The Gospel According to the Jesus Seminar
Birger A. Pearson
Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara
NB: This article appears as originally submitted it to the Claremont Graduate School for publication as no. 35 in the "Occasional Papers" series of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. Dr. Pearson's Preface refers to an "Afterword" supplied by Prof. James M. Robinson, which is not available on this web site. Also, the version of the Preface/Article presented here was subsequently reformatted in Claremont (with footnotes instead of endnotes). It was published in April of 1996.
Preface
The essay published here is a slightly expanded version of an article published in Religion 25 (October, 1995), pp. 317-38. That article represents results
of a graduate seminar in New Testament that I conducted for the Graduate
Theological Union in Berkeley, California, during the Fall semester of 1994.
The seminar, "Examining The Five Gospels," was devoted to a critical
analysis of the work of the now famous "Jesus Seminar," as published
in its "red letter edition" of the four canonical gospels plus
the Gospel of Thomas. My seminar was held on the campus of the Pacific
School of Religion, where, nine years before, the Jesus Seminar had begun
its work. It provided me with material for lectures on historical Jesus
scholarship in general, and the Jesus Seminar in particular, at Indiana
University Bloomington in November 1994, and at UC Santa Barbara and UC
Santa Cruz in May 1995.
Following upon my lecture at Santa Barbara I received a request from the
American Editor of Religion, Ivan Strenski, a UC colleague, that I write
up my findings in the form of an article that could be published in the
journal. I agreed to this, and submitted the article to the journal during
the summer of 1995; it was then scheduled for publication in the October
issue. Religion, published in London, is an international journal devoted
to the study of critical issues in religion and religions, ancient and modern,
and theoretical approaches to such topics. It is read by religious studies
generalists and specialists in diverse areas of the study of religion.
Thus, I attempted to tailor my article to this wider audience, though I
certainly hope that it will attract the attention of New Testament scholars
as well. This latter possibility is enhanced by its republication in the
"Occasional Papers" series of the Institute for Antiquity and
Christianity.
I want to express my thanks to Ivan Strenski, first for inviting me to
contribute the article to Religion, and then for arranging with the publisher
(Academic Press, London) for permission to republish it here. Christopher
Morray-Jones, a colleague at UC Berkeley (where I also taught during the
Fall semester of 1994), sat in on several sessions of my GTU seminar, and
provided many useful insights in the seminar's discussions, for which I
heartily thank him. He also read and responded to a pre-publication manuscript
of my Religion article. Others who read the manuscript, and provided useful
comments, were Gregory J. Riley and James M. Robinson at Claremont, and
A. Thomas Kraabel at Luther College in Iowa. My thanks go to all of them.
I am especially grateful to James M. Robinson for encouraging me to publish
this essay in the "Occasional Papers" series of the Institute,
and for providing the "Foreword" for it, wherein the reader will
also find a capsule summary of his own interpretation of the historical
Jesus.
Birger A. Pearson
Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies
University of California, Santa Barbara