Something would be wrong if we came away thinking Jesus was just a carpenter who died. The conference drew its share of critics as well. They said the new scholarship is a misguided attempt to turn Jesus into a social reformer and pacifist in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. or Mahatma Gandhi. Clergy too, said they were skeptical. But I do have a problem with some of the conclusions the Jesus Seminar draws from it.
More conservative scholars have problems with the method too.
I think that just because they were written by believers doesn't mean they're inaccurate. They had a certain responsibility to be faithful to the facts. The search for the historical Jesus is as old as Jesus himself. In 325, church fathers at the council of Nicea thought they had settled the issue in declaring that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. But discussion about the accuracy of the Christian Bible and its portrayal of Jesus have never been put to rest.