More Anti-Apocrypha Apologetic: Ben Witherington’s “What Have They Done With Jesus?”

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.