The new Jesus seminar discounts the Virgin birth.

The Jesus Seminar, a floating conference of 30 university scholars, last month voted down the biblical account that Jesus Christ was born of a virgin as not credible. Despite urgings of the group's founder, Robert W. Funk, however, the panel would not vote to remove God the Holy Spirit as one potential father of the Christ child.

The voting-done with multicolored pebbles signifying the degree of confidence a scholar has in the veracity of a given text-is something that Funk admits is designed to attract attention. After a decade of debating the authenticity of Jesus' sayings, the group has moved on to a discussion of what actions of Jesus are most likely to have taken place.

The Virgin Birth was dispatched by several academicians, including Ronald W. Hock of the University of Southern California and W. Barnes Tatum from North Carolina's Greensboro College. Hock presented a paper in which he cited the noncanonical "gospels" of James and Thomas as authorities for his view. Tatum dismisses the infancy narrative found in Matthew, calling it contradictory to Luke's account.

"I have been content to read the infancy stories," Tatum wrote in a paper presented at the event, "in Luke as well as in Matthew, as theological confessions by the respective gospels [sic] writers without a personal concern for possible historical underpinnings." He went on to assert that the gospel accounts of Christ's birth "represent 'theological fiction.' "

The Jesus Seminar, meeting for five days in Santa Rosa, California, voted down Bible accounts of Jesus healing a withered hand and suggested Pharisees did not really encounter Christ and the disciples in a wheat field on the Sabbath, but rather voiced criticisms ...