Friday 8 February 2008

Fabricating Jesus


This morning I have just finished reading Craig A Evan's book 'Fabricating Jesus' How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels. Craig Evans is a New Testament scholar at Acadia Divinity College. He is also on the advisory board on the Gospel of Judas for the National Geographic Society.
Evans writes from an evangelical scholarly perspective, where he believes in the authenticity of the biblical text but is not afraid to question this. Evans believes in critical scholarship, he does not accept the fundamentalist creed, "God said it, I believe it,that settles it." It is from this perspective that Evans examines modern scholarship's attempt to recast Jesus from the understanding of non-canonical gospels. Evans shows that some of his colleagues are worse than fundamentalists in their approach to non-canonical gospels, using special pleading to argue for Gospels that are obviously written in the third of fourth century.
Evans writes for a popular audience, some of whom may have been taken in by the so called evidence from Dan Brown's book 'The Da Vinci Code.' His main subject matter however are the gospels of Thomas, Peter and Mary Magdalene which he shows are nothing more than Gnostic Gospels that are far too late to present us with any genuine insight into the life and work of the historical Jesus.
My favourite section was on Josephus, Evans argues that some of his colleagues accept Josephus version of the events of Jesus' life and times rather than the gospels. Evans demolishes this by pointing out the obvious bias of Josephus. Having done this he then points out that there is much agreement between Josephus presentation of John the Baptist, Herod the great, Pilate and Jesus and the presentation in the Gospels.
In the appendix Evans shows why the gospel of Judas is something to be excited about from an historical perspective but that it is written in the fourth century from the perspective of a sect. This gospel offers us no fresh understanding of Jesus but does offer us one groups warped perspective on Judas.
This is a great book!
Shalom
Stephen

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