More Anti-CA Apologetic: Reinventing Jesus
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 …
In Fall 2008 moviegoers will be able to see a film adaptation of Anne Rice’s Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt (read the press release