The Bible A Fake?

Most of Jesus's words in the Bible were ghostwritten, according to a stunning new report by a group of 77 biblical scholars, who call themselves the Jesus Seminar.

Jesus probably did not say about 80 per cent of the words attributed to Him in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the scholars say in a 575 page book. It's called The Give Gospels: What did Jesus Really Say?

According to the scholars:

Jesus never claimed to be the Messiah and did not predict the end of the world.
Jesus probably did share a symbolic last meal with His disciples just before His death. But Jesus's words in the Bible comparing Himself to the bread and wine that He passed around the table, probably were written by His followers.
The Lord's Prayer, which the Bible says Jesus composed, also was compiled by Christians after his death.

"The image that comes out of our work is not a Jesus who was an apocalyptic visionary as much as He was a social revolutionary. And that is a massive step in our understanding of Jesus," says John Dominic Crossan, a co-founder of the Jesus Seminar in 1985 and professor of biblical studies at DePaul University in Chicago.

The group expects some church goers to be shaken by its conclusions, said Robert Funk, Crossan's co-chair.

"I can't imagine anyone wanting to have in faith that cannot withstand the tests of historical fact," Funk said.

At seminar meetings, the scholars examined all four of the Bible's gospels as well as a fifth ancient document, the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in Egypt in 1945.

Jesus left no written texts and none of the original gospels have survived. Instead the scholars studied and compared hundreds of ancient copies of the gospels.

They counted some of the Jesus's sayings because the versions conflicted sharply from one document to another. Other sayings appeared to be well meaning additions by church leaders after the death of Jesus. Some were eliminated because they did not fit properly into the chronology of Jesus's life.

The new image of Jesus that emerges, Funk said, is of "an itinerant sage. He wandered around and had no permanent address as far as we can tell.

"He seems to have been a social radical and he had a good sense of humor. He seems to have said a lot of things with a twinkle in His eye, like telling people that they should not be concerned about the speck in their neighbor's eye when they've got a whole timber stuck in their own."