Books Recently Read

I just finished reading "Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels," by Dr. Craig A. Evans, New Testament scholar. Dr. Evans will be the featured speaker at United Theological Seminary's Heck Lectures next month which I will be attending. His topic will be on what we know about Jesus from sources outside of the New Testament.

Dr. Evans makes the point in his book that some bible scholars make the assumption that many of the words of Jesus we find in the four Gospels were not actually said by Jesus but put there by the gospel writers several decades later. These scholars tend to argue that at the time the four Gospels were written, there were several variations of Christianity and that our present New Testament list of books represented only one particular expression of Christianity.

One of the reasons some scholars argue that there wasn't one uniform expression of Christianity as expressed in our present New Testament listing of books is because there are other writings that offer us a different understanding of Jesus. For example, there are gnostic gospels of the life of Jesus such as "The Gospel of Thomas" which offers a very different perspective of who Jesus was. Gnosticism is a belief that the world is evil and it's through knowing secret wisdom that one can be released from this evil world.

The problem with this approach, according to Dr. Evans, is that the gnostic Gospels weren't written until the 2nd century, several decades after our present four Gospels were written. In other words, the four Gospels that we have are the earliest materials that we have of the life of Jesus Christ. The modern scholars who claim that the gnostic Gospels represent a more accurate picture of Jesus base this on their belief that these sources were written in the 1st century.

One of the reasons why people today are fascinated to think that there might be a very different Jesus than the one that we read about in our present Gospels is because of several misunderstandings. These include the belief that the gnostic Gospels were written much earlier than they really were and a move to de-Judaize Jesus (remove Jesus from his Jewish self-understanding and context.)

The point that Dr. Evans is making in his book is that when we see Jesus in his 1st century Jewish context, the four Gospels give us an accurate picture of what Jesus actually said and did in his life and ministry.

I look forward to meeting Dr. Evans next month!