N.T. Wright on Jesus Seminar and Historical Jesus

“The main line of Jesus-scholarship today has, I believe, largely left behind the fantasyland of the “Jesus Seminar” and its attempt to produce an “objective” portrait of Jesus while measuring the data against an already agreed reductionist framework. Likewise, it has not proved as easy as some thought it would be to construct a historically credible “Jesus” out of the fragments of the gnostic gospels such as “Thomas,” even supposing them to be early, which many still doubt despite the powerful, and sometimes shrill, advocacy of the case in certain quarters. Jesus remains stubbornly and firmly a figure of Palestinian Judaism in the first third of the first century of the Common Era, not a teacher of strange, hidden wisdom after the manner of a Buddhist guru or a gnostic “revealer.”^[1]