The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar

The Fellows of the Jesus Seminar represent a wide variety of western religious traditions and academic institutions. They have been trained in the best universities in North America and in Europe. Together they first all inventoried all the surviving ancient texts for words attributed to Jesus. They then examined those words in several ancient languages in which they have been preserved. They produced a translation of all the gospels, known as the Scholars Version. And finally they studied, debated, and voted on each of the more than 1500 sayings of Jesus in their inventory.

If I recall correctly, there are scholars from every major denomination except Southern Baptist and I believe, Lutheran. Those denominations would not allow their scholars to participate.

Professor Mahlon Smith of Rutgers University presented a draft on the Sayings Gospel and Professor Stephen Patterson, who was our guest speaker at the recent April Restoration Studies Symposium in Independence who is from Eden Theological Seminary in St. Louis prepared the explanations on the fairly recent Gospel of Thomas.

Professor Julian Hills, Marquette University, helped prepare the comments on the Gospel of John. Professor Daryl Schmidt, Texas Christian University, a leading member of the translation committee took the responsibility of checking for accurancy in the Scholar's Version: he also discovered and corrected numerous errors of statement and citation.

There are many authors.