Concluding Remarks
Concluding Remarks
Many scholarly portraits and reconstructions of the historical Jesus are badly distorted through the use of documents that are late and of dubious historical value. The irony is that in trying to “go behind” the New Testament Gospels and find truth buried under layers of tradition and theology some scholars depend on documents that were composed 60 to 100 years after the New Testament Gospels. This is a strange way to proceed.
Two of the four extracanonical Gospels reviewed in this paper originated in the second half of the second century. These are the Gospel of Thomas and the Egerton Papyrus. A third writing, the Akhmîm Gospel fragment, also cannot date earlier than the middle of the second century, if indeed it is the Gospel of Peter mentioned by Bishop Serapion at the beginning of the third century. But there are grave doubts that this document is the Gospel of Peter. The Akhmîm Gospel fragment may be part of an unknown writing from an even later period of time. In any case, scholars are in no position to extract from the Akhmîm fragment a hypothetical mid-first century Passion and resurrection narrative on which the first-century New Testament Gospels relied. Such a theory completely lacks a critical basis.
The remaining document—comprising quotations of the Secret Gospel of Mark, imbedded in a long-lost letter by Clement of Alexandria—is a modern hoax and therefore has nothing to offer critical scholarship concerned with Christian origins and the emergence of the Jesus and Gospel tradition. Yet this writing, along with the other texts, has been used in historical Jesus research.
The scholarly track record with respect to the use of these extracanonical Gospels is frankly embarrassing. In marked contrast to the hypercritical approach many scholars take to the New Testament Gospels, several scholars are surprisingly uncritical in their approach to the extracanonical Gospels. It is hard to explain why scholars give such credence to documents that reflect settings entirely foreign to AD pre-70 Jewish Palestine and at the same time reflect traditions and tendencies found in documents known to emerge in later times and in places outside of Palestine.
This kind of extreme scholarship, which in some manifestations hardly qualifies as critical, provides a context out of which the irresponsible pseudoscholarship and popular writing can emerge. Critical scholars need to challenge it head-on, underscoring its highly theoretical nature and tendency to indulge in special pleading. If extreme scholarship is not checked, the industry of fabricating strange and eccentric Jesuses will continue.