIDENCE is scandalous with so little to base it upon--is it not?
The following conclusions were reached by the Jesus Seminar in no particular order.
(Note: Jehovah's Witnesses are NOT going like it at all)
The Seminar asserts that Jesus did NOT hold the apocalyptic (end of the world) view attributed to him the actual message of Jesus' ministry was likely that the most important life children of God can live is in an effort to repair what is seen to be wrong with the world as it exists!
Further:
Jesus was a Jewish sage with Greek philosophical influences who was a wandering faith healer who preached liberation from injustices using startling parables and sayings. He was a tradition breaker who thought outside the box challenging well-accepted ideas with extraordinary simple confutation. He asserted that the Kingdom of God was inside believers who practiced ethical and charitable lives. He described God as a loving father. He was not divine but mortal who had two human paretns, did not perform actual miracles nor die as a substitutionary sacrifice nor did he come back from the dead. Almost everything else said about him was the imagination, exaggeration and mythologizing of others--many of whom simply believed whatever they heard about him no matter how far-fetched.
The gospels of canon were intended as historical sources honestly accounting for Jesus' words and deeds but inadvertently included elaborate additions from naive folk who believed tall tales and people who inserted their own guesses. By comparison, the Gospel of Thomas (excluded by the church) contained more material of an authentic nature than the apocalyptic Gospel of John (included in the canon.)
The critics of the Seminar breathe fire and brimstone down on the conclusions, methodology, a penis size of everybody connect to this!