The foolish seminar: Case study on waffling present even in 1985
The Jesus Seminar was formed in 1985 under the supervision of Robert W. Funk and was subsequently sponsored by his umbrella organization, the Westar Institute, which Funk founded in 1986.
The original group of participants from 1985 through the 1990s included Funk himself and scholars representing a wide range of religious perspectives and academic backgrounds. In a strange twist, a risqué film director, Paul Verhoeven, was somehow included in the group, even though he had no seminary or theological education. The original Jesus Seminar, formed in 1985, concluded its work on the historical Jesus in 1998, but did not entirely leave the public eye.
Protestants and Catholics believe in the same Jesus and God, but Jewish and atheist participants would not generally accept Christian claims about Jesus' divinity and miracles. The distasteful, lurid film director would also not seem credible for any venture involving Jesus but was brought on board anyway.
According to Answers in Genesis' How Do We Know the Bible is True anthology, the seminar participants claimed that Jesus was the illegitimate offspring of Mary and a Roman soldier, that Caesar Augustus did not even order the census forcing Mary and Joseph to travel to Bethlehem, and that Jesus' biological father was a Roman military figure rather than Joseph.
The researchers' conflicting beliefs and credentials allowed Funk and friends to distribute falsehoods under the guise of academic information on Jesus. This gave them a platform to reduce Jesus to a good, moral teacher and discredit the belief that he was the Son of God. Essentially, Funk and friends frivolously forwarded these blatant falsehoods about Jesus' doctrine and history.
The umbrella organization, Westar Institute, advertises its hubris as true scholarship, reinforcing its "research-based" Jesus talking point campaign. Further fueling these factual errors, the group finagled its way into a 2000 documentary on ABC named The Search for Jesus. What's more, some of the original participants were interviewed for Discovery Channel, History Channel, and A&E programming, as per Answers in Genesis. The Jesus Seminar should have been renamed the “Let’s Undermine Jesus Seminar."
How their waffling continued in the 2020s: Waffling got worse
Westar still has a YouTube channel as of today, but what's left of the seminar (with its legacy and approach continued by Westar) is mainly a center for historical ignorance. After all, if there is anything they are scholars of, it would be ignoring what the Bible says in plain text.
For example, a fairly recent video called "Westar on the Road" argues that "there is no mention of homosexuality in the Bible," although the New Testament does make reference to it.
The Apostle Paul discusses the types of people who go to Heaven in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10:
"Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind. / Nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God."
The bigger they were, the harder they fell. Scholarship does not always mean what it is made out to be.
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