I really like this review.....for a popular article, it is amazingly free from obvious factual errors. And it strikes the biggest falsehood about the Bible square in the face: that the canon was decided by Emperor Constantine at the Council of Nicaea (which has been expanded into an elaborate story by Tony Bushby); the popularity of this meme is attested in this very thread in ziddina's response to the OP (who repeats the myth). I also love the description of the Bible as a "work of art" which comes very close to the way I view it as literature, in a broader cultural and literary context. I normally avoid popularizing books but Beal's book may be an interesting read.
About the Jesus Seminar, I recall April DeConick on her blog had a series of incisive posts laying out the methodological flaws, which is interesting because she has her own methodology for stratifying the material in the Gospel of Thomas. Maybe it was someone else, but I think she was the author. I love Crossan, I am glued to the TV everytime he is on because I adore the sound of his voice and I think he would the most fun guy to have a conservation with, but I find his "Cynic" analysis of the "historical Jesus" to be very flawed. Dale Allison has imo successfully shown that one could not label apocalyptic material in the gospel traditions as necessarily "late", for Crossan's analysis underestimates the eschatological character of first-century Palestinian Judaism and the apocalyptic bent wandering preachers/prophets like Jesus took. Allison suspects that Crossan's analysis has an ulterior motive of depriving of the historical Jesus of making eschatological error so making him a philosopher removes this potential problem. Allison however contends that even this theological motive betrays a sort of docetism; if Jesus was "truly man", then he was capable of error. So I agree that it was more likely that the "historical Jesus" (assuming that there was one, and I favor the view that there was) was apocalyptic than not, although there is no way of really knowing other than taking the gospels at face value. DeConick at least shows that there was a tendency to weaken apocalyptic sayings by spiritualizing them as a response to prophetic failure (in a kind of similar way to how the Society reinterpreted the significance of its dates), so the apocalyptic material comes from an earlier period than the spiritualizing interpretations and reformulations (of the sort that anticipate later gnostic views). Ultimately, the whole thing is subjective and dependent on what one's initial premises are. There was a recent attempt to kind of redo the Jesus Seminar with current scholarship, but the project fell apart due to many scholars' believing that the methodology was insufficient to reach the goals set for the project.
I want to be clear that I think Bart is an excellent scholar and a good guy from what I have read, never meeting the man.
I got to meet him once. It was funny because in the Q&A period after his "Misquoting Jesus" talk I queried him on whether he thinks Clement of Rome may be a reliable early witness to the text of 1 Corinthians, and I mentioned a few examples of things that seemed interesting. And then I came up to him later and asked about intertextuality with Psalm 69 in the gospels and Papias with respect to the death of Judas Iscariot, and he said in response, "WHO ARE YOU?" lol
