Top Ten Faulty Arguments in anti-Apocrypha Apologetics (Part 1)

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…)