Today is the day that all the bibliobloggers give their “I’m off to SBL” post. And I’m no exception. I will be presenting a paper during one of the Christian Apocrypha sessions. The paper is a synthesis of my reading and ruminating about modern Anti-Apocrypha polemic (see previous posts accessible through the side-bar on the left). Here is the abstract of the paper:

The popularity of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code has led to a surge of attacks on Christian Apocryphal literature by conservative NT scholars (e.g., Ben Witherington III, Craig Evans, Darrell L. Bock). The work of these scholars is transparently polemical—for example, Evans states that his book, Fabricating Jesus, was written “to defend the original witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus” (p. 17). And their methods are not new; indeed they use the same rhetorical strategies employed by such early heresiologists as Irenaeus, including the use of sarcasm and invective to describe their opponents, the intentional misrepresentation of the heretics’/scholars’ views and the content of the primary texts, the excerpting of material from the texts in order to expose their absurdities, and the demonization of their opponents by associating them with the powers of darkness. “Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium” illustrates the parallels between modern critics and the ancient heresy hunters but focuses particularly on how the two groups use and abuse the apocryphal texts. Perhaps we can learn from the contemporary debate something about the reception of the Christian Apocrypha in antiquity.

I decided to read the finished product in my ongoing Wednesday evening New Testament Apocrypha course. The students were required to complete a book review of Darrell Bock’s The Missing Gospels. The paper launched into a discussion of Bock’s book. From what I gathered from the discussion, the students on-the-whole were not favourable toward the book. Perhaps this is due to being bombarded by primarily liberal points-of-view on the texts over the past three months; perhaps they hope to do well on the review if they adopt what they expect me to say about it; perhaps they are all just really bright.

The principal objection was towards Bock’s bias. They see the book as aimed at a believing audience who want Bock to provide them comfort, to prove for them that the Jesus of the “alternative gospels” is not the true Jesus.  They identified certain rhetorical strategies used by Bock to show the superiority of the “traditional Jesus” (i.e., the Jesus of the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers), primarily because these texts are considered the earliest sources and also because Bock believes the traditional views of authorship of the texts are genuine. The students would have preferred it if Bock made this bias more transparent at the beginning of his book.

I have plenty of objections to the book, and to similar works by Witherington, Jenkins, Evans, etc., but these can be found in the earlier posts and the SBL paper. One thing I did mention in class is my frustration at how these authors and their opponents (the Christian Apocrypha scholars) avoid communicating with one another. I had hoped to have one of the apologetic authors respond to my paper at the SBL, but efforts to do so have failed. It might have made for a more animated discussion.

When I return from San Diego I will offer a post mortem of my session, as well as some comments on other CA-related papers.

The latest Review of BIblical Literature features a review of Craig Evans's apologetic work  Fabricating Jesus (previously discussed HERE) by Stephen Patterson. Patterson has pubished widely on the Gospel of Thomas; but, unlike my own review of the book, Patterson's review devotes little space to Evans's approach to the CA. It focuses instead on Evans's approach to the canonical gospels and to the scholars wth which Evans's takes issue. Here is an excerpt from the review:

After spending an unpleasant week with this book, it is all too tempting to let Evans’s own words come back to haunt him: “I am appalled at much of this work. Some of it, frankly, is embarrassing.” But this would not do. My real difference with Evans is that I do not share his evangelical stipulations about the text. This is a divide that we must increasingly deal with in biblical studies. Competently trained scholars now operate on both sides of this great divide. How we handle that difference honestly and respectfully is our unique challenge. On that score this book fails miserably and can best serve as a counterexample of how not to engage one’s colleagues in discussion and debate.

Several weeks ago I posted the first five of ten concerns I have about the treatment of Christian Apocrypha in recent apologetic books, books principally aimed at combating the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. Happily, that first post led to some discussion here and on April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels blog. Hopefully, this second post will elicit more discussion. Note that I have added a few citations from the apologetic writers as examples of the phenomena—these are not meant to be exhaustive.

6. All Christian Apocrypha scholars are created equal. The apologists’ main opponents are the so-called “new school” or Harvard school featuring the likes of Elaine Pagels, Helmut Koester, and Bart Ehrman (Bock, Missing Gospels, uses this term to great effect). The tendency, though, is to characterize them as a unit, as if all of them were in agreement on every CA text. Certainly their approach is similar—i.e., they are all sympathetic to the texts and their authors/communities—but not all of them agree on such issues as the dating and origins of the literature (e.g., Ehrman disagrees with other “liberal” scholars on the dating of the Gospel of Peter). In addition, there are numerous other scholars of this literature, rarely cited, who are not as radical as the “new school” in their dating of the texts. To characterize all CA scholarship by its most radical works misrepresents the field.

7. Neglect of the “orthodox apocrypha.” The apologists focus their energy primarily on the gospels that are in the public eye—such as, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Judas. Rarely are the “orthodox apocrypha”—i.e., non-Gnostic apocryphal texts such as the infancy gospels, the Pilate cycle, and Marian apocrypha—discussed, but when they are they are mischaracterized as Gnostic (as if all rejected literature must have been Gnostic; see Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 154). The problem with this is that all apocryphal literature thus appears to be written by Gnostics who, as noted previously, are trying to supplant canonical texts with their own bizarre takes on Jesus’ role and teachings. However, the orthodox apocrypha are so named because their views of Jesus, his family, and the apostles are not so different from the canonical texts and quite self-consciously attempt to supplement, not replace, the canonical texts. It is a shame to see this literature neglected, particularly since, unlike the Gnostic texts, they have enjoyed a long history of transmission and have influenced both eastern and western culture.

8. Demonizing Gnosticism scholars as modern Gnostics. The apologists sink low when they turn to insulting their opponents by calling them modern Gnostics or Neo-Gnostics (see Bock, Breaking the Da Vinci Code, p. 129; Witherington, What Have They Done, p. 47). Mind you, the CA scholars themselves may not consider this insulting, but the apologists’ audiences would see them as heretics, perhaps even as demonic (see particularly Witherington, Gospel Code, p. 74: “these scholars, though bright and sincere, are not merely wrong; they are misled. They are oblivious to the fact that they are being led down this path by the powers of darkness”). One would have to ask the individual scholars if they are truly Gnostics, but my suspicion is that they are merely sympathetic to some aspects of the Gnostic viewpoint, not believers. Is a person who studies a subject necessarily a believer in it? I study Christianity, does that make me a Christian? (Actually, I’m an atheist, an admission that my students and peers find more disturbing still).

9. Characterization of CA texts as containing “bizarre” embroidering (see Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 163-166; Jenkins, Hidden Gospels, p. 105). Certainly some parts of the CA are bizarre to modern readers. But the NT texts too are pretty bizarre. The canonical gospels feature a man who is born from a virgin, speaks to voices from heaven, walks on water, multiplies food, heals afflictions, and rises from the grave. How are these things any less “bizarre” than a talking cross (Gospel of Peter) or a cursing Jesus (Infancy Thomas; see the canonical Acts for plenty of examples of cursing holy men)? We all (scholars and non-scholars) know the canonical texts so well that often we give little thought to how strange these texts are. I like to begin my courses on the Bible by encouraging the students to see the biblical texts in all their “bizarre” glory.

10. Scholarly isolationism. My final pet peeve applies to both apologists and their opponents. Both sets of scholars seem unwilling to interact with each others’ work. The apologists tend to cite themselves and their peers for support against the claims of CA scholars, while the CA scholars simply ignore the presence of the apologists and other conservative scholarship. I’ve mentioned here before that both groups can learn from each other: the CA scholars can learn from the apologists to temper their enthusiasm for the literature and resist the urge to unjustifiably (note the emphasis) elevate it above canonical literature (e.g., by dating it too early, or by preferring it as a source for the historical Jesus), whereas the apologists can open themselves up to the possibility that the texts could preserve early traditions and that the authors of the literature and their communities are worth studying for their own sake as expressions of early Christian thought and expression. There is probably some common ground upon both groups could agree. Certainly early Christianity was varied and there was intra-Christian conflict with many of the groups expressing their views in writing. Where the groups divide is on the issue of whether there existed an early orthodoxy that both originated with Jesus and the disciples and that finds its expression in the NT. To me, and many other scholars, this viewpoint goes beyond the evidence. But so too does any declaration that the non-canonical texts somehow preserve the history and viewpoints of the early Jesus movement any better than the NT.

First, Timothy Paul Jones points out a typographical error. I wrote: “First, even if we grant that full-blown Gnostic Christianity is a late second century phenomenon (well, mid-first century really if we include Valentinus and Marcion)” but should have written “well, mid-second century…”). Oops.

Bryan L. asked for my opinion on why the non-canonical gospels fell out of use. Was there a concerted effort to suppress the texts? It would seem so from reading the canon lists and Athaniasius’ 39th Festal Letter. But such limitations on the canon can only be enforced in areas where the Western church had power and influence. As that power and influence grew, the Western canon became enforced. That said I agree that certain texts seem to have been more popular in certain areas and this popularity would have a natural effect on shaping the canon (though were they popular because the people liked them or because their preachers/bishops, etc. liked them and chose to read no other texts?). Gnostic texts, of course, had a limited audience (average readers/listeners would find them hard to understand and the texts’ views on asceticism unattractive).

Peter Head wrote: “For me most of these are only problematic when absolutised and generalised. Try using ’some’ for 1 and 4; and ‘many’ for 2 and 3. Then I’d (probably) have to agree with them (as you probably would too).” Peter is correct—I would agree with these arguments if the qualifiers were attached. But the problem with these arguments is precisely that they are absolutized and generalized, and are so because they rest on apologetically-motivated assumptions. That is what makes them faulty arguments.

Danny Zacharias has asked for citations for each of the faulty arguments. I will include complete citations when my work on this material is transformed into a formal paper. For now, I offer these select examples: 

1. All non-canonical texts are Gnostic. See the discussion of the Gospel of Peter by Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, p. 69-70 (he considers the lack of pain experienced by Jesus on the cross and the text’s anti-Jewishness as signs of Gnosticism) and the discussion of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 154 (“Although we are distinguishing the infancy gospels from the ‘Gnostic’ gospels, in many cases the former belong to the latter category”).

2. Canonical texts are early compositions and non-canonical texts are late. Craig Evans (Fabricating Jesus) dates the composition of the Gospel of Thomas to ca. 175 or 180 (rather close to the date assigned to the extant Greek papyri). He does so for several reasons (see pp. 67-68): because of the gospel’s apparent awareness of many of the NT writings, because it contains Gospel materials that scholars regard as late (i.e., M, L and John), because it reproduces Matthean and Lukan redaction, and because it shows familiarity with traditions distinctive to East Syrian Christianity, which did not emerge before the middle of the second century. All of these reasons are debatable but looking at the dating question purely by the material evidence, Evans’ position would be akin to dating Mark to ca. 150 because the earliest manuscript evidence is believed to be from 175 CE (P45). Peter Head commented that this manuscript should be dated to the mid third century. If so, this makes the physical evidence for Mark even bleaker (though Head states that we know Mark was in existence certainly by Irenaeus’ time, for the bishop mentions all four canonical gospels; mind you one could always make the argument that we don’t really know that Irenaeus is referring to canonical Mark—a similar argument is made by Evans about whether or not our manuscript evidence for the Gospel of Peter is truly the “Gospel of Peter” mentioned by Serapion [in office 199-211 CE])

3. The Non-canonical gospels are not “gospels.” See Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, ch. 4. The canonical gospels are “primarily narrative, with teaching interspersed within an overall storyline reaching a definite climax, while the latter (such as “Thomas”) consist simply of a collection of sayings, arranged as much for the purposes of meditation or memorization as for any thematic sequence or continuity…though the Gnostic documents do sometimes call themselves ‘gospels,’ they manifestly belong to a different genre” (p. 67).

4. The writers and readers of non-canonical texts were hostile to the canonical texts. See Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, p. 81 (and Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 152-153). Here he takes issue with Elaine Pagels’ view that ancient Christians could read the canonical and Gnostic gospels side-by-side, with the canonical for public worship and the Gnostic for advanced-level teaching. Wright admits that this is what Valentinians did but still criticizes Pagels for the view: “it could only be sustained by a systematic and sustained rereading, and in fact radical misreading, of the canonical gospels themselves” (p. 81). Whether the Valentinians and others were right or wise to do so is not important, only the fact that they did.

5. Extant versions of non-canonical texts are identical to their autographs. See, for example, the discussion of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas by Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, which is based on the Greek A recension of the text by Tischendorf, now shown to be a late, expanded version of the gospel. I find this approach to the texts particularly problematic in the scholarship on the Gospel of Thomas for it routinely neglects the Greek fragments of the text which, though incomplete, are better witnesses to the original text as they predate the Coptic by two centuries and are likely in the text’s original language.

1. All non-canonical texts are Gnostic. Since when was the Gospel of Peter a Gnostic text? What about the Infancy Gospel of Thomas? Such identifications belong in scholarship of the nineteenth-century (when we knew less about Gnosticism) not the twenty-first century. Either the modern apologists know nothing of recent scholarship on the texts (which is likely) or they intentionally call all non-canonical texts Gnostic in order to heap scorn upon them (which is also likely)—i.e., Gnosticism is bad, all non-canonical texts are Gnostic; therefore, all non-canonical texts are bad.

2. Canonical texts are early compositions and non-canonical texts are late. The late dating of non-canonical texts is due to two factors: because Gnosticism is a late second-century phenomenon, and because the physical evidence for Gnostic texts is no earlier than the mid to late second century. These arguments tend to swirl around the dating of the Gospel of Thomas, so I will respond specifically to arguments about that text. First, even if we grant that full-blown Gnostic Christianity is a late second century phenomenon (well, mid-second century really if we include Valentinus and Marcion), it is not entirely secure that Thomas and a few other “Gnostic” texts are truly Gnostic. Thomas, for one, seems to have been Gnosticized somewhat between the time of its origins (reflected better in the Greek fragments) and the version found at Nag Hammadi. If anything, Thomas is “proto-Gnostic” which could fit into the milieu of at least the pastoral epistles and the Johannine epistles, texts that criticize groups who have Gnostic features (liberal scholars would date these two sets of texts to the late first/early second century while conservatives would date them to the mid-first century which, by their own admission, would make “proto-Gnosticism” very early indeed). As for the second argument, the physical evidence for non-canonical texts is just as good as, if not better than, canonical texts—i.e., there is very little evidence (canonical or non-canonical) that dates before the mid-second century. The conservative writers would never say that Mark is late second-century based on the earliest manuscript (P45 dated ca. 175), so why do they do that for Thomas?

3. The Non-canonical gospels are not “gospels.” The argument goes that the NT gospels are biographies whereas the non-canonical gospels are, for the most part, sayings collections or dialogues (a few exceptions are sometimes noted—e.g., Gospel of Peter, Infancy Gospel of Thomas—but are not allowed to affect the argument); therefore, the non-canonical gospels are not truly “gospels.” Yet it is not clear that “gospel” was used in antiquity to designate a genre of literature; even today the term connotes more the message of a text than its form. Also, evidence indicates that the NT gospels and at least some of the early non-canonical texts did not originally bear titles (e.g., the Infancy Gospel of Thomas is more accurately called “The Childhood of Jesus”; the Infancy Gospel of James was probably originally “The Birth of Mary”). Even if the full range of the texts were originally termed “gospels,” to identify a genre of literature by selecting four similar texts from the group is like taking knock-knock jokes and declaring all other forms of jokes not jokes at all.

4. The writers and readers of non-canonical texts were hostile to the canonical texts. The conservative writers want to make Gnostics out to be villains opposing orthodoxy and thus the non-canonical texts are said to be written in order to replace or refute the established canonical texts. But the non-canonical writers often acknowledge their debt to earlier writers and expect their readers to be knowledgeable about these texts. The CA writers have a particular interpretation of the canonical texts which they employ but rarely do they seek to refute or replace them. The conservative writers seem to have trouble thinking that anyone could possibly read Gnostic ideas into or out of canonical texts, but that is precisely what they did—e.g., docetists saw their christology reflected in Mark and John, the Treatise on the Resurrection cites Paul’s letters to the Colossians and Ephesians, etc.

5. Extant versions of non-canonical texts are identical to their autographs. To be fair, many liberal scholars are guilty of this same error. They neglect to take into consideration that non-canonical texts change considerably over time, with stories embroidered, added, and removed depending on the copyist’s sensibilities. One must be very careful, therefore, to argue for a particular writer’s viewpoints by using a form of the text based on much later manuscripts.

(more to come…) 

Though the furor over The Da Vinci Code has died down, books refuting its claims about the Christian Apocrypha continue to be published. One of the most recent of these is Reinventing Jesus: How Contemporary Skeptics Miss the Real Jesus and Mislead Popular Culture (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Kregel Publications, 2006) by J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace. Like its ilk, Reinventing Jesus is apologetic—i.e., it is aimed specifically at defending Christianity from its critics—and therefore allows evidence to take a back seat to the promotion of orthodoxy. I’ve read enough of these books now that the arguments no longer surprise me. I am frustrated, however, by the authors’ lack of knowledge about the CA texts and the scholarship at which they take aim.

Komoszewski et al focus their apologetic against the usual suspects: the Jesus Seminar, The Da Vinci Code, and anti-historical Jesus works such as Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ. They see the works of these writers feeding a “radical skepticism” (p. 15) rampant in North America: “The media’s assault on the biblical Jesus, postmodernism’s laissez-faire attitude toward truth, and America’s collective ignorance of Scripture have joined to create a culture of cynicism. In short, society has been conditioned to doubt” (p. 16). Their book seeks to redress this by “build[ing] a positive argument for the historical validity of Christianity” (p. 17). They do so by asking (and answering) a number of questions: did the gospel writers get the story right? were the texts copied faithfully? were the right texts put in the Bible? what did early followers think of Jesus? (i.e., did they think he was divine?), and how do we know the Jesus story was not copied off other religions? As the writers confront these issues they take pains to provide readers with all of the background necessary for them to understand how scholars arrive at their positions, including brief overviews of the Synoptic Problem, text-criticism, etc.

Occasionally the authors do not present this information with requisite care. Regarding the Synoptic Problem, they describe the Griesbach Hypothesis as maintaining that Luke was independent of Matthew (in fact Griesbach supporters believe Luke obtained his double-tradition material from Matthew) and fail to mention the Oxford Hypothesis. Komoszewski et al support the Four/Two Source Hypothesis and place the composition of Mark in the 60s yet also follow James A. T. Robinson’s dating of Luke-Acts before the death of Paul (incidentally, Robinson dates Mark to the 40s) (p. 22-23). The following chapter draws on studies of oral cultures to state that the gospel writers were trained to memorize Jesus’ teachings; therefore, the evangelists transmitted the words and deeds of Jesus correctly. Yet, it is not clear how the authors can support such a theory and at the same time agree with a solution to the Synoptic Problem that claims the gospels have a literary relationship. And, in their discussion of apostolic attribution, they at once agree that the gospels were originally anonymous and that their current attributions are accurate (p. 138). The authors appear to be cherry-picking scholarly hypotheses, adopting any that fit their agenda without giving thought to how they work together to produce a comprehensive and cohesive theory of the composition of the gospels.

One of Komoszewski et al’s apologetic methods is to minimize or obfuscate evidence that runs contrary to an early and wide-spread orthodoxy. When discussing the process of canon formation they state that the church generally agreed at an early date on 22 books of the canon and debated the status of the remaining “fringe” texts up into the fourth century. If anything, they state, some churches argued for a smaller canon, not a larger one. But that is not entirely the case. In Eastern Syria, 3 Corinthians was considered canonical for some time, and even in the West several early writers appealed to Jewish-Christian gospels to support their arguments. No mention is made at all of the popularity of the Diatessaron in the East. Komoszewski et al’s intent here is to refute the claim that a host of non-canonical texts were considered for inclusion in the Bible, and certainly that does not appear to be the case. But it seems the relationship between canonical and noncanonical needs to be looked at afresh. For many Christians the texts and traditions from both categories contributed to their conception of Jesus; indeed, given that the majority of Christians were illiterate, their knowledge of Jesus was influenced by art and iconography as much as by texts, and visual representations of the life of Jesus were resplendent with imagery from noncanonical gospels—even within churches. So, whether or not the canon was officially closed in the fourth century is not as relevant an issue as modern apologists would like it to be.

The CA are addressed explicitly in two chapters entitled “What did the Ancient Church Think of Forgeries?” and “What did the Ancient Forgers think of Christ?” Here Komoszewski et al make a good point that the church was rather cautious about ascribing authorship to the texts they valued (e.g., neither Mark, nor Hebrews, nor Revelation are given explicit apostolic sanction) and they rejected texts they believed were late compositions and/or pseudepigraphical (e.g., the Shepherd of Hermas, Acts of Paul). But I, for one, am not prepared to give the church “the benefit of the doubt” (p. 139) when it comes to authorship. All of this evidence only reinforces my belief that canon selection rested first on a text’s content and secondarily on its date and authorship. Komoszewski et al also create here a false dichotomy: that canonical texts are necessarily genuine and non-canonical texts are necessarily “forgeries.” They do not bring Deutero-Pauline letters into the discussion, nor suspected OT pseudepigrapha like Daniel, nor the possibility that some CA were once anonymous (a possibility particularly for the Gospel of Thomas and certainly the case for the Infancy Gospel of Thomas) and some are not pseudepigraphical at all (e.g., the Apocryphal Acts and the Gospel of Judas are about their respective protagonists not written by them). Again Komoszewski et al are grossly oversimplifying a nuanced issue.

In the chapter “What did the Ancient Forgers think of Christ?” Komoszewski et al describe two groups of texts: infancy gospels and Gnostic gospels. They begin their discussion with a list of the gospel writers’ motivations: “‘to supplement [or]…to supplant the four Gospels received by the Great Church’” (quoting Metzger), for entertainment (adding the comment, “No harm was meant; no deep theological agendas were involved. Likewise, no one took these gospels seriously [or, at least, no one should have!]” p. 153), and to promote “a different Jesus” from the Jesus of the canonical gospels. I concede that the CA writers see themselves as supplementing prior texts—the four gospels and the letters of Paul seemed to have had a universal acceptance—but this same reverence for the earlier texts rules out the motive of “supplanting.” To my mind no non-canonical writer ever aimed to replace or refute a canonical writing, for though they certainly promoted a Jesus different from that of the orthodox writers, they believed he was in continuity with that of the canonical texts. So-called “heretical” and “orthodox” portrayals of Jesus are equally grounded in and dependent upon the early traditions, but neither has a greater claim to accuracy.

Like Komoszewski et al’s discussions of the Synoptic Problem and canon formation, the book’s treatment of select CA texts suffers from errors and oversimplifications. Their description of the infancy gospels is heavily dependant on Oscar Cullmann’s contribution to the 1991 Hennecke-Schneemelcher-Wilson collection; unfortunately, Cullmann’s treatment of the material is outdated and wholly inadequate. Thus Komosewski et al associate the infancy gospels with Gnosticism and the wisdom displayed by the child Jesus in these texts with docetism (p. 154). They state also that the church fathers “condemned them as unworthy descriptions of the real Jesus. They were seen to be hokey and palpably untrue” (p. 157). The problem with this and other statements about the infancy gospels is that they are anachronistic—Jesus’ behaviour in the texts is consistent with other wonder workers from antiquity who curse as well as bless, the maturity he displays reflects the ideal of the puer senex not a docetic Christ, and the earliest commentators on these texts reject them because they contradict John 2:1-11 (which states that the wedding at Cana was Jesus’ first miracle) not because they find the stories “hokey.” Evaluating these texts based on twenty-first rather than first century sensibilities leads the writers to disregard possible theological and Christological motives in their composition and to characterize the prime purpose of the infancy gospels only as “sensationalism and entertainment” (p. 157).

As for Gnostic gospels, Komosewski et al counter well the evidence brought forward by Brown and others for an intimacy between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. But the remainder of their discussion of these texts is intended to denigrate the Gnostics and their literature. They call the Gnostics “a knockoff pseudo-Christian group” (p. 158) who placed apostolic attributions on their texts to “fast track” their acceptance (p. 161). Their texts are criticized for containing bizarre embellishments and for not having “the restraint, the ring of truth, the lack of forced apologetic that the canonical gospels portrayed” (p. 161). The authors seek to show precisely how bizarre the texts can be by excerpting material from the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Peter, the Acts of Paul, and the Acts of John. They conclude: “These fanciful descriptions have nothing to do with biblical Christianity or historical Christianity. They are stories devised to, at best, be bubblegum for the soul and, at worst, as propagandist devices to persuade the church to abandon its orthodox roots. Obviously, fringe Christian groups had their own agenda, which has nothing to do with the biblical narratives” (p. 164).

What is most objectionable about such comments is that they fail to take into account that the noncanonical texts are not all that different from their canonical counterparts. The canonical gospels also contain “bizarre embellishments” of Jesus’ life (is a Jesus who walks on water that much more believable than the Gospel of Peter’s talking cross?) as does the book of Acts (its reports of the fantastic exploits of the apostles are little different from the stories in the Apocryphal Acts). Both canonical and noncanonical texts have agendas. And Paul’s letters, more than any other early Christian literature, seek to persuade their readers to remain loyal to their author’s own particular understanding of “the gospel.”

I understand that Reinventing Jesus is apologetic and that it is intended to reach believers who are struggling with their faith due to what they read in popular books and the media. But is it too much to ask for writers like Komoszewski and friends to research the CA in more depth before they criticize it? Indeed why be so negative about it at all? One can easily combat the claims of Dan Brown and his ilk without denigrating the CA, its authors, and its audiences. Mind you, CA scholars also tend to ignore their critics. This is unfortunate as CA specialists and apologetic writers have much to learn from each other but that will not happen if the two groups refuse to read each others’ works. 

One of my on-going research projects involves tracing how the CA are received by scholars and the general public. I have posted here before on some anti-CA apologetic books (including Craig Evans’ Fabricating Jesus, discussed HERE). I have just completed reading Ben Witherington III’s What Have They Done With Jesus: Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History—Why We Can Trust the Bible (San Francisco: Harper, 2006) and thought I’d post some initial observations about it here.

First, the book’s title is somewhat misleading. It has less to do with explicitly countering other scholars’ claims as it is about a summary of Witherington’s past work on the Historical Jesus. Though several recent books by liberal scholars (Pagels, Ehrman, et al) are discussed early in the book and James Tabor’s The Jesus Dynasty is singled out for criticism in the epilogue, on-the-whole the book interacts little with the “strange theories and bad history” mentioned in its title.

The book is structured similarly (and perhaps not accidentally) to Bart Ehrman’s recent Peter, Paul and Mary Magdalene, offering chapters on various figures in Jesus’ life. Witherington believes this the best method to learn about Jesus—by examining the “impact crater” he left behind. Of course this method necessitates determining whether certain sources were or were not written by their putative authors. And, as can be expected, Witherington believes virtually the entire corpus of the NT is not pseudonymous. As a result, these texts are most reliable for recovering the historical Jesus and early Christianity. This makes Witherington’s task rather simple: the NT reports the facts and anything that disagrees with the NT texts must be erroneous, or worse, heretical.

Witherington’s introduction features a rather negative portrayal of scholars who use the CA to reconstruct the life of Jesus. He characterizes such scholarship as a reaction to fundamentalism, presenting “Christianity in a way that is as distant as possible from what they see fundamentalists teaching; they offer ideas and theories that they find more personally congenial” (p. 4). He goes on to suggest this approach can be attributed also to petty jealousy—liberal scholars feel the fundamentalist scholarship gets too much attention—or insecurity: “Some scholars think they must prove (to themselves and/or others) that they are good critical scholars by showing how much of the Jesus tradition or the New Testament in general they can discount, explain away, or discredit” (p. 5). He does make a valid point that “these same scholars often fail to apply the same critical rigor and skepticism to their own pet extracanonical texts or pet theories” (p. 5) but conservative scholars like Witherington need to do the same—i.e., treat canonical and noncanonical texts equally as useful tools for reconstructing early Christian history. Certainly some early Christian texts will be more useful than others for particular tasks (e.g., first-century gospels and the letters of Paul are better suited for earliest Christianity) but the noncanonical texts should not be immediately dismissed simply because they were not selected for inclusion in the NT.

Reconstructing early Christian history using only the NT will lead to an impression that the church was a harmonious community with all leaders and all communities in complete agreement over the message and mission of Jesus. The hints of discord observable in Acts and Paul’s letters are problematic, but conservative scholars (and Witherington is no exception) tend to minimize these. Liberal scholars, on the other hand, make much of these hints and conclude that early Christianity came in a variety of forms from a very early date. Witherington has little patience for such theories of “Lost Christianities.” He states: “We have no good evidence that the earliest Christians were in pitched battles with rival forms of Christianity or that there were parallel streams of early Christianity all flowing out of the Christ event, streams that only occasionally crossed each other’s paths” (p. 4). As for second-century movements, he adds: “As it turns out, the lost Christianities so often touted today were not so much lost as abandoned for good reasons. They were not suppressed because they offered an alternative, earlier, and truer version of Christian origins; they were tried and found wanting because they betrayed the essentially Jewish monotheistic, eschatological character of Jesus and his movement” (p. 48).

Witherington discounts the suggestion that second-century movements had their roots in the first century. The disagreements between Paul and Peter, or Paul and the Judaizers, are considered minor intra-Christian debate that still remains within the parameters of early Christian orthodoxy and orthopraxy (I doubt Paul would agree). However, other opponents of the church—such as the false teachers in the letters of John—are clearly to be considered heretics. The church, Witherington states, had a stable enough sense of orthodoxy that it could characterize certain teachings as aberrant. Yet, Witherington still maintains that, “What we have no hint of in the New Testament is polemics against later aberrations like Gnosticism or Marcionism; nor does any New Testament document—or, for that matter, any other first-century Christian document, such as the Didache or 1 Clement—suggest that there was a Gnostic or Marcionite stream of Christian tradition already extant in the first century….False teachers do not a stream of Christianity make” (p. 224). This statement illustrates the divide that exists between liberal and conservative scholars: Witherington calls Gnosticism and Marcionism “aberrations” and accepts John’s descriptions of his opponents as “false teachers” but scholars like Ehrman and Pagels would consider all forms of early Christianity (and modern Christianity too, I suspect) as equally valid religious expressions and would be cautious about considering a particular teaching as “false” simply because its opponents characterize it so.

Early in his work Witherington states that there is value in noncanonical texts for understanding Christian history (p. 8 and 34). But by the close of the book it is clear that he feels these texts, and the scholarship that draws upon them, is dangerous: “[heretical movements] should not be seen as ‘lost Christianities’ that we should rediscover, if by rediscover one means endorse or embrace as a legitimate form of early Christianity. We certainly need to know about them, however, in order to know what early Christianity was not like. These aberrations should be seen exactly the way the church fathers and others of the second through fourth centuries saw them—as ‘heresies,’ the promulgation of ‘other’ ideas not in continuity with the eyewitness and apostolic faith given in the first century” (p. 273).

Witherington’s invoking of the views of the church fathers is no surprise for he often employs the same techniques as Irenaeus et al to attack the texts and their supporters. First, he attempts to show that the texts are of dubious pedigree (they are late and pseudonymous; indeed the Gospel of Judas’ claim of apostolic authorship is a practice that “does not comport with the high standards of truth and honesty that Jesus and his first followers upheld” [p.9]; but the Gospel of Judas is about Judas, it does not claim to be written by him). Second, Witherington, like the heresiologists, excerpts material from the texts so that they can incriminate themselves as peculiar in comparison to the NT texts. He states, “It is difficult to talk about any of these documents without giving a taste of them so that readers can see how different in character they are from the canonical gospels” (p. 39) and goes on to excerpt a significant amount of material from the Gospel of Philip. Third, the texts are often mischaracterized, even ridiculed: Gos. Thom. 18 (“Have you found the beginning, then, that you are looking for the end?”) is “just being obscure for obscurity’s sake!” (p. 30), Gos. Thom. 30 (“Where there are three deities, they are divine. Where there are two or one, I am with that one”) is considered pantheistic, and Gos. Thom. 114 (“For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven”) misogynist. In addition, Witherington mentions a Nag Hammadi text “that calls itself a Valentinian exposition” (p. 37) but this name was given to this anonymous text by its editors, not its author; is Witherington being careless here or is he trying to make this text appear more “aberrant” by making its connection with Valentinianism more explicit? And fourth, Witherington attacks the scholars themselves by suggesting that they too are (or think they are) Gnostic heretics: “in light of the evidence of the primary sources themselves, it is puzzling why scholars such as Elaine Pagels, Karen King, Stephen Patterson, Marvin Meyer, and James Robinson would find this material so exciting. None of them are actually ascetics like the original Gnostics, nor have they withdrawn from the world and anathematized the goodness of things material. Frankly, the Old Gnostics would have repudiated the new ones” (p. 47). Apparently, Witherington thinks one must support a viewpoint in order to study it.

The aim of this post and the larger study of the anti-CA apologetics is not attack to Witherington and his ilk but to bring attention to their technique. What aspects of the texts and the scholarship do they find objectionable? Are they motivated purely by the desire to present history accurately? or are they concerned more about defending Christianity from what they perceive as a demonic attack on its integrity? Are they honest in their assessments of the material? or are they trying to sway the opinion of their readers by intentional deception? In the end I would hope that readers would place more stock in scholarship that holds itself to a high standard of intellectual honesty rather than apologetics that sacrifices honesty in its rush to rescue Christianity from its critics.

The Times On-line reports that the scene in which Veronica wipes the face of Jesus has been removed from the Via Dolorosa. The move is a response to the popularity of apocryphal gospels (see a previous post on the Vatican and the CA here). Here is an excerpt:

The Pope will risk upsetting many of the Roman Catholic faithful tonight after recasting a central ritual of the Easter ceremonies.

Benedict XVI has revised radically the traditional Good Friday Stations of the Cross procession that marks Christ’s progress from prison to the Crucifixion. A reference to St Veronica, who wiped Christ’s face with a veil, has been dropped and Judas and Pontius Pilate have been introduced.

The new itinerary for the route, also known as the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Sorrows, has been drawn up to give more weight to authentic Gospels, Vatican officials said.

Veronica was an apocryphal figure and the Vatican is conducting a campaign against the trend in popular literature, such as The Da Vinci Code, and among some theologians, to bring apocryphal writings into the mainstream. 

What’s next? Will Mary’s parents Anna and Joachim (first named in the Infancy Gospel of James) be written out of Catholic dogma? What about traditions of Jesus’ descent into Hell from the Gospel of Nicodemus? And the lives of the Saints which are principally drawn from the Apocryphal Acts? Perhaps the Vatican should stop before they realize how many of their cherished traditions are based on apocryphal literature.

Bart Ehrman and Darrell L. Bock (author of The Missing Gospels) are interviewed on The Things That Matter Most (based in Dallas) about the Gospel of Judas. For a recent on-line review of Bock’s book see Mike Aquilina’s The Way of the Fathers Blog.