Apocryphicity

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 …