The Jesus Seminar
Newsweek, April 4th, 1994Source: http://www.themodernreligion.com/comparative/christ/bible_JesusSeminar.htm
The Jesus Seminar, a group of 77 New Testament experts, meet twice a year to deconstruct the story of Jesus (Prophet Isa a.s.) and build their own version of what happened. They are sober people, and Christians themselves in most cases.
The Jesus Seminar is perhaps best known for colour-coding the New Testament. Since its founding in 1985, the group has studied the sayings of Jesus, using coloured beeds to vote on the accuracy of each one. A red bead is cast if the scholar thinks "Jesus undoubtedly said this or something very like it." Pink is for a statement close to what Jesus probably said. Grey is for something he didn't say, though the ideas were close to his, while black is for something he neither said nor thought. Last December, the group published a new version of the Gospels, with Jesus' sayings in coloured type - little of it in red. In the Lord's Prayer, the only words Jesus said for sure were "Our Father."
In addition to the 4 canonical Gospels (Mathew, Mark, Luke and John). Seminarians draw on a variety of early Christian writings, some of which are dismissed as apocryphal or irrelevant by other experts.
There is the "Gospel of Thomas," a collection of Jesus' sayings discovered in Egypt in 1945. In its new edition of the Gospels, the Jesus Seminar includes Thomas as a full-fledged number 5, though some other authorities question whether it is a genuine 1st Century work. Even the Seminarians seem to have some doubts about Thomas. In their colour-coded version, only three short statements by Jesus are printed in red.
Ref. http://www.westarinstitute.org/Jesus_Seminar/jesus_seminar.html
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