Category: Anti-CA Apologetic

Rob Bowman has posted two new responses to my Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium article from the latest issue of SBL Forum. The first addresses my point that the modern apologists tend to disparage the apocryphal texts as bizarre by seizing upon one or two aspects of the texts despite the fact that much of the texts are otherwise benign (thinking specifically here of Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Peter). I stated in the article: “Such focus on the ‘bizarre’ elements of the texts misrepresents their contents. There is plenty of material in the canonical texts that is bizarre or objectionable but it would be unfair to characterize Acts simply on the basis of the cursing stories, or Luke on Jesus’ disappearing act (4:30) or the sweating of blood (22:43-44), or John on its anti-Semitism.” Rob’s second post deals specifically with Anti-Semitism in John.

Rob’s posts argue that the examples I cite of “bizarre elements” in the canonical texts are not so bizarre and the charge of Anti-Semitism in John is unsubstantiated. He concedes, however, that many readers and commentators have struggled with these issues; and I think that is sufficient for my argument. These are troubling aspects of the texts, whether or not they can be tamed by exegetical athletics. Similarly, some of the “bizarre elements” in Gos. Thom. and Gos. Pet. can also be tamed or explained if one takes the time to do so. It is unfair, I think, to label Gos. Thom.…

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, …

The paper I presented at 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, "Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium", appears in an edited, popularized form in the current volume of the SBL Forum. It can be accessed HERE.

I have been rereading Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace’s Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) for a paper I am writing. I was struck by one statement in particular:

“Certain narrow perspectives reign on many campuses almost without any expression of alternate viewpoints. What makes this a scandal is that educational universities, especially state universities, are supposed to be places where intellectual perspectives held by the full array of the populace represented by the schools are weighed. These public schools should not be think tanks of a singular point of view. The give-and-take of diverse viewpoints is what makes the educational experience. Yet in many universities, when it comes to religion, representation by believers within the various religious perspectives is lacking, as evidenced by the numerous students who say their faith has come under attack in courses on religion” (p. 21).

The statement shows a surprisingly misguided view of the goals and methodology of Religious Studies in the Academy. In our courses we do not seek to provide instruction, or even a forum, for all viewpoints on religion (though here by “religion,” I think the authors mean Christianity). What we do seek to do is examine religious texts and related historical events with the same scientific methodology as other university/college disciplines (e.g., literary criticism, social-scientific criticism, etc.). Religious or faith-based perspectives have no role to play in the Academy, i.e., unless it is to study these perspectives in others. …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …