THE JESUS PROJECT - a new Jesus Seminar, sort of:

Scholars will investigate the Sources of the Gospel

Amherst, New York (November 17, 2008)--Following in the footsteps of the famed Jesus Seminar, scholars representing the cream of the crop in the field of Biblical studies are set to gather December 5-7 at the Center for Inquiry campus in Amherst, New York for a conference devoted to exploring the historical Jesus. The sessions will mark the inaugural meeting of the new "Jesus Project," first announced to the world at the University of California at Davis in January of 2007. "The Jesus Project" is an initiative of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion (CSER), housed at Center for Inquiry/Transnational, a secularist think tank.

"The conference in Amherst will answer the challenge laid down by CSER Fellow and Jesus Seminar cofounder John Dominic Crossan, namely, how one goes about deciding what counts for evidence of the Jesus tradition," said R. Joseph Hoffmann, chair of the Committee for the Scientific Examination of Religion. "I suspect we will witness a lively discussion on the question of sources and methods. How can we know what constituted the earliest phase of the Jesus-tradition? Is it possible to reconstruct the earliest form of the gospel, using the advanced techniques of biblical and historical criticism?"

"The Jesus Project" is devoted to examining the case for the historical existence of Jesus based on a rigorous application of historical critical methods to the gospels and related literature. Unlike the "Jesus Seminar," founded in 1985 by the late Professor Robert Funk of the University of Montana, the new Seminar regards the claim that Jesus of Nazareth was an historical figure as a "testable hypothesis." Hoffmann said that the project has been called for by a number of scholars who felt that the first Jesus Seminar may have been--for political reasons--too reluctant to follow where the evidence led.

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