John P. Meier, «The Present State of the ‘Third Quest’ for the Historical Jesus: Loss and Gain», Vol. 80 (1999) 459-487

Despite the questionable method and positions of the Jesus Seminar, the third quest for the historical Jesus has resulted in seven notable gains as compared with the old quests. (1) The third quest has an ecumenical and international character. (2) It clarifies the question of reliable sources. (3) It presents a more accurate picture of first-century Judaism. (4) It employs new insights from archaeology, philology, and sociology. (5) It clarifies the application of criteria of historicity. (6) It gives proper attention to the miracle tradition. (7) It takes the Jewishness of Jesus with utter seriousness.

international and inter-confessional breadth to the third quest that the former two lacked. To take but a few examples, Ben Witherington, who has stressed the role of Jesus as wisdom teacher, is a conservative Methodist⁹; E.P. Sanders, in a sense the person who launched the third quest, comes from a Methodist background and might best be described as a post-liberal Protestant (though a Texan, he taught for many years in Canada and England)¹⁰; Robert Funk, the founder of the Jesus Seminar, comes out of the Disciples of Christ tradition; N.T. Wright, a perennial opponent of the Jesus Seminar, is an Anglican and the Dean of Lichfield cathedral¹¹; and writers of such diverse views as John Dominic Crossan, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza¹², and myself come from Roman Catholic backgrounds. To this can be added the valuable contributions — indeed, the decades-old impetus — of Jewish scholars such as Geza Vermes of Oxford and more recently Paula Fredriksen of Boston University¹³.

        At the beginning of Volume One of my multi-volume study, A Marginal Jew, I conjured up the fantasy of an "unpapal conclave", a committee made up of a Catholic, a Protestant, a Jew, and an agnostic, sober historians all, who were locked up in the bowels of the Harvard Divinity School library, put on a spartan diet, and not allowed to emerge until they had hammered out a consensus document on who Jesus of Nazareth was and what he intended in his own time and place¹⁴. While not intended literally — though some unfortunately took it that way — this unpapal conclave was meant to symbolize in graphic fashion the kind of international and inter-faith cooperation on a central and sensitive religious topic that would have been inconceivable not too many decades ago.