How Scholars Fabricate Jesus
HOW SCHOLARS FABRICATE JESUS
Craig A. Evans
One of the characters in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code claims that in the three centuries or so following the death of Jesus, “thousands of documents” were penned chronicling the life of Jesus as a mortal. Readers are told that Emperor Constantine (who ruled 312–37) changed the historical record by commissioning a new Bible, which omitted Gospels that spoke of the humanity of Jesus and embellished Gospels that emphasized His divinity. The “earlier” Gospels, Brown's novel tells us, were outlawed, gathered up, and burned. Nevertheless, the true story of Jesus managed to survive in the Dead Sea Scrolls and in the old Gnostic books found in Egypt.
Most of these astonishing assertions are either false or grossly misleading, as all trained historians know. Constantine apparently did commission the production of 50 copies of Scripture (as Christian historian Eusebius reports), but he did not decide which Gospels to include and which to omit. Furthermore, the claim that the Dead Sea Scrolls preserve the truth regarding Jesus is ludicrous, for the scrolls mostly date from the first century BC and do not refer to Jesus or to anyone in His following. Many of the Gnostic books found in Egypt (at Nag Hammadi and elsewhere) do refer to Jesus and His disciples, but all of these books are later not earlier than the Gospels in the New Testament. The “true” story of Jesus is not preserved in these writings. Indeed, the Gospels of the New Testament present Jesus as truly human, while the Gnostic Gospels exalt Jesus' heavenly status and often deny the reality of His humanity. And, of course, there is not a shred of credible evidence that Jesus had a wife and children. Brown's fictional character could not have got his facts more mixed up. Brown's book is rife with these types of errors and blunders.
The single greatest factor that contributes to the kind of distortion that one encounters in Dan Brown's book is the fascination on the part of some scholars with a number of second- and third-century writings that for various reasons most early Christians never accepted as authoritative. The Jesus in these writings is noticeably different from the Jesus of the first-century New Testament Gospels. It is not surprising, then, that portraits composed on the basis of appeal to the later writings are different. In my view, which is shared by many historians and biblical scholars, these portraits are distortions. The radical scholars, whose work inspires authors like Dan Brown, do not offer careful reconstructions of the historical Jesus but fabrications that pander to this fad and that fad.
Of the many extracanonical Gospels that have been trotted out in recent years, not least the much talked about Gospel of Judas, those most cherished are the Gospel of Thomas, Egerton Papyrus 2, the Secret Gospel of Mark, and the so-called Gospel of Peter. These four sources received prominent attention in John Dominic Crossan's Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of Canon.1 These sources have continued to receive scholarly attention, with respect to questions relating to the historical Jesus and the origin of the Jesus tradition and the New Testament Gospels. The Gospel of Thomas has enjoyed pride of place and is in fact the fifth Gospel in the Jesus Seminar's publication The Five Gospels.2 Thomas, with which I begin, will receive more attention than the other extracanonical Gospel sources.