The Jesus Seminar is a group of about 150 critical scholars and laymen founded in 1985 by Robert Funk under the auspices of the Westar Institute. The seminar uses votes with colored beads to decide their collective view of the historicity of the deeds and sayings of Jesus of Nazareth. They produced new translations of the New Testament and apocrypha to use as textual sources. They published their results in three reports: The Five Gospels (1993),The Acts of Jesus (1998), and The Gospel of Jesus (1999). They also run a series of lectures and workshops in various U.S. cities.

The seminar's reconstruction of the historical Jesus portrays him as an itinerant Hellenistic Jewish sage and faith healer who preached a gospel of liberation from injustice in startling parables and aphorisms. An iconoclast, Jesus broke with established Jewish theological dogmas and social conventions both in his teachings and behaviors, often by turning common-sense ideas upside down, confounding the expectations of his audience: He preached of "Heaven's imperial rule" (traditionally translated as "Kingdom of God") as being already present but unseen; he depicts God as a loving father; he fraternizes with outsiders and criticizes insiders. According to the seminar, Jesus was a mortal man born of two human parents, who did not perform nature miracles nor die as a substitute for sinners nor rise bodily from the dead. Sightings of a risen Jesus were nothing more than the visionary experiences of some of his disciples rather than physical encounters.

Jesus ( /ˈdʒiːzəs/; Greek: Ἰησοῦς; 7–2 BC/BCE to 30–36 AD/CE), also referred to as Jesus Christ or simply Christ, is the central figure of Christianity and most Christian denominations venerate him as God the Son incarnated. In Islam, Jesus (in Arabic: عيسى‎ in Islamic usage, commonly transliterated as Isa) is considered one of God's important prophets.

Most modern historians agree that Jesus existed and was a Jewish teacher from Galilee in Roman Judaea, who was baptized by John the Baptist, and was crucified in Jerusalem on the orders of the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate. Scholars have offered competing descriptions and portraits of Jesus, which at times share a number of overlapping attributes, such as a rabbi, a charismatic healer, the leader of an apocalyptic movement, a self-described Messiah, a sage and philosopher, or a social reformer who preached of the "Kingdom of God" as a means for personal and egalitarian social transformation. Scholars have correlated the New Testament accounts with non-Christian historical records to arrive at an estimated chronology of Jesus' life.

Sons of God (B'nai HaElohim, בני האלהים) is a phrase used in Levantine Bronze and Iron Age texts to describe the "divine council" of the major gods.^{[citation needed]}

In the pantheon of 2nd millennium Ugarit the El, the father-god and head of the pantheon, and the 70 "sons of El", make up a "Divine Council" which deliberates over major decisions. In the 1st millennium the El had been demoted and each of the "sons of El" was held to have been given a "nation" as his charge: Chemosh, for example, was the god of Moab. Yahweh, not originally included in the Ugaritic pantheon, was the God of Judah and of Israel. In the Book of Genesis, Yahweh is seen as the single deity, with "sons of elohim" as his assistants.

By the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC further hypotheses were developed to explain this passage in Genesis. One hypothesis was that the sons of God were the descendants of Seth, the pure line of Adam, and the "daughters of men" as the descendants of Cain.^{[citation needed]}

In the Hebrew Bible the phrase "sons of God" occurs:

Marcus J. Borg (born 1942) is an American New Testament scholar, theologian and author. He is a fellow of the Jesus Seminar and was formerly Hundere Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University, a position from which he retired in 2007. Borg is among the most widely-known and influential voices in progressive Christianity and is a major figure in scholarship related to the Historical Jesus.

Borg was born and raised in a Lutheran family in South Dakota. After high school he attended Concordia College in Minnesota, initially planning to be an astrophysicist and majoring in math and physics. He later changed his major to political science and philosophy. Though plagued by doubt as a young adult, after his undergraduate studies Borg decided to study at Union Seminary in New York City, where he became familiarized with liberal theology. One of the profound influences on Borg during his seminary years was his professor and the noted theologian W. D. Davies. After graduating from Union he then enrolled at Oxford University, where he earned his D. Phil.

John Dominic Crossan (born 1934) is an Irish-American New Testament scholar, historian of early Christianity, and former Catholic priest known for co-chairing the Jesus Seminar. Crossan is a major figure in the fields of anthropology of the Ancient Mediterranean and New Testament Studies, particularly in the application of postmodern hermeneutical approaches for the avant-garde Biblical studies journal Semeia.^{[citation needed]} He is also a lecturer who has appeared in television documentaries about Jesus and the Bible. He is a key figure in research into the historical Jesus.

Crossan was born in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, Ireland.Though his father was a banker, Crossan was steeped in the rural Irish life, which he experienced through frequent visits to the home of his paternal grandparents. On graduation from St. Eunan's College, a boarding high school, in 1950, Crossan joined the Servites, a Catholic religious order, and moved to the United States. He was trained at Stonebridge Seminary, Lake Bluff, Illinois, then ordained a priest in 1957. Crossan returned to Ireland, where he earned his Doctor of Divinity in 1959 at St. Patrick's College Maynooth, the Irish national seminary. He then completed two more years of study in biblical languages at the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. Thus equipped, he returned to the seminary where he had trained, and through four years of teaching he "first began to learn something about the Bible" as he puts it.^{[citation needed]} In 1965 Crossan embarked on two additional years of study, this time in archaeology based at the Ecole Biblique in Jordanian East Jerusalem. His work led him to journey through many Middle-Eastern countries before escaping just days prior to the outbreak of the Six Day War of 1967.