Excerpt on voting and color-coding from the introduction to The Five Gospels
 

The first step in the work of the Jesus Seminar was to inventory and classify all the words attributed to Jesus in the first three centuries of the common era. The edict of toleration issued by the emperor Constantine in 313 C.E. was chosen as the cutoff point. With the council of Nicea in 325, the orthodox party solidified its hold on the Christian tradition and other wings of the Christian movement were choked off. The Seminar collected more than fifteen hundred versions of approximately five hundred items (it is often difficult to know how to count clusters of sayings and words embedded in longer narratives). The items were sorted into four categories: parables, aphorisms, dialogues, and stories containing words attributed to Jesus. The inventory covers all the surviving gospels and reports from the period, not just the canonical gospels. This was the rule the Fellows adopted:

Canonical boundaries are irrelevant in critical assessments of the various sources of information about Jesus.

They refused, in other words, to privilege the gospels that came to be regarded as canonical by the church. The Seminar thus acted in accordance with the canons of historical inquiry.

The goal of the Seminar was to review each of the fifteen hundred items and determine which of them could be ascribed with a high degree of probability to Jesus. The items passing the test would be included in a database for determining who Jesus was. But the interpretation of the data was to be excluded from the agenda of the Seminar and left to individual scholars working from their own perspectives.

The Seminar had to agree on two questions that established the course of its deliberations. It first had to decide how it would reach its decisions. It then had to determine how it would report the results to a broad public not familiar with the history of critical scholarship over the past two centuries and more.

Voting was adopted, after extended debate, as the most efficient way of ascertaining whether a scholarly consensus existed on a given point. Committees creating a critical text of the Greek New Testament under the auspices of the United Bible Societies vote on whether to print this or that text and what variants to consign to notes. Translation committees, such as those that created the King James Version and the Revised Standard Version, vote in the course of their deliberations on which translation proposal to accept and which to reject. Voting does not, of course, determine the truth; voting only indicates what the best judgment is of a significant number of scholars sitting around the table. It was deemed entirely consonant with the mission of the Jesus Seminar to decide whether, after careful review of the evidence, a particular saying or parable did or did not fairly represent the voice of the historical Jesus.

The second agreement reached by the Seminar at the beginning of its work—again, only after agonizing review—was to create a critical red letter edition of the gospels as the vehicle of its public report. We could not readily report the exchange that regularly followed the presentation of technical papers. We required some shorthand and graphic model—one that could be understood at a glance by the casual reader.

The model of the red letter edition suggested that the Seminar should adopt one of two options in its votes: either Jesus said it or he did not say it. A vote recognizing the words as authentic would entail printing the items in red; a vote recognizing the words as inauthentic meant that they would be left in regular black print.

Academics do not like simple choices. The Seminar adopted four categories as a compromise with those who wanted more. In addition to red, we permitted a pink vote for those who wanted to hedge: a pink vote represented reservations either about the degree of certainty or about modifications the saying or parable had suffered in the course of its transmission and recording. And for those who wanted to avoid a flat negative vote, we allowed a gray vote (gray being a weak form of black). The Seminar employed colored beads dropped into voting boxes in order to permit all members to vote in secret. Beads and boxes turned out to be a fortunate choice for both Fellows and an interested public.

Fellows were permitted to cast ballots under two different options for understanding the four colors.

Option 1

red: I would include this item unequivocally in the database for determining who Jesus was.

pink: I would include this item with reservations (or modifications) in the database.

gray: I would not include this item in the database, but I might make use of some of the content in determining who Jesus was.

black: I would not include this item in the primary database.

red: Jesus undoubtedly said this or something very like it.

pink: Jesus probably said something like this.

gray: Jesus did not say this, but the ideas contained in it are close to his own.

black: Jesus did not say this; it represents the perspective or content of a later or different tradition.

One member suggested this unofficial but helpful interpretation of the colors:

red: That's Jesus!

pink: Sure sounds like Jesus.

gray: Well, maybe.

black: There's been some mistake.

The Seminar did not insist on uniform standards for balloting. The ranking of items was determined by weighted vote. Since most Fellows of the Seminar are professors, they are accustomed to grade points and grade-point averages. So they decided on the following scheme:

red = 3

pink = 2

gray = 1

black = 0

The points on each ballot were added up and divided by the number of votes in order to determine the weighted average. We then converted the scale to percentages—to yield a scale of 1.00 rather than a scale of 3.00. The result was a scale divided into four quadrants:

red: .7501 and up

pink: .5001 to .7500

gray: .2501 to .5000

black: .0000 to .2500

This system seemed superior to a system that relied on majorities or pluralities of one type or another. In a system that made the dividing line between pink and gray a simple majority, nearly half of the Fellows would lose their vote. There would only be winners and losers. Under weighted averages, all votes would count in the averages. Black votes in particular could readily pull an average down, as students know who have one "F" along with several "A"s. Yet this shortcoming seemed consonant with the methodological skepticism that was a working principle of the Seminar: when in sufficient doubt, leave it out.

Voting on the Deeds of Jesus

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