By Craig A. Evans, Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College in Novia Scotia, 2006
Val J. Peter
Introduction
We live in a post modern world and one of its characteristics is a distaste and distrust of what has been handed down to us from times past. This includes the study of Christian origins. Some today claim that the Gospels are “unreliable, full of myth and legend, and so biased that knowledge of what Jesus really said and did cannot be recovered.” Evans shows this view to be incorrect, off the mark, “excessive and unwarranted.” (p. 234)
There are two groups of these folks that our author wants us to look at and holds conversation with.
A. First are some post-modern scholars who would like us to believe that:
1. Jesus was illiterate;
2. Jesus had no interest in scripture;
3. Jesus had no interest in eschatology (eschatology means: at last God’s rule is making itself felt on earth as the prophets had promised);
4. Jesus certainly did not think of Himself as Israel’s messiah or in any way divine.
These scholars get headlines in the daily press. Regular Christians who read these stories don’t have a background in ancient languages such as Coptic, Syriac, Aramaic or even Greek. They are sometimes easily led to believe these dubious claims. Our author, Evans, says that many of these scholars don’t know all those languages either, and in this book, shows that these four claims about Jesus to be very unlikely indeed, not worthy of credence. A mature judgment of such an accomplished scholar as Evans cannot be ignored. Most of these claims about Jesus are based on the following five extracanonical Gospels, which are said to support portraits of Jesus mentioned above and quite different from what we find in the four Gospels of the New Testament. Actually, there are thirty or so documents identified as Gospels or Gospel like writings. These five extracanonical Gospels are:
1. The Gospel of Thomas.
2. The Gospel of Peter.
3. Egerton Papyrus 2 (or the Egerton Gospel).
4. The Gospel of Mary.
5. The Secret Gospel of Mark. The most recent is the Gospel of Judas.
• The Gospel of Thomas, in comparison with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, is late, not early. It is secondary, not authentic. Contrary to what a few scholars say, the Gospel of Thomas originated in Syria in probably not earlier than the end of the second century. More than 100 years later than Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is an esoteric writing, purporting to record the secret (or “hidden”) teachings of Jesus, teachings reserved for those qualified to hear these teachings. In the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus encourages His disciples to find “the interpretation of these words.” If they find it, they will “not taste death.” The Gospel of Thomas places emphasis on knowing and knowledge whereas Matthew, Mark, Luke and John place emphasis on faith. The word for knowledge is gnosis. Christian writers of the second, third and fourth century called those who claimed to possess this secret or hidden knowledge Gnostics. Gnosticism was not a neutral variety of general Christian belief, but essentially a different and opposing religion that simply borrowed terminology from the New Testament Gospels and changed its meaning. Evans conclusion: “The Gospel of Thomas does not offer students of the Gospels early independent material that can be used for critical research into the life and teaching of Jesus. Reliance on this writing can only lead to a distorted portrait of the historical Jesus. John Dominic Crossan’s book entitled The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant published in 1991 gives a distorted picture.
• The Gospel of Peter, which describes a talking cross, is late and incredible. In fact, the fragmented document that we have may not be the Gospel of Peter at all. The document that we have may date to the fourth and fifth century, 300 or 400 years after Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is not advisable to use it for Jesus research.
• The Egerton Gospel. Evans shows that the available evidence at this time favors the likelihood that the Egerton Gospel represents a second century combination of elements from Matthew, Mark, Luke and John rather than primitive first century material on which Matthew, Mark, Luke and John depended.
• The Gospel of Mary. “This writing, however it is to be understood, reflects a setting no earlier than the middle of the second century. We find in it nothing that with any confidence can be traced to the first century or traced back to the life and ministry of the historical Jesus and the historical Mary Magdalene.” (p. 94) Dan Brown’s popular novel The DaVinci Code relies on this gospel of Mary. It is fiction.
• The Secret Gospel of Mark is a modern forgery done in 1958 by the scholar Morton Smith at the Mar Saba Monastery in the Judean wilderness. It is a forgery, a modern hoax. An analysis of the handwriting betrays the telltale signs of fogery.
Professor Evans conclusion: Apart from the all-too-human desire to challenge authority, it is hard to explain why scholars give such credence to these documents that reflect settings that are entirely foreign to pre-A.D. 70 Jewish Palestine and at the same time reflect traditions and tendencies found in documents known to have emerged in later times and in places outside of Palestine.
B. Then there are the scholars in the 20th century who have said Jesus was:
1. A Pharisee.
2. An Essene.
3. A prophet.
4. A great moral teacher.
5. A philosopher.
6. A charismatic holy man.
7. A magician.
8. A cynic (the modern equivalent of a hippie).
For example, Crossan says that Jesus was a “peasant Jewish Cynic” and that Jesus and His followers were “hippies in a world of Augustan yuppies.” This is misguided and misleading. There is no archaeological or literary evidence of Cynic presence in Galilee in the early part of the first century when Jesus lived…no evidence whatsoever, so scholars exaggerate the similarities and ignore the profound differences.
The evidence is compelling that the New Testament Gospels:
• Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are our best sources for understanding the historical Jesus.
• The New Testament Gospels are based on based on eye witness testimony and truthfully and accurately relate to teaching life, death and resurrection of Jesus.
There was evidence early on that the works of Jesus were considered on a par with scripture. In this Jewish context, this is quite remarkable. As a rabbi, His sayings were cherished. In ancient times, oral tradition (the ability to remember and recite accurately) was much more important early on than it ever would be in our age where today written documents are on computers, in libraries and easily accessible.
Given such a high regard for Jesus’ words it is not likely that the early Christians freely invented sayings and attributed them to Jesus. Let’s take an example. There were questions and issues that the early Church had to face (after Jesus was gone) and the Church didn’t make up sayings of Jesus to answer them. These were disagreements over the question of circumcision (Should Gentiles be circumcised?), eating meat sacrificed to idols (Was that ok?), spiritual gifts (Was the ability to speak in tongues better than charity?), Jewish gentile relations and the qualifications for Church office, but not one saying of Jesus speaks to any of these questions. This shows that gospel writers were not in the habit of making things up and putting them in the mouth of Jesus. Thus there is every reason to conclude that the Gospels have fairly and accurately reported the essential elements of Jesus’ teaching, life, death and resurrection. The true story of the historical Jesus is exciting and inspiring. The true story is the old story in Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. It is far more compelling than “the newer, radical, minimalist, revisionist, obscurantist and faddish versions of the Jesus story that have been put forward in recent years.” (p. 235) Archaeological discoveries, by and large, have tended to confirm the reliability of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John and disprove novel theories.
Some of the founders of these new theories use the example of a modern game of telephone where you tell four or five people and the story gets all distorted. That is true today, but other researchers in the history of Jewish teaching and learning have come to an opposite conclusion and have shown how early Rabbinic teachers expected their students to memorize and pass on faithfully what was taught. What was taught could be adapted and expanded, but not distorted. Thus, there was significant continuity between the original oral teaching of Jesus and the later written gospels. That is different from our day.
C. A fresh look at healings and miracles.
Some of these modern scholars have neglected Jesus’ works of power, His healings and His miracles. They want us to think of them as nonsense and non-existent.
What does our author, Evans, have to say about this: “How can we really hope to understand who Jesus was and what his ministry was all about if one of the most distinguishing features about Him – His miracles – are not taken into account?”
Today, scholars are more open to talking about the miracles of Jesus because they rightly recognize that the task of the historian is to describe what people reported and recorded. It isn’t the historian’s task to engage in science and metaphysics. In other words, it is enough that historians acknowledge that Jesus’ contemporaries observed what they believed were miracles; historians should not try to explain exactly what Jesus did or how he did it. This shift in thinking in recent years is welcome. (p. 139)
Jesus was not just a great teacher. People followed Him because of His reputation as a powerful healer.
Everyone agrees that the essence of Jesus’ proclamation was the Kingdom of God…the rule of God. In the thinking of Jesus, the onset of the kingdom of God means the collapse of the kingdom of Satan. The collapse of the kingdom or rule of Satan is seen in the exorcisms and healings. The exorcisms or healings cannot be ignored or discounted. They are important if we are to understand fully the significance and importance of Jesus’ bold proclamation that the rule of God has indeed arrived and that it is time to repent and embrace it. (p. 141)
Let us look at Exodus 8: 18-19: “The magicians tried by their secret arts to bring forth gnats, but they could not. So there were gnats on man and beast. And the magicians said to Pharaoh, “This is the finger of God.” Moses and Aaron were not magicians, pulling off clever tricks. They possessed no power, for no human power, no matter how well trained in the magical arts (and Egypt was the capital of magic), could do what Moses and Aaron were able to do. The magicians rightly concluded that what was at work in Moses and Aaron, the two Hebrew brothers, was “the finger of God.” This is the idea in Jesus’ saying that if he cast out demons it is “by the finger of God,” the same power that had worked long ago through Moses and Aaron. This is an astonishing claim. He claimed the greatest power God had ever worked through a human being was at work through him.
D. Here are some ancient non-Christian views of the Christian movement:
• Christians were regarded as lawless because they either did not obey the law of Moses or did not worship Cesar or the Gods of Rome.
• They were even accused of cannibalism, which was probably a misunderstanding of the Eucharist or the Lord’s Supper.
• Tacitus (writing in the early second century A.D.) described Jesus as the founder of a “pernicious superstition,” an evil that originated in Judea and eventually took hold in Rome itself, “where all things horrible and shameful collect and are practiced.”
• His contemporary Suetonius (early second century) viewed Jesus as an instigator of unrest, which may have been related in some way to the decision made by Emperor Claudius in the middle of the first century to expel Jews from Rome.
• Pliny the Younger, Governor of Bithynia (early second century) wrote to Emperor Trajan stating that Christians recited “a hymn antiphonally to Christus as to a god.” He goes on to say that they “bound themselves with an oath not to commit any crime, but to abstain from theft, robbery, adultery, breach of faith and embezzlement of property entrusted to them.” His description suggests that the Christians he interrogated were slaves.
• Jewish rabbis from about the same time viewed Jesus as a false prophet who practiced magic and led Israel astray.
• Josephus who was not a rabbi, but (lived in the first century) described Jesus as a “doer of amazing deeds, a teacher of persons who receive truth with pleasure.”
• The Gnostics (that is, “Knowers”), who absorbed some trappings of Christian teaching, viewed Jesus primarily as a revealer—not as the Messiah.
E. Why is it that some studies of the Gospels seem to give us a new portrait of Jesus every spring, just in time for Easter.
The more unusual the portrait of Jesus, the more it departs from the traditional view of Jesus, the more attention it gets in the media today. Why are scholars so prone to make up or fabricate a new Jesus? What methods and assumptions predispose scholars to distort the record? The answer is pretty straight forward:
• We no longer live in modern times. We live in post modern times.
• One of the characteristics of modern times was that reason should prevail. We should use it to settle arguments. Not so anymore. One of the characteristics of post modern times is that not reason but power should prevail to settle arguments. Whoever has the greatest power through the media can settle arguments and convince people through fancy wizardry no matter how far fetched and fake.
• Another characteristic of post modern times is called the hermeneutic of suspicion. (Don’t trust authority.) This simply means that we should suspect that any text, including Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are not what really happened, but what really happened is hidden cleverly from our eyes and we need to find out what the hidden stuff is and expose it.
Let us take some examples. Lately it has become fashionable to speak of multiple “Christianities” and lots of lost Gospels. Some authors want us not to know what really happened. Bart Ehrman’s Lost Christianities (2003) and Misquoting Jesus will enlighten us. Another example is one of the characters in Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code declares there are some 80 Gospels circulating in the first century…simply preposterous…a lie. The whole confusion is made worse when scholars attempt to smuggle second century writings into first century supposedly proving that Christianity was indeed quite diverse from the beginning (it really wasn’t) and that all these Christianities are more or less equal.
What is the response of Evans? At the beginning, there was only one Christianity, one core of beliefs that Jesus (Israel’s Messiah and God’s Son) had died on the cross for the sins of humanity and that on the third day, He had been raised as the world’s Savior.
There were, however, disagreements, not ever about core beliefs, but over questions pertaining to the validity and application of the Law of Moses, either with regard to Jews or to Gentiles. It was a thorny issue never completely settled in the early Church and it led to a decline in membership in the Church from Jewish Christians and a lasting division.
Remember that during Jesus’ ministry, Pharisees were critical of Him because Jesus did not seem to take the Jewish laws of purity and Sabbath so seriously. In fact, He often ate with sinners. As Israel’s Messiah, so went the reasoning of the Pharisee, shouldn’t Jesus be more careful to observe faithfully the law of Moses, a law for which many devout Jews such as the Maccabees gave their lives. Jesus replied that what defines a person is what comes out of his heart, but not what goes into his stomach. He said as for picking grain and eating it on the Sabbath, didn’t David and his men eat the consecrated bread on the Sabbath. He said the Son of Man who received heavenly authority was Lord of the Sabbath.
This satisfied some Pharisees after the resurrection and they joined the Jesus movement since they were known for their belief in the resurrection.
Let’s get back to Barth Ehrman. Our author, Evans, correctly points out that Ehrman started out as a fundamentalist with rigid ideas about verbal inspiration. Once he discovered that the Bible was not dictated word for word by God whispering in the ears of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, he lost his faith and became an agnostic, a non-believer. It was nothing more than a human book. As a fundamentalist, he believed that if you could find one mistake in the Bible, than it was totally disproven. He did not accept literary forms and so many other instruments of modern scholarship. Thus, he was led astray. Robert Pierce is another good example of a fundamentalist who became an agnostic, a non-believer. He found parallels in other ancient text so Jesus could not have said what is attributed to Him or the event did not happen. Nonsense! Robert Funk in Honest to Jesus was also a fundamentalist who became emotionally devastated by new scholarship. James Robinson started as a Calvinist with a very conservative view and ended up a skeptic.
Our author, Evans, cites these folks as typical of what he calls brittle fundamentalism. “Show me one mistake in the Bible and I will throw out the whole thing.” The reliability, Evans says, of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John does not hinge on a brittle fundamentalist view of inerrancy of scripture. The truth of the Christian message hangs on the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus and our chance to share in it.
It is important to remember that lost Christianities are not first century, but second century. Ebonite’s were second (not first) century Jews who believed in Jesus, but rejected some of His claims. The Ebonite Gospels were apparently revisions of Matthew that brought the gospel story in line with their views. Marcion was a second century extremist who said the Old Testament God was different from the New Testament God. The Church rejected His ideas. Gnosticism did not arise until the second century and not one of the Gnostic texts that we possess in part or in whole dates before the middle of the second century, namely, the Gospel of Thomas, which was not written before 175.
• All of these moved away from the one Christianity of the first century attested to the teaching of Jesus in the first generation of His followers.
Now let’s look at popular texts today. Why are they so popular? Our author Evans says this: “These folks start to read the agnostics and the skeptics who used to be fundamentalists and conservative. That shakes up folks today.
• Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Inaccurate and stories made up.
• Michael Baigent’s equally foolish The Jesus Papers. (A fake death. Jesus really didn’t die. It was faked. He wrote letters to the Jewish Sanhedrin after that.
• Barbara Thiering’s The Qumran Origins of the Christian Church…She says the Dead Sea Scrolls are in code and she knows how to decode them.
• Dolores Cannon, who is a psychic and has written Jesus and the Essenes: Fresh Insights into Christ’s Ministry and the Dead Sea Scrolls, says through progressive hypnosis, she goes back to one of her previous lives when she was an Essene and knew Jesus. In other words, a long lost spirit can tell you all you need to know. Don’t bother relying on scholars.
• Then there is Chretien de Troyes (died 11/85) who wrote The Romance of Perceval: The Legend of the Holy Grail. Americans know this in the version of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table, Germans and French have their own version of it also. It is myth and legend. There is no historical evidence of the existence of the cup Jesus drank from, not is there any evidence that the Knights Templar, who served primarily as armed escorts to and from Europe and the Holy Land ever had a connection to the Holy Grail or found hidden documents or lost treasures.
• Then there is Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln who wrote Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982). They want us to believe that they did research and discovered the truth: Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers, had children and these children reached southern France and married into noble families from which emerged the French Merovingian kings. The Knights Templar and Priory of Sion, a secret society supposedly founded in 1099, knew all of this and did all in their power to keep it secret to protect the descendents of Jesus and Mary. Grand masters of the Priory of Sion included (so they claim): Leonardo Da Vinci, Sir Isaac Newton and Victor Hugo. The whole thing is a hoax. The hoaxers themselves have admitted it finally. They have written pseudohistory.
• Let’s take one more example of Dan Brown’s foolishness, namely, Leonardo Da Vinci’s portrait of the Last Supper (1497). Dan Brown says the figure to the right of Jesus…is beardless and has a full head of long flowing hair…It is St. John…but Dan Brown says it is Mary Magdalene. Art historians say it is the apostle John and are correct. In the time of Leonardo, youthful men were portrayed in art with beardless faces and long tresses. See for example Leonardo’s portrait of John the Baptist…Raphael’s portrait of St. Sebastian.
• Let’s now look at the Gospel of Philip written in Coptic and discovered at Nag Hammadi, Egypt in 1945 and composed as early as 150 A.D. The author of the Gospel of Philip is not trying to suggest that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were lovers. He only wants to elevate Mary Magdalene to the level of the other disciples. On page 63 of the codex 2, we read “The companion of the […] Mary Magdalene. […] her more than […] the disciples […] kiss her […] […] on her […]. The brackets indicate holes in the text. Some of the text can be restored to say: The companion of the [Savior is] Mary Magdalene. [But Christ loved] her more than [all] the disciples [and used to] kiss her [often] on her […]. Hucksters say on her mouth or lips. That possibility makes people believe that it really happened. Foolishness. The same point is made in the Gospel of Mary. It dates from the same period and is Gnostic. The story here is that Peter is jealous of Mary Magdalene because Mary Magdalene has a right to contribute to the teaching of the community. Modern writers want us to believe that there was a romance between Jesus and Mary Magdalene when, in fact, there was none.
• Dan Brown’s character in the Da Vinci Code Sir Leigh Teabing is a variable fountain of misinformation. In the novel, he wrongly credits the contents of the Bible to Emperor Constantine (fourth century A.D.); claims that the emperor pressured Christian theologians into viewing Jesus as divine, instead of human; and claims that there were eighty Gospels, many of which the emperor ordered burned. He wrongly says that the Dead Sea Scrolls tell the “true Grail story” and depict the ministry of Jesus. All of this is utter nonsense since the Dead Sea Scrolls contain no Christian text or references whatsoever.
• Finally, there is the 2006 book by Michael Baigent called The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History. Baigent says he is an expert in the field of arcane knowledge and says that Jesus survived His crucifixion and wrote letter in which He denies His divinity. Where does he get this information? He says he heard it from an old man in the 1980’s about a conversation this elderly man had with another elderly man in the 1930’s. The older elderly man said he saw in the 1890’s, but which no one can produce. Would you believe a story that someone heard in 1980’s about someone who heard something in the 1930’s, who heard something in the 1890’s and there is nothing written. Nonsense…Nonsense…Nonsense.
• Then there is the 2006 book by James Tabor The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity. He says that Jesus’ human father was a Roman soldier, perhaps Jewish by birth. He thinks the soldier’s tomb is in Germany. In the late second century, a philosopher by the name of Celsus wrote an angry work against Christianity. It survives in a work by Origen, a Christian scholar, in the middle of the third century. This angry Celsus made up the story that Jesus sojourned in Egypt, where he learned magic, returned to Israel, dazzled everyone with what appeared to be miracles, claimed to be God and so forth. Celsus says that Blessed Mary, the mother of Jesus, was impregnated by a Roman soldier named Pantera. Evans says: “In my view, the allegation that Jesus’ real father was a man named Pantera (or Panthera) exploits Christians’ claim that Jesus was born of a “virgin” (Greek, Parthenos). It was nothing more than a play on words. Pantera was the closest sound-alike name, and was a name of soldiers, so Jesus’ conception was suggested to be not that of a virgin, a parthenos, but that of a soldier, a man named Panthera. We have here nothing more than slander and lies. There is no archaeological evidence whatsoever and no probability.”
• Another book to look at is Tom Harpur’s The Pagan Christ published in 2004. It presents the very old notion that Jesus did not exist.
In Conclusion:
Post-Modern day claims that the Gospels are unreliable, full of myth and legend and so biased that the knowledge of what Jesus really said and did cannot be recovered are excessive and unwarranted. The author’s of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John had one principle concern, namely, to publish the teaching and deeds of Jesus. His words and example were considered normative. It is not likely that early Christians would have freely invented sayings and then attribute them to Jesus. Gospel writers were not in the habit of making things up, so there is every reason to conclude from the evidence that the Gospels have fairly and accurately reported the essential elements of Jesus’ teaching life, death and resurrection.
There is one final question. Why unreliable claims such as we have seen here are so easily believed? Why would so many people think that Dan Brown’s the Da Vinci Code tells the real story? I believe the answer can be found in one of the principle characteristics of the 21st century, namely, the post-modern belief in skepticism and rejection of all dogmatic convictions. Evans has shown us that it is morally certain that the Gospels are very reliable. Moral certainty excludes the probability of their being unreliable.
So historical data shows that the New Testament has been preserved over the centuries, even though you can make up some fanciful story that is theoretically possible.
Finally, remember the evidence for our New Testament writings is ever so much greater than the evidence for many writings of classical antiquity, which are widely accepted. Look at Livy (who lived from 59 B.C. to 17 A.D.) and the oldest manuscript we have is from the fourth century. Testatus (who lived from 56 B.C. to 120 A.D.) and the oldest manuscript is from the ninth or tenth century. Thucydides (who lived from 460 to 400 B.C.) and the oldest manuscript we have is from the tenth century. Herodotus (who lived from 484 to 425 B.C.) and the oldest manuscript we have is from the tenth century. We have over five thousand (counting only Greek manuscripts) manuscripts from the New Testament from the second century. If the New Testament were a collection of secular writings, their authenticity would generally be regarded as beyond all doubt. In fact, historians have often been much more ready to trust the New Testament records then some of the theologians or scholars. Somehow or other, there are people who regard “a sacred book” as automatically under suspicion and demand more evidence.
In the post modern world, people want a tame Jesus, a Jesus who can be controlled, a Jesus who is non-threatening, a Jesus who values what they value and does not demand anything of them at all. In other words, a Jesus who is not Savior and Lord. Frankly, it is hard to escape the feeling that our post modern culture has taken Jesus’ question: “Who do you say that I am?” and changed it into “Who do you want me to be?”
