Ding!, Ding!, Ding!!, Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!!!
from the JAN 1963 Congressional Record, "The 45 Modern Goals of Communism"
#27 Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with "social" religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity, which does not need a "religious crutch."
from Wikipedia
The Jesus Seminar was a group of about 150 critical scholars and laymen founded in 1985 by Robert Funk under the auspices of the Westar Institute. The seminar used votes with colored beads to decide their collective view of the historicity of the deeds and sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. They produced new translations of the New Testament and Apocrypha to use as textual sources. They published their results in 3 reports: The Five Gospels (1993), The Acts of Jesus (1998), and The Gospel of Jesus (1999). They also run a series of lectures and workshops in various U.S. cities. Their results have been edited and heavily featured, with no explanation as to the origin of this group, on cable TV’s History Channel, PBS, and the National Geographic Channel during the 1st decade of the 21st century.
The seminar's reconstruction of the historical Jesus portrayed him as an itinerant Hellenistic Jewish sage and faith healer who preached a gospel of liberation from injustice in startling parables and aphorisms. An iconoclast, Jesus broke with established Jewish theological dogmas and social conventions both in his teachings and behaviors, often by turning common-sense ideas upside down, confounding the expectations of his audience: He preached of "Heaven's imperial rule" (traditionally translated as "Kingdom of God") as being already present but unseen; he depicted God as a loving father; he fraternized with outsiders and criticized insiders. According to the seminar, Jesus was a mortal man born of 2 human parents, who did not perform natural miracles nor die as a substitute for sinners nor rise bodily from the dead. Sightings of a risen Jesus were nothing more than the visionary experiences of some of his disciples rather than physical encounters.
The seminar treated the canonical gospels as historical sources that represented Jesus' actual words and deeds as well as elaborations of the early Christian community and of the gospel authors. The fellows placed the burden of proof on those who advocated any passage's historicity. Unconcerned with canonical boundaries, they asserted that the Gospel of Thomas may have more authentic material than the Gospel of John.
The seminar held a number of premises or "scholarly wisdom" about Jesus when critically approaching the gospels. They acted on the premise that Jesus did not hold an apocalyptic worldview, an opinion that was controversial in mainstream scholarly studies of Jesus. Rather than revealing an apocalyptic eschatology, which instructed his disciples to prepare for the end of the world, the fellows argued that the authentic words of Jesus indicated that he preached a sapiential eschatology, which encouraged all of God's children to repair the world.
The method and conclusions of the Jesus Seminar have come under harsh criticism by biblical scholars, historians and clergy for a variety of reasons. It was the assertion of such critics that the Fellows of the seminar were not all trained scholars, that their voting technique didn't allow for nuance, that they were preoccupied with Q and the Gospel of Thomas but omitted material in other sources such as the Gospel of the Hebrews, and that they relied excessively on the criterion of embarrassment.
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