A Response to “Heresy Hunting”

My recent article in SBL Forum, “Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium,” has elicited some responses in the blogging community—some positive, some negative. Rob Bowman of Religious Researcher has offered the first part of a lengthy response (HERE). I appreciate the time and effort he has put into the response—indeed, the real goal of the article was to get so-called liberals and conservatives talking about the issue. I’d like now to offer my own response to Rob’s comments.

1. Rob calls his response “Defending Heresy” and accuses me of being an apologist for the Christian Apocrypha (CA). A similar charge is made by Danny Zacharias at Deinde; April DeConick, on the other hand, has come to my defense, stating, “Objectivity is not neutrality. Tony's piece in my opinion is objective. He writes as a historian who points out the Christian apologetic agenda of some popular writers who are misrepresenting other scholars' work as well as the ancient documents they are writing about. This is not neutral. Who says that neutrality is what we are after?” I am not defending heresy. If anything I am defending CA scholarship, but only because it is misrepresented, not because it is superior in any way.

2. Rob accuses me of “rhetorical gamesmanship” in the terms I use for the various writers I discuss. He takes issue with me calling them “apologists,” which he says is a “term of disapprobation.” That is not how I intended the term, however, and I’m not sure the writers would see it as offensive; indeed, one of the reviewers quoted in the opening pages of Craig Evans’ Fabricating Jesus calls it “contemporary Gospel apologetics at its very best” (Gerald O’Collins). While I’m no fan of apologetics, my use of the term “apologists” was meant to be value neutral. Are the CA scholars equally apologists? I’m not so sure. It depends on the quality of their scholarship—are they letting their assumptions guide how they evaluate the literature? For example, are they advocating, as is often charged, replacing the canonical gospels with the non-canonical? This is absurd. All that CA scholars like myself (though there may be some who are a bit radical) ask for is a neutral discussion of the texts—that is, to examine them as artifacts of early Christian thought without assessing them as aberrant, as “forgeries,” or “false.” I will concede that Rob is right in noting that my terminology is somewhat inconsistent, even incorrect in the case of calling Baigent et al “scholars” (a little bit of a slip there).

3. Rob takes issue with some of my generalizations about the marketing of the apologists’ works. For example, he points out that Witherington’s What have They Done with Jesus? does not fit in with the other books because it was published by Harper, not a conservative press. He is right, though my argument was phrased more cautiously: “many [emphasis added] of the books are published by conservative presses.” Witherington’s book is an exception, and I’m not sure what Harper was thinking. Jenkins’ Hidden Gospels is another (by OUP). He also states, “But it may be pointed out that books by conservative scholars sometimes enjoy a wider breadth of endorsement than secular works. Bock’s book The Missing Gospels, for example, was endorsed by Martin Hengel (University of Tübingen) and Larry Hurtado (University of Edinburgh) as well as various conservative scholars.” But Hengel is hardly a “liberal,” and I’m not sure where to situate Hurtado. Rob is right that the two sides, liberal and conservative, are firmly entrenched in their own scholarly worlds—i.e., they tend to cite only scholarship produced by their ideological peers. But my final paragraph calls for an end to such entrenchment.

4. Rob takes issue with me drawing upon brief comments on specific texts out of context of a writer’s larger argument—e.g., I criticize Komoszewski’s and Wright’s assessments of the Gospel of Peter even though, as Rob says, the writers’ aims were not to offer thorough reviews of the text. He is correct, but I think it is one thing to note the existence of an apocryphal text which has particular features (e.g., that it presents Jesus as less, not more, human) and another to describe its unique features as “bizarre embellishment” (Komoszewski p. 163) or “strange, somewhat surreal” (Wright, p. 69) (and worse things are said of other texts, particularly the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). That seems to be the crucial difference between liberal “scholarship” and conservative “apologetics”—liberals tend to view the texts with neutrality, without needless value judgements or disparaging comments.

5. Rob also says I misrepresent Witherington’s views on the Gospel of Thomas. But again, my aim was not to agree or disagree with his assessment of the value of this text as a tool for establishing the teachings of the Historical Jesus, but how he unnecessarily disparages the text. One can discuss the historical credibility of the Jesus in the text without labeling some of its sayings as “pantheistic,” “misogynist,” and “obscure for obscurity’s sake!’” Worse still, these assessments are incredibly shortsighted and deserve deeper analysis (if Witherington is not willing to do so, then he should not simply offhandedly dismiss them with comments that will incite his readers to view the text negatively).  I haven’t “missed” Witherington’s point, it’s just not relevant to what I aim to prove.

6. The same charge is made of my use of Jenkins. Rob states, “If Burke wishes to disagree with Jenkins, let him do so, but his failure to engage Jenkins’s argument when it is so directly relevant to Burke’s claim and when it appears in the very pages that Burke cites from Jenkins’s book is inexcusable.” Jenkins’ point in this section of his book is that the heresiologists were essentially correct in their assessment of Gnostic literature. The larger version of my article does mention some of the comments the modern apologists offer about the ancient heresy hunters, but most of the time they agree that the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library has shown how wrong Irenaeus and his ilk often were. I also mention how the modern writers seem unaware they are guilty of the same offense. Regardless, I do not agree that it was necessary to engage Jenkins on this point.

7. Rob criticizes me for mischaracterizing the works of Bock and Evans. He says they provide thorough overviews and discussions of at least some of the texts. He is right that these two works have particular depth but that does not excuse their intentions, which are to discourage their readers from appealing to the texts for studying Jesus. Even Evans, who sees some historical value to a few of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas, ignores a vast amount of scholarship on the text and focuses only on the authors that enable him to date the text late and conclude that it is dependent on the NT gospels. I’m not sure that we can call such a discussion, in Rob’s words, “very nuanced.” And Bock presents excerpts from the texts only to show their differences from the NT texts; can we call this “even-handed”?