Rating: 
Summary: To the point!
Review: This book is completely honest with what the evidence they found and thoroughly explains why they did what they did and agreed or disagreed with things. The critics I've read here I don't think read the book. The translation alone is unique and worth reading! This book is really about answering the question "What did Jesus say?" which is a far cry different than books "about" Jesus how many really know what Jesus' teachings actually are? Few people do most know what their religeon and what Paul said "about" Jesus but not what Jesus did much less follow what he says. Get this book!
Rating: 
Summary: Nonsense
Review: This book is a remarkable display of collective insanity. A groups of self proclaimed scholars start off by saying they trust almost nothing in the gospels and then proceed without any other source to tell us what really happened. It's full of horrifying ahistorical nonsense, circular arguments justifying politically correct premises, historical judgement by committe vote, and that strange logic that leads them to say that the gospels are worthless as history because they were written decades after the events but they, the Jesus seminar, living 2000 years after the same events are able to make definitve statements about what is real and what isn't. Obviously most of the Jesus seminar are nonbelievers which is a very defensible position. What isn't defensible is to be a nonbeliever and not let Jesus go. They want to have their wafer and eat it too. Albert Schweitzer said almost a century ago that each generation will recreate the historical Jesus in their own image. So this bunch of leftist revisionists want to make Jesus a proto socialist and political revolutionary. The problem is that Jesus without the message of traditional Christianity is an irrelevant religious fanatic. Michael Grant in his brilliant study of the gospels as historical documents illustrates this vividly. In two decades these Jesus seminar books will by relegated to the compost heap of historical Jesus books while believers will contine to draw inspiration from the gospels. By the way, there are some good books on the historical Jesus. I already mentioned Schweitzer and Grant. Check out Joachim Jeremias and John P. Meier also. My favorite historical Jesus book is called Jesus the Magician. All of these are written by credible scholars who are brave enough to present their views under their own name without hiding behind the numbers of a seminar. But the bottom line is, if you don't believe in Jesus, don't bother with this stuff. It's all pretty much a deadend. Be brave enough to proclaim yourself a nonbeliever and declare Jesus irrelevant. If you are a believer, checkout Meier and Jeremais. If your interest is purely historical, check out Grant. And if you want an off beat but very credible take, check out Jesus the Magician.
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Summary: A Must Read for Bible Study
Review: This book is one of the first I would put in any Library for those who study Christianity. Although the "Jesus Seminar" takes, and earns, a lot of criticism, this is one any Christian should read through and through while studying the Gospels, It will explain the development of the 4 Canonized Gospels. It has an accurate timeline on the editing of the Gospels, uses a cross reference system to Gospels and how they were included, can be read by any level of student, and is an indespensible aid, more than any other, of the methods of writing, and transmitting the early Gospels. There is no better book in this category. If you do not have it, or have no other sources like this, then you will be ignorant of many of the teachings of Jesus.
Dave P
Emmanuel, AR
Rating:
Summary: Intelligent, invigorating, liberating.
Review: Groundbreaking attempt to clean off two thousand years of plankton. If there are those that disagree with apects of the methodology, that's reasonable. But at least we finally have an ATTEMPT to present a multi-dimensional view of the flawed text that has come down to us. I am persuaded that there are textual problems with the traditional Gospels; they are not what they seem. I welcome honest and well-informed attempts to bring them into better focus.
Rating:
Summary: Difficult to interpret ratings
Review: This is an interesting book, but starts with the premise that the Gospel of Thomas provides some insight into original words of Jesus. This has certainly been hotly debated, and many scholars (such as John Meier) give solid reasons to doubt the premise that it is based on material that predates the other gospels. However, a greater criticism is that there is no voting data on the words. If 30% of scholars in the Jesus Seminar voted red, 19% voted pink, 10% voted grey and 41% voted black, the text would be listed as as black - inauthentic. There is also no discussion of how the various criteria for authenticity were weighted in coming to conclusions about authenticity for each passage. Personally, I would weigh some of the criteria as more important and convincing than others, but this information is not given. The book, therefore lacks sufficient information to aid the reader in coming to their own conclusions and gives only the conclusions based on democratic votes of its members. I do not think that contributes to understanding of the issues.
Rating: 
Summary: The Five Gospels: the scholars' arrogance
Review: I see one very positive thing about this book and another negative: the gospels translations presented here are great! They make Jesus sound fresh and authentic(read him saying "okay" to the leper); the stories sound like when you heard them for the first time. One can almost see the landscapes, plus the specific situations are easily understood in a modern context. The scholars of the Jesus Seminar say it's the best possible and most accurate translation. Okay, they scored a good point here. The problem comes when they have the arrogance to determine which sayings are authentic and which ones are pious stories. Sometimes it looks like their true agenda is to dismiss all of the gospels as unathentic (the Gospel of John has only one, ONE authentic saying in their oppinion, and it's one with parallels in the synoptics). Why in the "scholars'" oppinion most of Jesus sayings are unauthentic? Why do they say they were invented many years after he died? Because, in principle, they messed up and basically broke their most important rule (as they themselves defined it): "Beware of finding a Jesus entirely congenial to you". Throughout the book these folks do just that: try to prove their idea of Jesus as an itinerant sage, whose sayings were characterized by exaggeration, humor and paradox, but no more. If you want to read a good book about Jesus, I recommend "On being a Christian" by Hans Kung.
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Summary: Flawed methodology employed by radical group of scholars
Review: The problem of the methodology has been dealt with in other places (including some of the other reviews) and due to the length required to properly address it, I will refrain from doing so here. In short, by starting with the assumptions that miracles are impossible, that Jesus did not think of himself as the Messiah, that he only spoke in short parabolic form, etc. they vote on whether or not Jesus really said the things in the gospel records, and surprisingly enough, they come up with a picture of Jesus that looks just like the undefended presuppositions they started with. One of my major problems, though, with this work is the fact that they claim to represent a concensus of modern Jesus scholarship. They do not. Neither their theology nor their methodology can be considered representative of a scholarly consensus--even among liberal scholars they are a minority. A handful of the fellows of the Jesus Seminar are big names in contemporary Jesus scholarship. Another handful are small names in contemporary Jesus scholarship. More than half of the 72 fellows are unknown in contemporary Jesus scholarship. The conservative viewpoint is hardly represented at all, and almost half the fellows hail from one of the three most liberal departments in the country. Most scholars find their methodology far to restrictive and arbitrary, and I cannot think of any other respectable scholars who believe that Thomas represents an earlier tradition than the canonical gospels. The most distressing facet of the Jesus Seminar's agenda is that they have captured the public limelight. Because they claim their views represent a majority of experts, the media has embraced them and their radical conclusions. They show up in newpapers, Time, Newsweek, etc. as *the* final word on what Jesus said. People think they are reading the fruit of two hundred years of the quest for the historical Jesus, when they, in fact, are reading the dubious claims of the most radical fringe of the liberal branch of that quest. An conservative critique of the Jesus Seminar methodology, as well as a defense of the traditional view of the historical Jesus, can be found in the book Jesus Under Fire, edited by M. J. Wilkins and J. P. Moreland. This book was written by a team of conservative scholars but is not too technical and should be easily understood by the intelligent layperson.
Rating: 
Summary: Too many people getting their panties in a bunch
Review: A lot has been said criticizing the methodology that The Jesus Seminar used in crafting this work. While I'm no biblical scholar myself, it did at first seem suspect. Then I read "THe Jesus Seminar and it's Critics" which is by another member of the group, and it satisfied most of my problems with the methodology. The one remaining qualm I have is that the entire work presupposes an actual historical Jesus figure who can be known to modern scholars. The only problem with that assumption is that there is a thunderous silence on the issue of Jesus himself from any secular sources. There are mentions of Christians from first century sources, but no reports of the man himself. It's no great surprise really. Modern Christianity is based on the idea that Jesus died to absolve the sins of mankind. He is not important in his life and day to day goings on, as is evidenced in the sparse accounts of his life in Biblical sources, but rather, he is important in his death and in the concepts that his crucifixion is a symbol of. This is not a problem for matters of Faith, because to believe in Jesus one does not need proof of his life. But for scholarly matters, it seems irresponsible to assume that the non iconic figure, the actual flesh and blood man, actually walked the earth simply because that is the Christian tradition. "Jesus" could just as likely have been an amalgam of different men working to reform judaism in the first century as opposed to a single rabbi. The point of what I'm saying is that this book doesn't raise any religious questions. Those questions have been settled for hundreds of years. If you grant the authors their conceits, and they really aren't great ones, there are interesting things to be learned. For one, it is nice to read the book in common english, as the original gospels were written in a low form of Greek. Unlike what a previous reviewer said, this translation restores the spirit of the common man to the gospels which for too long have been couched in hoity toity upper class gobbledygook as a way of lending them greater weight. That's all fine and good if you want to hear the words of thousands of years of monks, and not the original texts as they would have sounded to the people of their time. Also, the color coding does a lot to differentiate between different messianic traditions and show the many parallels and differences that occured among the early Christians, a people who disagreed on things a lot more than you would think. Over all, the book is valuable because it takes a critical look at one of the most important works of western civilization and forces the reader to deal with their own preconceptions no matter what they might be. In that, the book is a great triumph and well worth a look.
Rating:
Summary: Godawful Translation
Review: I'm going to ignore all the controversy on whether this group of scholars can actually identify the real words of Jesus and just warn people about the "translation." The attempt here was to make what Jesus said 2000 years ago have the same impact on modern readers as it did back then. Assuming Jesus spoke in plain, everyday language, the translators here have filled his teachings with today's slang, even if the nouns in the slang didn't exist in Jesus' time. "One cannot love God and his checking account." I'm sorry, "checking account"??? Is the assumption here that we're too stupid to understand the word "money"? All the work put into this and they come up with a translation that sounds like it was written for a three year old. I would suggest to the Jesus Seminar that anyone with the interest and patience to wade through the endless analysis in their books does not need a translation made for a young child.
Rating:
Summary: With no basis in fact...
Review: Question: What do you get when you get a group of liberal biblical scholars together to discuss what the historical Jesus really said? Answer: "The Five Gospels." The group of 72 (I suppose we should consider this a special number since this is how many supposedly translated the Hebrew scriptures into the Greek LXX!) got together over a period of time and "voted" with their emotions and liberal presuppositions, using colored beads to determine what Jesus really said. The result is this book, with its color-coded sections corresponding to the perceived accuracy of the text. What I find most fascinating is that they hold the Gospel of Thomas--the supposed "fifth gospel"--to be a much more accurate portrayal of Christ's words than any of the other gospels. However, the Gospel of Thomas, which can be dated no earlier than AD 140, is a confirmed Gnostic writing, no better than a number of other apocryphal books that have been discovered over the years (i.e. 1945-6 Nag Hammadi literature). (In fact, I wonder, why stop at the Gospel of Thomas? Why not use all of the Gnostic writings? After all, these other books have some pretty unique teachings as well.) Truly if we are going to give authenticity to the Gospel of Thomas, then we should hopelessly dump the rest of the New Testament because the contradictions are immense. For instance, the Gospel of Thomas portrays Jesus as saying that women must resemble males in order to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. This was an obvious Gnostic teaching referring to how the separation of the sexes was responsible for the origin of evil. Such a legendary and obviously slanted idea goes against the rest of scripture (i.e. Gal. 3:28). I have to admit that perusing the Gospel of Thomas can help us understand the state of the heretics in the second century, but it can hardly be compared to the canonical gospels! Overall, my recommendation is to save your money and avoid a book where the authors considered their liberal ideas as more sacred than true history.
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