Editing Jesus Seminar (section)

===Bias against canonical sources and for non-canonical sources===
Casey criticizes the Seminar for the "exaggerated importance which they have attributed to the [[Gospel of Thomas]]",<ref name="Casey2010"/> stating, "Their voting was so bizarre that they ended up with more red in the Gospel than in our oldest genuine source, the [[Gospel of Mark]]."<ref name="Casey2010"/> [[Craig Blomberg]] notes that if the Jesus Seminar's findings are to be believed, then: {{quote|It requires the assumption that someone, about a generation removed from the events in question, radically transformed the authentic information about Jesus that was circulating at that time, superimposed a body of material four times as large, fabricated almost entirely out of whole cloth, while the church suffered sufficient collective amnesia to accept the transformation as legitimate.{{cn|date=September 2022}}}} [[Craig A. Evans|Craig Evans]] argues that the Jesus Seminar applies a form of hypercriticism to the canonical gospels that unreasonably assumes that "Jesus' contemporaries (that is, the first generation of his movement) were either incapable of remembering or uninterested in recalling accurately what Jesus said and did, and in passing it on" while, in contrast, privileging extra-canonical texts with an uncritical acceptance that sometimes rises to the level of [[special pleading]].<ref name="Fabricating Jesus"/> [[Howard Clark Kee]], writing in ''The Cambridge Companion to the Bible'' (1997) and citing [[Helmut Koester]] and [[John Dominic Crossan]] as examples, states: {{quote|Some scholars have advanced the theory that these so-called apocryphal gospels actually include texts and traditions that are older and more reliable than those in the canonical New Testament writings. ... These opinions are purely circular arguments, since the investigators have found material which they prefer to what is the canonical Gospels and, in support of their preferences, attribute this material to more ancient sources. No ancient evidence confirms these theories, but the theories have been welcomed and widely publicized in the popular press.<ref>Kee, Howard Clark, et al. eds., (1997) ''The Cambridge Companion to the Bible'', "Bibliographic Essay", Cambridge University Press. {{ISBN|0-521-34369-0}} pp. 582-83.</ref>}}