Controversial Jesus Seminar

As one who has for decades worked over and published on the early Jesus tradition, I can only say that the tactics of the Jesus Seminar as reported in The Times are an academic disgrace (“Seminar Rules Out 80% of Words Attributed to Jesus,” Part A, March 4). Ignoring both the dynamic development of the Jesus tradition and its relationship to what we are coming to understand about Galilee and Judaism in the First Century, the seminar settles for simplistic classification by majority vote. The result is a triumph for publicity, but a tragedy for intellectual responsibility.

The leaders of the seminar, some of whom I have known for years, are in many cases still carrying on a post-adolescent revolt against the traditionalism in which they were reared. Theirs is not a quest for the historical Jesus, but a quest for the intellectually respectable Jesus, free of such features, embarrassing to modern intellectuals, as demons, miracles and predictions about the future--all of which were commonplace features of First-Century thinking, Jewish and Gentile. What is deplorable about this seminar is not its cute methods or its iconoclastic “results,” but its gross violation of responsible historical methods.

HOWARD C. KEE, Visiting Professor of New Testament School of Theology at Claremont