Jesus in Four Colors

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An event in the history of Jesus scholarship is about to occur. In December, accompanied by considerable media attention and a major advertising campaign, a new multicolor edition of the Gospels will be published: The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.¹

The feature of this edition that will attract the most attention is its presentation of the sayings of Jesus in four colors: red, pink, gray and black. The colors represent a descending scale of scholarly judgment about whether a given saying is “authentic” (that is, goes back to Jesus himself), or is more the product of the early Christian movement. In colloquial language, red will mean “That’s Jesus!”; pink, “Sure sounds like him”; gray, “Well, maybe”; and black, “There’s been some mistake.”

Broadly speaking, the Gospels contain two voices. As the developing tradition of the early Christian movement in the last third of the first century, they contain both the voice of Jesus and the voice of the Christian community. A saying printed in red signifies the voice of Jesus, pink is the voice of Jesus beginning to be shaped by the community, gray may contain an echo of the voice of Jesus but is more the voice of the community, and black is completely the voice of the community.

The colors represent the results of the voting of The Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars convened by Robert Funk in 1985.^a The seminar met twice a year to examine all the sayings attributed to Jesus in sources written before the year 300. After analysis and discussion, the question facing each Fellow was, “Do I think Jesus said that?” Fellows then voted by casting a bead (one of the four colors) into a ballot box. Votes were tabulated, and each saying received a “weighted average,” which determined the color in which it will be printed.

Fellows represent a spectrum of contemporary scholarship, including Catholics, Protestants, a few Jews and some nonreligious scholars. Requirements for membership were not ideological, but formal: typically a Ph.D. in relevant areas of Gospel research. Though fundamentalist scholars were welcome, none became members, presumably because their understanding of Scripture as a “divine product” made the activity of the seminar unnecessary and irrelevant. A few Southern Baptist scholars were involved until pressure from their denomination forced them to withdraw.

The work of the seminar is important in part because it is unprecedented: It is the first systematic and collaborative historical assessment of the Jesus tradition. The results will generally not surprise the scholarly world, except on one major point: The eschatological (or “end of the world”) sayings of Jesus will consistently appear in black. This reverses the near consensus among scholars, during much of this century, that Jesus was an eschatological figure. Building on Albert Schweitzer’s work at the start of the century, scholars had generally concluded that Jesus expected the imminent arrival of the everlasting kingdom of God, the resurrection of the dead and the last judgment, all within his generation. The foundation for this view lies in two groups of sayings, one referring to the coming of a supernatural “son of man” on the clouds of heaven, and a second referring to the coming of the kingdom of God in the near future. The seminar sees both groups of sayings as the product of the early Christian movement in the decades after the first Easter, therefore reflecting the movement’s eschatology and not the eschatology of Jesus.

The volume will contain many surprises for the general public, however. Some of these surprises are “negative” and are likely to receive much media attention. The following are some of the passages that will be printed in black (that is, seen as the voice of the early Christian community and not as the voice of Jesus): all passages that speak of Jesus having an exalted status (as Messiah, Son of God, light of the world, bread of life, etc.); all passages that speak of Jesus’ dying for the sins of the world; all the end-of-the-world or “second coming” passages; and essentially all of the Gospel of John. The seminar sees all of these as the product of the community in the post-Easter period.

These results will surprise many people because they differ sharply from Jesus’ widespread popular image (held by many Christians and non-Christians alike) as one who knew himself to be the Son of God, saw his own purpose as dying for the sins of the world, and whose message was about himself and the importance of believing in him. The negative results provoke the question, “If Jesus wasn’t like this, then what was he like?”

On the positive side, there is the greatest agreement about the parables and aphorisms of Jesus. Parables, of course, are short stories, and aphorisms are short 062sayings, memorable one-liners. One of the most certain things about Jesus, according to The Five Gospels, is that he was a teller of stories and a speaker of great one-liners. This means that there was a “wisdom teacher” dimension to Jesus. The seminar is less certain about whether Jesus was also a social prophet and movement founder; most of the sayings pointing to these roles will be in gray, which in many cases means “absence of consensus” rather than “the consensus is gray.”

In addition to provoking thought about “What was Jesus like?” the publication of The Five Gospels also raises the question, “To what extent are the Gospels historical and nonhistorical, and what does one do with the nonhistorical parts?” It is a mistake to think that black passages should simply be discarded; rather, as the voice of the community, they tell us what Jesus had become in the lives of his followers in the decades after Easter.

Some persons question the idea of “voting on Jesus.” The whole notion is rejected, of course, by people who see the Gospels as divine products, guaranteed to be infallible through divine inspiration.² But for those not committed to this understanding of Scripture, the new volume will provide a window onto the world of scholars at work on the Jesus tradition. And more broadly, the publication of The Five Gospels will put Jesus “in the news” once again.

An event in the history of Jesus scholarship is about to occur. In December, accompanied by considerable media attention and a major advertising campaign, a new multicolor edition of the Gospels will be published: The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus.1 The feature of this edition that will attract the most attention is its presentation of the sayings of Jesus in four colors: red, pink, gray and black. The colors represent a descending scale of scholarly judgment about whether a given saying is “authentic” (that is, goes back to Jesus himself), or is more the […]