American scholarly group founded by Robert Funk in 1985 that used colored beads to vote on the historical authenticity of Jesus's sayings and deeds — publishing The Five Gospels (1993) — and which became the most publicly visible and controversial enterprise in historical Jesus scholarship.
Made historical Jesus scholarship publicly visible and democratized the scholarly debate — while the bead-voting method attracted criticism, the Jesus Seminar forced mainstream Christianity to confront the gap between the historical Jesus and the Christ of faith.
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