“Scholars Are Uncovering a Radically Different Jesus in Ancient Documents Just as Credible as the Fo

“Scholars Are Uncovering a Radically Different Jesus in Ancient Documents Just as Credible as the Fo

CHALLENGE #1

“SCHOLARS ARE UNCOVERING A RADICALLY DIFFERENT JESUS IN ANCIENT DOCUMENTS JUST AS CREDIBLE AS THE FOUR GOSPELS”

For nineteen hundred years or so the canonical texts of the New Testament were the sole source of historically reliable knowledge concerning Jesus of Nazareth. In 1945, this circumstance changed.

Religion professor Stevan L. Davies¹

There’s a very important historical point here, which is that in the, last thirty years we have discovered real Gospels — hundreds of them—that are not the official Gospels, [but] that were part of the discussions in the early church.

Commentator Andrew Sullivan²

The rumor mill was churning. A political operative called one of my reporters with a tip that a candidate for Illinois governor had recently been detained by police after allegations that he had abused his wife. If this was true, the irony would be devastating: one of his responsibilities as the state’s chief executive would be to oversee a network of shelters for battered women.

Since other news media had been alerted as well, I knew we had only a short period of time to nail down the story. I immediately assigned five reporters to pursue various angles of the investigation. We needed indisputable confirmation—preferably, a written document—before we could publish the story.

The reporters milked their sources. One of them came up with a time frame for the incident. Another got the name of the Chicago suburb where it allegedly took place in a public parking lot. Still, we didn’t have enough. The information was too vague and uncorroborated.

Finally, another reporter was able to obtain the key piece of evidence: a police report that described exactly what had happened. But there was a snag. Because no criminal charges had been filed, privacy laws dictated that all names on the report be blacked out. At first glance, it looked like there would be no way to link the candidate to the incident.

As the reporter studied the report more carefully, though, she discovered that the police had inadvertently failed to delete one reference to the person involved. Sure enough, it was the candidate’s name. Still, his name was rather common. How could we be sure it was really him? Digging deeper in the report yielded the final clue: the suspect had bragged about being the mayor of a certain suburb—the same position held by the gubernatorial candidate. Bingo! A match.

In a dramatic confrontation in the newspaper’s conference room, I peppered the candidate with questions about the incident. He steadfastly denied it ever occurred—until I handed him a copy of the police report. Faced with the indisputable evidence, he finally admitted the encounter with police. Within seventy-two hours he had withdrawn from the gubernatorial race.³

For both journalists and historians, documents can be invaluable in helping confirm what has transpired. Even so, detective work needs to be done to establish the authenticity and credibility of any written record. Who wrote it? Was this person in a position to know what happened? Was he or she motivated by prejudice or bias? Has the document been kept safe from tampering? How legible is it? Is it corroborated by other external facts? And are there competing documents that might be even more reliable or which might shed a whole new light on the matter?

That last question has come to the forefront in the quest to understand the historical Jesus in recent years. For centuries, scholars investigating what happened in the life of Jesus largely relied on the New Testament, especially Mark, Matthew, and Luke—which are the oldest of the four Gospels and are called the “Synoptics” because of their interrelationship—as well as the Gospel of John.

In modern times, however, archaeological discoveries have yielded a fascinating crop of other documents from ancient Palestine. Some of them paint a very different portrait of Jesus than the traditional picture found in the Bible, and they throw key theological beliefs into question. But can they really be trusted?

A DIFFERENT JESUS

In the years since my own investigation into Jesus, the focus on these “alternative gospels,” in both academic and popular books, has greatly intensified. In the 1990s, several Jesus Seminar participants and others, led by Robert J. Miller, published The Complete Gospels, which juxtaposed the New Testament gospels with sixteen other ancient texts.⁴

“Each of these gospel records offers fresh glimpses into the world of Jesus and his followers,” says the book.⁵ “All of the . . . texts in this volume are witnesses to early Jesus traditions. All of them contain traditions independent of the New Testament gospels.”⁶

To me, the implication was clear: these other gospels—with such names as the Gospel of Thomas, the Secret Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Peter, and the Gospel of Mary—were equal to the biblical accounts in terms of their historical significance and spiritual content. Indeed, said Philip Jenkins, professor of history and religious studies at Pennsylvania State University, “With so many hidden gospels now brought to light, it is now often claimed that the four gospels were simply four among many of roughly equal worth, and the alternative texts gave just as valid a picture of Jesus as the texts we have today.”⁷

The case for these other gospels has been bolstered by some scholars who date a few of them to as early as the first century, which is when Jesus’ ministry flourished and the four Gospels of the New Testament were written. That would mean they would contain very early—and therefore perhaps historically reliable—material.

For example, Karen L. King, professor of ecclesiastical history at Harvard Divinity School, said the Gospel of Mary may arguably have been written in the late first century.⁸ Contrary to the biblical Gospels, in this text Jesus teaches that “salvation is achieved by seeking the true spiritual nature of humanity within oneself and overcoming the entrapping material nature of the body and the world.”⁹ The disciples Peter and Andrew are depicted as “proud and ignorant men,” while the gospel “identifies the true apostolic witness” of Mary Magdalene.¹⁰ In other words, she has the same stature as the other apostles of Jesus.

As for the Gospel of Peter, which includes a bizarre passage about a talking cross and the risen Jesus with his head extending beyond the clouds, scholars such as Arthur J. Dewey, associate professor of Theology at Xavier University in Cincinnati, date its early stage to the middle of the first century.¹¹

Then there’s the incendiary Secret Gospel of Mark. Award-winning scholar Morton Smith of Columbia University, author of Jesus the Magician and other books, reported finding two and a half pages of this formerly unknown gospel in a monastery near Jerusalem in 1958. Scott G. Brown, who based his doctoral dissertation on the gospel, asserted in a 2005 book that it was penned by the same author who wrote the Gospel of Mark and was reserved only for those spiritually mature enough to handle it.¹²

The most shocking claim in that gospel is that Jesus conducted a secret initiation rite with a young man that, according to Smith, may have included “physical union.”¹³ Specifically, the text says that six days after Jesus raised a wealthy young man from the dead, “in the evening the youth comes to him, wearing a linen cloth over his naked body. And he remained with him that night, for Jesus taught him the mystery of the kingdom of God.”¹⁴

Another explosive text—purportedly written by Jesus himself on papyrus in his own native language of Aramaic—was described by Michael Baigent in his 2006 New York Times bestseller The Jesus Papers. Directly contradicting what Christianity has taught for two millennia, Jesus explicitly denies that he’s the Son of God, clarifying instead that he only embodied God’s spirit. According to Baigent, Jesus added that “everyone who felt similarly filled with the ‘spirit’ was also a ‘son of God.’ ”¹⁵

THE MYSTERY OF THOMAS

The darling of liberal scholarship, however, is the Gospel of Thomas, a collection of 114 “hidden” sayings attributed to Jesus. In its 1993 book The Five Gospels, the Jesus Seminar granted this text equal status to the New Testament.¹⁶ Thomas’s first edition, according to The Complete Gospels, was written about AD 50, earlier than any of the biblical Gospels.¹⁷The Gnostic Bible, edited by Willis Barnstone and Marvin Meyer, agrees with the early dating: “A version of this gospel may have been composed, most likely in Greek, as early as the middle of the first century, or somewhat later.”¹⁸

Elaine Pagels, professor of religion at Princeton University and author of Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas, told me that she dates Thomas’s composition to AD 80 or 90, which would be before many scholars date the Bible’s Gospel of John. “The scholars that I know see John and Thomas sharing a common tradition,” she said.

Yet the gospels of John and Thomas come to opposing conclusions concerning pivotal theological issues. “John says that we can experience God only through the divine light embodied in Jesus,” Pagels said. “But certain passages in Thomas’s gospel draw a quite different conclusion: that the divine light Jesus embodied is shared by humanity, since we are all made in the image of God.”¹⁹

The Thomas gospel describes Jesus not as the biblical redeemer, but as a wisdom figure who imparts secret teachings to the disciples who are mature enough to receive them. That’s consistent with the Gnostic belief that salvation comes through knowledge, not through Christ’s atonement for sin. “The salvation offered in the Gospel of Thomas is clearly at odds with the salvation (by grace through faith) offered in the New Testament,” said Ben Witherington III of Asbury Theological Seminary. In the Gnostic view, he said, “a person has to be worthy to receive Jesus’ secret wisdom.”²⁰

Contrary to the Bible, Jesus is quoted in Saying 14 of Thomas as telling his disciples: “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.” He is quoted in Saying 114 as teaching that “every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of Heaven.” The gospel also quotes Jesus in Saying 7 as offering this inscrutable insight: “Blessings on the lion if a human eats it, making the lion human. Foul is the human if a lion eats it, making the lion human.”²¹

“The Gospel of Thomas contains teaching venerated by ‘Thomas Christians,’ apparently an early group that . . . thrived during the first century,” says Pagels.²² “We now begin to see that what we call Christianity . . . actually represents only a small selection of specific sources, chosen from among dozens of others. Why were these other writings excluded and banned as ‘heresy’? What made them so dangerous?”²³

That’s a good question. Were these alternative depictions of Jesus censored—even burned—because they dared to deviate from what was becoming the “orthodox” view of him? Was the first century a maelstrom of clashing doctrines and practices—all equally valid— with one dominant viewpoint eventually elbowing its way to prominence and brutally squelching the others?

This is the opinion of some scholars who talk in terms of early “Christianities” rather than Christianity. “With the council of Nicea in 325, the orthodox party solidified its hold on the Christian tradition,” says the Jesus Seminar, “and other wings of the Christian movement were choked off.”²⁴

All of this has profound implications for my personal quest to discover the real Jesus. Is it possible that my earlier conclusions about him have been unduly colored by New Testament accounts that in reality were only one perspective among many? Is the Bible’s theology merely the result of one politically connected group repressing other legitimate beliefs?

“We can probably say with some certainty that if some other side had won . . . there would have been no doctrine of Christ as both fully divine and human,” says agnostic professor Bart Ehrman of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.²⁵

Clearly, a lot is at stake. I need to have confidence that the right people used the right reasoning to choose the right documents in the ancient world. I need to know if there was any historical support for these alternative texts seeing Jesus in a different light. Surely the Jesus that emerges from many of these documents looks radically different from the Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Says Jenkins:

The hidden gospels have been used to provide scriptural warrant for sweeping new interpretations of Jesus, for interpreting theological statements in a purely symbolic and psychological sense, and for challenging dogmatic or legal rules on the basis of the believer’s subjective moral sense. Generally, the hidden gospels offer wonderful news for liberals, feminists, and radicals within the churches, who challenge what they view as outdated institutions and prejudices.²⁶

I needed to go wherever the evidence would take me. Knowing there are almost as many opinions as there are experts, I wanted to track down someone who has sterling credentials, who would be respected by both conservatives and liberals, and who, most importantly, could back up his insights with solid facts and reasoning.

That meant flying to Nova Scotia and driving to a quaint village to interview a highly regarded historian whose professional endorsers range from the orthodox N. T. Wright to such leftwing scholars as Marcus Borg and even Jesus Seminar cofounder John Dominic Cros-san, the now-retired DePaul University professor who claims to have discovered a different Jesus among the once-lost texts of antiquity.

After driving more than an hour from my hotel in Halifax, I rang the doorbell at the colonial-style house of Craig A. Evans in a heavily wooded community near Acadia University, where he serves as a professor of New Testament.

INTERVIEW #1: CRAIG A. EVANS, PH.D.

Evans came to Acadia University in 2002 after spending more than twenty years as a professor at Trinity Western University, where he directed the graduate programs in biblical studies and founded the Dead Sea Scrolls Institute. He received his bachelor’s degree in history and philosophy from Claremont McKenna College, his master of divinity degree from Western Baptist Seminary, and a master’s degree and doctorate in biblical studies from Claremont Graduate University, which also has produced numerous members of the Jesus Seminar. In addition, he also has served as a visiting fellow at Princeton Theological Seminary.

He is a prolific writer known for his scholarly precision as well as his ability to pierce the fog of academia with uncharacteristic clarity. He is the author or editor of more than fifty books, including Non-canonical Writings and New Testament Interpretation; Studying the Historical Jesus; Jesus and His Contemporaries; Eschatology, Messian-ism, and the Dead Sea Scrolls; Early Christian Interpretation of the Scriptures of Israel; Authenticating the Words of Jesus; The Missing Jesus: Rabbinic Judaism and the New Testament; and Ancient Texts for New Testament Studies. He has lectured at Cambridge, Durham, Oxford, Yale, and other universities, as well as the Field Museum in Chicago and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Ottawa.

For a decade, Evans served as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin for Biblical Research, and he is a member of the Studiorum Novi Testa-menti Societas (SNTS), the Institute for Biblical Research, and the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies. He has been selected chairman of the Society of Biblical Literature’s Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity Section and the SNTS’s Gospels and Rabbinic Literature Seminar.

More recently Evans has been expanding his work into the popular arena. He has appeared as an expert on numerous television programs, including Dateline NBC, the History Channel, and the BBC, and his excellent book Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels, was published for a general audience in 2006.

Evans and his wife of thirty-two years, Ginny, opened their front door and invited me in. He was casually dressed in a short-sleeve striped shirt and dark slacks. His graying hair, parted neatly at the side, and his wire-rim glasses gave him a professorial air, while the tone and cadence of his voice sounded vaguely like commentator George Will. As we settled into chairs at his dining room table, I decided to ask him a series of background questions before we plunged into analyzing the legitimacy of the “alternative” gospels.²⁷

KINGDOM OF GOD, SON OF MAN

“Why are some scholars coming up with such unusual portraits of Jesus?” I asked, picking up a homemade chocolate-chip cookie from a tray that Ginny set down between us.

Evans thought for a moment. “One reason,” he replied, “is many of them lack training in the Semitic background of the New Testament.”

“Meaning . . .”

“Semitic training deals with Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and various sources written in those languages, such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and early rabbinic writings. Very, very few New Testament scholars go beyond the Hebrew of the Old Testament, which is sort of a ‘baby Hebrew.’ ”

“How does this affect their scholarship?” I asked.

“Here’s the rub,” he said. “These scholars can read the Greek in which the New Testament is written, but Jesus didn’t speak Greek, except perhaps occasionally. Most of his teaching was in Aramaic, and his scriptures were in Hebrew or Aramaic paraphrases. Jesus and his world were very Semitic, yet most New Testament scholars lack adequate training in the very languages and literatures that reflect his world. Since they know Greek, they gravitate toward making comparisons between the Jesus of the Greek Gospels and various Greek philosophies and the Greco-Roman world. It’s easy to find parallels if you’re not worried about context or nuance.”

“So they’re reading a Greek influence into Jesus.”

“Exactly,” came his reply. “With few exceptions, the Jesus Seminar was not known for dealing with the Hebrew, Syriac, Aramaic, rabbinic literature, or the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here’s the result: they missed the meaning of Jesus’ central proclamation of the kingdom of God.”

“Explain what the kingdom of God refers to.”

“It’s not complicated if you have the Semitic context: Jesus was basically proclaiming the ‘rule of God.’ He demonstrated that God’s rule was truly making itself felt in his ministry through healings and exorcisms. He said in Luke 11:20, ‘But if I drive out demons by the finger of God’—that is, the rule of God—‘then the kingdom of God has come to you.’ But the Jesus Seminar studiously avoided that, instead interpreting ‘Kingdom of God’ in terms of a Greek philosophical concept—and they got it completely wrong.

“They made a similar mistake with the ‘Son of Man’ title that Jesus repeatedly applied to himself. They didn’t know how it was linked to the Son of Man figure in Daniel 7, where there are divine implications. Instead, they pursued a bizarre Greco-Roman understanding, translating ‘Son of Man’ as ‘Son of Adam,’ which doesn’t clarify anything.

“So if you don’t understand Jesus’ central proclamation—what the kingdom of God means—and you don’t understand Jesus’ favorite self-designation—what the Son of Man means—then where are you?” he asked, sounding truly bewildered. “It doesn’t surprise me that the Seminar’s work is so quirky and so severely criticized by nonSeminar members — probably 90 percent of Gospel scholars around the world.”

“So,” I interjected, “this is Jesus out of context.”

He nodded. “Right. They move Jesus out of his Jewish world and into a Greco-Roman world, turning him into a Western academic who’s up in the ivory tower smoking his pipe and—what do you know! He’s a whole lot like them.”

Another example, I mused, of professors finding the Jesus they wanted to find in the first place. “In some ways,” I said, “it seems scholars are almost in a competition to see how skeptical they can be.”

Evans sighed. “Yes, that’s unfortunate,” he said. “I don’t think that’s the appropriate attitude for scholars. If somebody says, ‘I believe something is true,’ then the right approach should be to reply, ‘That’s nice, but what are your reasons? What’s the evidence? What are your criteria?’ That’s how the early church began. The women saying Jesus’ tomb was empty did not immediately prompt faith. It prompted questions, investigation, and exploration. Some disciples ran to the tomb to confirm it. And I think rather than expressing automatic skepticism, scholars ought to similarly investigate claims with an open mind.

“The problem, though, is there are so many people pursuing doctorates, writing dissertations, pursuing tenure, and trying to get published that there’s a tendency to push the facts beyond where they should go. If you’re hoping to get on the network news—well, news has got to be new. Nobody is going to get excited if you say the traditional view of the Gospels seems correct.

“But if you come up with something outrageous—that Jesus’ body was eaten by dogs, for example—then that warrants a headline. Or if you say there’s a gospel just as valid as Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John, but it was suppressed in an early Christian power play, well, that’s news.”

DOGMATIC PREJUDICE?

Moving to the issue of the alternative gospels, I asked Evans to set forth the criteria that historians use in determining whether an ancient document is reliable.

“The first question is: When was it written?” he said, leaning back in his chair. “If the document is about Alexander the Great, was it written during the lifetime of those who knew him? Same with the New Testament. There’s a huge difference between a gospel written in AD 60—about thirty years after Jesus’ ministry—and another document written in AD 150.

“If the Gospel of Mark was written in the 60s — some thirty to thirty-five years after Jesus’ ministry—then it was written within the lifetime of numerous people who would have known Jesus and heard him teach. This would have a corrective effect. But if a document is written sixty, eighty, or a hundred years later, then that chain is lost. Although it’s not impossible that a document written much, much later could contain authentic material, it’s a lot more problematic.”

I knew that the dating of the alternative gospels was going to be a major factor in determining whether they can be trusted. Rather than delve deeper into that topic at this point, however, I asked Evans to continue discussing the historical criteria.

“A second issue,” he said, “involves a geographic connection. For example, a document written in the Eastern Mediterranean world thirty years after Jesus’ ministry is more promising than one written in Spain or France in the middle of the second century.

“A third issue involves the cultural accuracy of the document, in terms of its allusions to contemporary politics or events. This can expose phony documents that claim to have been written earlier than they really were. When we have a writer in the second or third century who’s claiming to be recounting something Jesus did, often he doesn’t know the correct details. For example, whoever wrote the so-called Gospel of Peter doesn’t know Jewish burial traditions, corpse impurity issues, and other matters from Jesus’ time. He gets exposed by mistakes that he didn’t even realize he had made.

“Then there are motivational questions. Did the writer have an axe to grind? Does he bend over backward to deny something or affirm something that’s dubious? These things are often transparent and we can detect them.

“We look at the New Testament documents and, yes, they have an agenda: they’re affirming that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. But they also make all kinds of statements that can be evaluated. Are they culturally accurate? Are they true to what we know from other historical sources? Were they written in a time and place that has proximity to Jesus’ life? The answers are yes.

“When we get into other gospels, the answers to those questions are almost always no. They’re written in a later period of time—too late to be historically reliable. They were written from other places with strange and alien contexts. We find inaccuracies at key points. We can see they’re derived from earlier sources. Sometimes there’s a philosophy, like Gnosticism, that’s being promoted.”

A question popped into my mind. “Is this kind of analysis mostly science or art?” I asked.

“It’s much more science. It isn’t just guesswork and opinion. It’s logical,” he answered. “When you look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke—also John, but especially the Synoptics—and use the same criteria that you would use in assessing secular historians like Suetonius, Tacitus, or Thucydides, the New Testament Gospels perform very favorably. Actually, these other historians were much further removed from many of the events that they wrote about.”

I picked up my notes. “Helmut Koester of Harvard Divinity School says: ‘Only dogmatic prejudice can assert that the canonical writings have an exclusive claim to apostolic origin, and thus to historical pri-ority.’²⁸ Is it mere prejudice on your part,” I asked Evans, “that causes you to give priority to the four Gospels of the New Testament?”

“The only way his statement can be true would be if somebody dogmatically asserts it before any evidence is considered,” he answered.

“If one examines all the evidence fairly and completely, then it’s a logical conclusion that the canonical writings have an exclusive claim to being connected to the apostles. For crying out loud,” he added with a laugh, “the Gospel of Thomas doesn’t! And would anyone claim that the so-called Gospel of Peter—found in the coffin of a monk in the ninth century—really has a connection with Peter? Come on!

“If you had ten documents and you arbitrarily selected four of them and said only they have a connection with the apostles, and you didn’t have any reason for saying that—then that would be prejudice, I agree. But if you go through all ten and you discover that you actually do have credible historical evidence for four of them as having some kind of apostolic connection and the others not a chance—then it’s not a dogmatic, prejudicial assertion. It’s a reasonable and considered conclusion, based on the evidence.”

CHRISTIANITY OR CHRISTIANITIES

At this point, I brought up The Complete Gospels, in which the Jesus Seminar published sixteen other gospels alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—suggesting to me that they considered them all equal in terms of their historical validity.

“Some scholars have sought to give these other gospels very early dates of origin,” I said to Evans. “This backs up their claim that first-century Christianity featured a broad range of differing doctrines and practices—all equally legitimate—and it was the more powerful orthodox wing that crushed these other valid Christian movements. Is it true that the earliest Christianity was a fluid melting pot of all kinds of different perspectives about Jesus?”

The disdain was apparent on Evans’s face. “It’s not true at all,” he insisted. “This is the product of a modern agenda — a politically correct, multicultural agenda motivated by sympathy for marginalized groups. It’s the attitude that says diversity is always good, truth is negotiable, and every opinion is equally valid. The question is: What really did happen in the first century? What’s the evidence? What are the facts?”

I jumped in. “What are the facts?” I asked.

“Well, the early Christian movement certainly did have disagreements. But there weren’t ‘Christianities.’ There wasn’t one Christianity that thought Jesus was the Messiah and another Christianity that didn’t; another Christianity that thought he was divine and another

Christianity that disagreed; and another Christianity that thought he died on the cross as a payment for sin and another Christianity that scoffed at that. This is nonsense.

“There were no major questions about any of these basic points in the first decades of the Christian movement. The New Testament writings reflect the testimony of the first generation church, which very much depended on the testimony of Jesus’ own handpicked disciples. To take second-century diversity and exaggerate it, and then to try to smuggle those controversies into the first century by hypothesizing that there was some earlier version of second-century documents, is just bogus. Real historians laugh at that kind of procedure.”

“Still,” I objected, “we do see the New Testament talking about controversies in the first century—things like whether converts should be circumcised and so forth.”

“Yes, and the New Testament quite honestly discusses disagreements when they occur—issues like circumcision, whether Christians can eat meat sacrificed to idols, those kind of tensions,” he conceded. “But that’s not what these scholars are claiming. They’re trying to smuggle into the first century a mystical, Gnostic understanding of God and the Christian life, even though first century Christians had never heard of these things.”

“So the core message of Christianity ...?”

“. . . Is that Jesus is the Messiah, he’s God’s Son, he fulfills the scriptures, he died on the cross and thereby saved humanity, he rose from the dead—those core issues were not open for discussion,” he said firmly. “If you didn’t buy that, you weren’t a Christian.”

Evans’s mention of Gnosticism seemed an apt segue into discussing the most highly touted alternative text: the Gospel of Thomas, whose portrait of Jesus as an imparter of mysterious and secret teachings has intrigued scholars and captivated the public in recent years. The real story behind Thomas, I was soon to learn, was even more fascinating.

DOCUMENT #1: THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

“History preserves at least half a dozen references that say there was a gospel purportedly written by Thomas,” Evans said in response to my question about the ancient document. “And, by the way, they didn’t believe for a minute that this gospel really went back to the disciple Thomas or that it was authentic or early. Nobody was saying, ‘Boy, I wish we could find that lost Gospel of Thomas because it’s a goodie.’ They were saying, ‘Somebody cooked this up and it goes by the name of Thomas, but nobody believes that.’ ”

Hmmmm, I thought to myself. An interesting start.

“Then in the 1890s, archaeologists digging in the city dump of ancient Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, found thousands of papyri, including three fragments of the Gospel of Thomas in Greek. Only they didn’t know what they were until 1945, when the Nag Hammadi library was discovered at another location in Egypt. Among the thirteen leather-bound codices found in a jar was the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic. That’s when scholars realized that the discovery in Oxyrhynchus represented 20 percent of the Thomas Gospel.

“A lot of people assume that the Greek version is earlier than the Coptic version. But now the small number of scholars who have competence in the field believe that may not be true. Instead, Thomas was probably written in Syriac. What’s particularly interesting is that most of the material in Thomas parallels Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and sometimes Paul and other sources. Over half of the New Testament writings are quoted, paralleled, or alluded to in Thomas.”

“What does that tell you? ” I asked.

“It tells me it’s late,” he replied. “I’m not aware of a Christian writing prior to AD 150 that references this much of the New Testament. Go to the Epistles of Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, which were written around AD 110. Nobody doubts their authenticity. They don’t quote even half of the New Testament. Then along comes the Gospel of Thomas and it shows familiarity with fourteen or fifteen of the twenty-seven New Testament writings.” His eyebrows shot up. “And people want to date it to the middle of the first century? Come on!”

I interrupted. “Elaine Pagels told me that she takes what she called a ‘conservative view’ of the dating and puts it about AD 80 or 90. Stevan L. Davies says Thomas ‘is wholly independent of the New Testament Gospels; most probably it was in existence before they were written. It should be dated AD 50-70.’”²⁹ “Oh, that’s absurd!”

Undeterred, I continued. “John Dominic Crossan says the current text emerged about 60 or 70, but that an earlier edition goes back as far as the 50s.³⁰If they’re right, that means Thomas has really early material. Are they wrong?”

“They’re wrong for several reasons,” he said. “Number one, as I explained, Thomas has too much New Testament in it. Not only that, but Thomas doesn’t have early, pre-Synoptic material. Thomas has forms that reflect the later developments in Luke or Matthew.”

I was confused. “Explain what you mean,” I said.

“Matthew and Luke sometimes improve on Mark’s grammar and word choice. Mark is not real polished in terms of Greek grammar and style, while Matthew and Luke are much more so. And in the Gospel of Thomas we find these more polished Matthew and Luke forms of the sayings of Jesus. So Thomas isn’t referring to the earlier Mark, but to the later Matthew and Luke. We also find references to the special material that’s only found in Matthew and only in Luke, both of which scholars think is later, not earlier.

“And Thomas has material from the Gospel of John. How can Thomas be written in the 50s and the 60s but still have Johannine material that doesn’t get written down until the 90s? It gets even worse when we find that some of the material that certain scholars think is old and independent actually reflects Syrian development.”

Again, I asked him to elaborate. “The Gospels are published in the Greek language,” he said. “Christianity then spread to all sorts of language groups. Of course, it goes eastward, where people speak a form of Aramaic called Syriac.”

“So the Gospels were translated into Syriac?”

“Not immediately. There was a guy named Tatian, a student of Justin Martyr, who created a written harmony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the year 175. It’s called the Diatessaron, which means, ‘through the four.’ What he did was blend all four Gospels together and present it in Syriac. So the first time Syrian-speaking Christians had access to the Gospels was not as separate Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but as the blended, harmonized form.

“In blending together the sayings of the four Gospels, Tatian created some new forms, because it was part Matthew, part Luke, and so forth. Here’s the clincher: those distinctive Syrian forms show up in the Gospel of Thomas.

“What’s more, a study by Nicholas Perrin has found that in places the Gospel of Thomas is also acquainted with the order and arrangement of material in the Diatessaron. All of this means Thomas must have been written later than the Diatessaron in 175. Now everything begins to add up. Of course Thomas knows more than half of the New Testament. By the end of the second century, you’re in a position to know that much. And Thomas reflects Syrian ideas.”

“Such as what?”

Evans replied with a question of his own: “How does the Gospel of Thomas refer to Thomas?”

Feeling a bit like one of his students, I searched my memory. “As Judas Thomas,” I offered.

“That’s right,” he said. “That name is found in the Syrian church — and nowhere else. Also, the Syrian church was very much into ascetics. They did not like wealth. They did not like businessmen and commercialism. That shows up in Thomas. They were into elitism and mysticism. And guess what? That also shows up in Thomas.

“But maybe this is the most interesting evidence. If you read Thomas in Greek or Coptic, it looks like the 114 sayings aren’t in any particular order. It appears to be just a random collection of what Jesus supposedly said. But if you translate it into Syriac, something extremely intriguing emerges. Suddenly, you discover more than five hundred Syrian catchwords that link virtually all the 114 sayings in order to help people memorize the gospel.³¹ In other words, Saying 2 is followed by Saying 3 because Saying 2 refers to a certain word that’s then contained in Saying 3. And Saying 3 has a certain word that leads you into Saying 4. It was a memorization aid.

“So you have distinctive Syrian sayings, you have Thomas called Judas Thomas, you have Syriac catchwords, you have familiarity with more than one-half of the New Testament—what does it all add up to? Everything points to Thomas being written at the end of the second century, no earlier than 175 and probably closer to 200.”

I had to admit: that was an extremely impressive case. Still, I knew Thomas supporters would raise arguments to the contrary. “A few scholars point out that there was apparently a collection of Jesus’ sayings called Q that was used as a source by Matthew and Luke and was therefore extremely early,” I said. “Similarly, the Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings — so maybe they’re similar genres and therefore Thomas must be early like Q.” ³²

Evans rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah, what a brilliant argument!” he said, his sarcasm in full bloom. “What they don’t seem to realize is that at the end of the second century, there was another collection of sayings produced, called the Sentences of Sextus. And by the end of the second century, a collection of sayings of the rabbis was produced. So what is it about collections of sayings that argues for the middle of the first century only? The collections genre was just as popular in Syria at the end of the second century as it was anywhere else in an earlier period.”

I tried another approach. “What about the argument that there’s an earlier edition of Thomas, with more ancient elements, that’s embedded in the text?”

“Obviously, Thomas is depending on some traditions that have been inherited. So, yes, there’s some earlier stuff in it,” he said. “But when you say there was an earlier Gospel of Thomas—a coherent, whole, discrete unit — now you’re claiming something for which you should have evidence. Frankly, there is no such evidence.

“That’s when a few scholars turn to what we call ‘special pleading.’ They’re aware of the points I’ve been making today. They know this evidence embarrasses their theory that Thomas is very early. So they hypothesize a different form of Thomas that they claim was earlier than the one we now have. That is, instead of modifying their theory to fit the evidence, they modify the evidence to fit the theory. Well, I’m sorry—where I come from, when you do history and examine documents, you’re not allowed to get away with that. You deal with the evidence that you have.”

“Pagels claims: ‘The Gospel of Thomas contains teaching venerated by ‘Thomas Christians,’ apparently an early group that . . . thrived during the first century,’ ’’ I said.³³ “Do you see any evidence of this stream of Christianity existing in the early days of the faith? ”

“No, the ‘Thomas Christians’ are the Christians of Syria, and they thrived at the end of the second century. Think about this: If ‘Thomas Christians’ were running around at the end of the first century, how come church fathers writing in the 90s, around 100 and 110, never refer to them? How come they don’t appear on the radar until the end of the second century?”

Evans left those questions hanging in the air. There was no need to try to provide an answer.

JESUS ACCORDING TO THOMAS

I had to admit: Evans had done a persuasive job in establishing that the Gospel of Thomas dates to the late second century and therefore lacks credibility in its depiction of Jesus. However, I was still interested in how this ancient text portrays him. After all, more

and more people are exploring Gnosticism, especially on the Internet, where Davies even maintains a “Gospel of Thomas Homepage.”³⁴ “How does Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas differ from the Jesus we see in the four Gospels?” I asked Evans.

“Jesus in Thomas teaches a mystical understanding of the good news,” he responded. “That is, inner light, inner revelation, freeing oneself from materialism, greed, and the usual worries of life. Some of the material in Thomas is in step with Wisdom teaching, like the book of Proverbs, and even with some of Jesus’ teaching. It’s just skewed or exaggerated so that it becomes inner, mystical, private, personal, and not very much community or collective. Indeed, some of the mysticism in Thomas is very similar to Tatian’s distinctive views, which again argues for lateness, not antiquity.

“There’s no longer any interest in this world being redeemed. That, of course, is the Gnostic element. This world is hopeless, it’s lost, it will be destroyed, rather than being restored and redeemed. Israel’s promises no longer mean anything. In fact, there’s a touch of anti-Semitism in Thomas.”

“It’s a bit anti-women too, isn’t it? ” I added.

“Yes, it’s very politically incorrect the way it concludes,” he said. “Simon Peter says, ‘Miryam’ — or Mary — ‘should leave us. Females are not worthy of life,’ and Jesus answers, ‘Look, I shall guide her to make her male, so she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.’ I’ve actually heard gratuitous assertions that Thomas originally didn’t have that conclusion. So there you go: you just redefine the evidence if it doesn’t fit your theory.”

Interestingly, the Gnostic gospels as a whole don’t elevate women in the way that some authors have claimed. As Witherington points out:

The Gnostic literature is written by those who wish to get beyond human sexual matters, who see such material things as hindrances to the core of a person’s true identity. Thus it is not true that women are more affirmed as women in the Gnostic literature than they are in the canonical Gospels. Quite the opposite is the case. The Gnostic literature is all about transcending or ignoring one’s material or bodily identity. But the canonical Gospels affirm maleness and femaleness as part of the goodness of God’s creation.³⁵

“What about salvation in Thomas? ” I asked Evans.

“Salvation is not perhaps exactly the way it is in other Gnostic texts, but it’s pretty close,” he answered. “It comes from self-knowledge, from understanding oneself authentically, and recognizing where one fits into the cosmos, as well as repudiating and not getting caught up with this world. So it’s slightly Christian, slightly Old Testament, slightly Gnostic.”

“And the resurrection? ”

He leaned forward. “That’s an interesting question,” he said. “Jesus is called the ‘living one.’ Some wonder if the post-Easter and pre-Easter Jesus are blended together in Thomas. But it doesn’t even matter to them—this is the revealing Jesus.”

“History itself doesn’t seem to matter very much to the Gnostics,” I observed.

“Yes, that’s right,” Evans said. “Contrast that with the canonical Gospels. The reason for the Christian movement in the New Testament is that an event of history has taken place. Jesus has become flesh, we have seen him, we have touched him, he died on the cross, and on Sunday morning he was resurrected. But for the Gnostics, Jesus is a revealer—he tells us things and we must internalize and live in light of them. What actually happened becomes less relevant. It isn’t the story that counts anymore; it’s the thought. It isn’t a response of faith in something God has done; it’s just knowing what you’re supposed to know.” “So the idea of Jesus dying for our sins would not be a . . . ,” I said, pausing to let him finish the sentence.

“No, in their view Jesus didn’t die for our sins,” he said. “He came so that we would have knowledge. How he left doesn’t matter.”

“The Jesus Seminar elevated the Gospel of Thomas to equal stature with the canonical Gospels in The Five Gospels,” I observed. “Even if we grant that Thomas was written much later than the New Testament, do you think a legitimate argument can be made that Thomas should have been included in the Bible?”

Evans was adamant. “No, I’m sorry, it cannot,” he insisted, becoming more animated as he spoke. “If Thomas is to be included, then why not the Diatessaron, because that’s its source? Why not any mishmash written by anyone at the end of the second century that takes second- and third-hand materials, blends them together, and creates an inauthentic setting? Would even a Jesus Seminar scholar argue sincerely that the Jesus of Thomas is closer to the historical Jesus of the 20s and 30s than the Jesus we have presented in Mark or Q? I can’t believe that!

“What happens is that some radical scholars are hypercritical of the canonical Gospels and shove them to the end of the first century. Then they’ll take these alternative gospels and not be critical of them at all. By being naive and gullible, they drag them to the early second century, or they even smuggle them in supposed ‘early forms’ into the first century. Then they can say all these documents were written at approximately the same time by approximately the same kinds of people in terms of their qualifications. Now you go back to Koester’s statement: it’s just dogmatism and prejudice to privilege the canonical Gospels.

“If you picture fifteen or twenty gospels as all being part of one soupy gray porridge, then picking out four of them and saying these four are privileged—well, yeah, that does sound rather dogmatic. But that grossly misrepresents the evidence. Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were earlier than all these other gospels, and they have credible connections with the first generation, apostolic, eyewitness sources. The only way to deny that is to say, well, I don’t care what the evidence says, I will instead rely on my own intuition and guesswork and preference. Now, I call that dogmatic and prejudiced!”

I was thankful that Evans didn’t politely dance around issues the way some scholars do. I decided to ask his opinion about something else Pagels had said to me—suspecting that he would again be direct in his answer.

“Pagels thinks the Gospel of Thomas should be read alongside Mark, which is the public teaching of Jesus, because Thomas ‘possibly’ preserves Jesus’ private teaching,” I said. “Would you suggest people use Thomas in this way? ”

“I disagree profoundly,” came his immediate response. “That’s wishful thinking. I don’t think there’s any hope in the world that this is Jesus’ private teaching. Let’s put it this way: if anything in the Gospel of Thomas actually goes back to Jesus, it’s because it reflects authentic tradition that is already preserved in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Everything distinctive in Thomas turns out to be late second-century Syrian tradition.”

Referring to my notes, I read Evans this quote from Jenkins:

The new portrait of Gnosticism is profoundly attractive for modern seekers, that large constituency interested in spirituality without the trappings of organized religion or dogma. For such an audience, texts like Thomas are so enticing because of their individualistic quality, their portrait of a Jesus who is a wisdom teacher rather than a Redeemer or heavenly Savior.³⁶

“Do you think that’s true?” I asked.

“We’re seeing conflicting graphs these days — there’s an increased interest in spirituality and a decreased interest in organized religion,” he said. “Well, that makes Thomas attractive. If you are biblically illiterate and don’t care about history or what really occurred with Jesus, if you’re not interested in the organized church, then Thomas would be interesting. Let’s face it: we’re in a postmodern era that is interested in oddball, eclectic, in some cases downright spooky aspects of spirituality, and Thomas kind of fits in.

“It’s sort of like reading Nostradamus—it’s ambiguous, it’s vague, it’s open to all kinds of interpretation. And Thomas doesn’t lay very heavy demands on anyone. You’re chastised for being ignorant — well, nobody wants to be ignorant. There isn’t any severe rebuke for immorality or injustice — things that the authentic Jesus does talk about.”

My thoughts went to people who are reading exaggerated claims about Thomas in books and on the Internet. “What about average, everyday Christians?” I said. “What current value does Thomas have for them?”

Evans thought for a moment before answering. “I don’t know that Thomas has any value for everyday Christians. If you’re looking for the real Jesus, there are far, far better places to go —like the canonical Gospels,” he said. “However, I tell my students that if they’re curious about documents outside the New Testament, then go ahead and read them. I say, ‘You tell me: Should Thomas be right alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John?’ Without exception, they come back and say, ‘My goodness, what weird stuff. Good grief! Now I think the church chose wisely.’

“Once these documents are carefully studied, fairly and in full context, with no prejudice or no bias, with no axe to grind or special pleading, if you have a historical perspective in mind, then you have to say the early church made very wise choices from the get-go. You don’t come up with a Dan Brown conclusion that, boy, somebody really fooled around with the stew; they should have ended up with the gospels of Philip, Thomas, and Mary instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

“It’s not a photo finish,” he declared. “Not even close.”

DOCUMENT #2: THE GOSPEL OF PETER

Next I turned to the “Gospel of Peter,” knowing that when I called it by that title, I was making an assumption that may very well not be correct. “Scholars aren’t even sure they’ve got the ‘Gospel of Peter,’ are they? ” I asked.

“No,” he replied. “They’re not.”

“Then why has it been called by that name?”

“The document was found in the 1880s in Akhmtm, Egypt, in a codex inside the coffin of a Christian monk who died in the ninth century. In this codex was the Apocalypse of Peter, an account of the martyrdom of St. Julian from the Byzantine era, fragments of Greek Enoch, and a gospel fragment without its beginning or end, so there’s no title. But because the apostle Peter appears in the text and narrates it, and because it was accompanied by the Apocalypse of Peter when it was found, archaeologists assumed it was the lost Gospel of Peter that the ancient church historian Eusebius and Bishop Serapion had warned was falsely attributed to the apostle.”

“They didn’t consider it to be reliable?” I asked.

“Oh, heavens, no! ” he replied, shaking his head. “It was considered full of errors and false teaching and therefore should not be read in the church.”

“So we don’t know for sure that this is a copy of that gospel?” “We don’t know that at all.”

“What about you?” I asked. “You’re apparently pretty skeptical.” “I’m extremely skeptical,” he said, “because Bishop Serapion says the Gospel of Peter was ‘docetic,’ which means Jesus only appeared to be physical. In other words, he didn’t leave footprints; his feet didn’t quite touch the ground. Yet where’s the docetism in the Akhmfm fragment?” I pondered that question. “Some people point to the part that says it was as if Jesus felt no pain during the crucifixion,” I observed.

“That’s not docetism,” Evans insisted. “That’s lionizing Jesus by saying that even though he was brutally treated, he didn’t lose selfcontrol. He didn’t cry out in pain. If the text is understood rightly, it implies he felt the pain but controlled himself.”

“Overall,” I said, “what does the fragment talk about?”

“It starts with Pilate giving up Jesus to the crowd to be crucified. Then there’s this extraordinarily crazy story about the ruling priest spending the night in a cemetery.” Evans’s eyes got wide. “This writer doesn’t know what he’s talking about! ” he declared. “No ruling priest would do that! Then the stone of Jesus’ tomb rolls aside and two angels, whose heads reach all the way to the clouds, go into the tomb and come out helping a third person, whose head goes above the clouds. I mean, we have an NBA dream team here!” he added with a chuckle.

“Following them, coming out of the cave, is a cross,” he continued. “I mean, this is bizarre! You wonder—how does it ambulate? Is it a pogo stick? Does it have wheels? Then a heavenly voice says, ‘Have you preached to them that sleep?’ Jesus doesn’t answer—the cross does! The cross says, ‘Yes!’ This is extraordinary! You read this and you say, ‘I can’t believe my eyes.’ How can anyone suggest that this account of a talking cross and angels with their heads going to the clouds could really be an early, primitive account about Jesus?” “But,” I insisted, “Crossan does date it very early. He extracts what he calls the ‘Cross Gospel’ from it and says all four Gospel accounts are based on this. In his book The Cross That Spoke, he dates this gospel to as early as AD 50.” ³⁷

Evans shook his head. “Crossan is just about all by himself on that point. Very, very few scholars would say the Akhmtm fragment could be as early as the New Testament Gospels, but I’m not so sure even they would say it’s got an early core on which the canonical Gospels depend. Crossan does, but not too many people think that’s credible, since it’s such a tour de force of special pleading.

“The problem is when the Akhmtm fragment is critically studied, it appears to be loosely based on Matthew, and it contains errors that somebody ignorant of first-century political and cultural realities in Palestine would make — like having ruling priests spend the night in the graveyard. They would not do that — and anybody writing in the middle of the first century would know that. Obviously, he’s ignorant of Jewish burial traditions and rules about corpse impurity. Also, the fragment is anti-Semitic, which would reflect lateness, not earliness. Because who would write a gospel in the 50s?”

“A Jewish person,” I ventured.

“That’s right. So now we supposedly have an anti-Semitic person writing a document on which the Jewish authors — Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—would base their accounts?³⁸ This is absurd! Would they base their accounts on a document that has manifest errors that would be obvious to them? The writer doesn’t even know who rules what part of Israel at that time.

“And Jesus’ head goes into the clouds? This probably represents embellishment of the Shepherd of Hermes, written between AD 110 and 140, and an addition to Ezra in the mid-second century. What about the cross being buried with Jesus — and talking? This is the stuff of later legend. In the late second century, and on into the third, there were some fantastic ideas that cropped up about Jesus’ cross, like going wherever he goes and preceding him into heaven.

“Any fair-minded historical reading of the Akhmtm fragment would say that, given the errors and the coherence with documented late tradition, that this may very well not be the lost Gospel of Peter at all. If it isn’t, we could date it in the third century, or even the fourth or fifth centuries. It’s little more than a blend of details from the four canonical Gospels, especially from Matthew, embellished with pious imagination, apologetic concerns, and a touch of anti-Semitism.

“Moody Smith of Duke Divinity School put it this way: ‘Is it thinkable that the tradition began with the legendary, the mythological, the anti-Jewish, and indeed the fantastic, and moved in the direction of the historically restrained and sober? ’ ”³⁹

Evans waited for the question to sink in. “Of course not,” he concluded. “That’s not how history works. It doesn’t move from wild stories of talking crosses and angels with their heads going to the clouds and then progress to the sober accounts of the canonical Gospels.”

DOCUMENT #3: THE GOSPEL OF MARY

Popularized by Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code, the Gospel of Mary has become increasingly fashionable, especially among women who see it as validating female leadership in the church. “What about any historical connection with Mary herself?” I asked Evans.

“Nobody in all seriousness who’s a scholar and is competent would say Mary Magdalene composed this gospel that now bears her name.”

“Her name was attached to legitimize it? ” I asked.

“Sure. And by the way, that’s what Gnostics would do. In contrast, the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke circulated anonymously. Their authority and truth were transparent. Everybody knew this was what Jesus taught, so there wasn’t much concern over who wrote it down. But in the second century, they had to force it. So the gospels of the second century and later would attach a first-century name to try to bootstrap their credibility, since they didn’t sound like Jesus. They had to compensate by saying, well, Thomas or Peter or Philip or Mary wrote it, so it must have credibility.”

“You’d date the Gospel of Mary to the second century?”

“Yes, probably between 150 and 200,” he replied. “And, frankly, that’s not very controversial. Scholars are virtually unanimous about this. There’s nothing in it that we can trace back with any confidence to the first century or to the historical Jesus or to the historical Mary.” “What takes place in the gospel? ”

“Mary Magdalene tells the disciples about some revelations that Jesus gave her, but Andrew and Peter are skeptical because the teaching is at odds with what Jesus had taught them. Mary is saddened that they’d think she would misrepresent Jesus’ words, and she begins to cry. Levi rebukes Peter, defends Mary, and exhorts the disciples to preach the gospel, ‘neither setting boundaries nor laying down laws, as the Savior said.’ They go forth and that’s the end.”

“What’s the significance of Jesus supposedly being against the setting of boundaries? ” I asked.

“It appears to be a reaction to the kind of rules laid down in the pastoral letters. A guy may want to be a bishop, but he must meet certain specified qualifications. Deaconesses likewise must be this and not that. And this Gospel of Mary appears to be something of a protest in the middle of the second century against rules that were probably shutting out eccentric, offbeat teachers, maybe some of whom are women.

“Can you just imagine a woman of a Gnostic orientation who wanted to preach from time to time? The bishop declines permission, maybe appealing to the pastoral letters. So the Gospel of Mary, with a decidedly Gnostic flavor, deals with that particular issue by saying that Jesus told Mary in a revelation not to lay down rules. The gospel defends the right of women to be teachers, perhaps in opposition to the growing institutionalization of Christianity that put some restrictions on women.

“Now, it’s just fragmentary enough that we don’t know quite the whole story — so you can modernize it, you can make it politically correct, you can feminize it, you can do all kinds of things with it, which some people do. What’s clear, though, is that the gospel fits a setting that’s no earlier than the mid-second century.”

“I hesitate to bring this up, because it’s already been thoroughly debunked by so many credible scholars,” I said, “but we might as well mention that this gospel does not actually support the now-popular idea that Jesus was married to Mary.”⁴⁰

“No legitimate scholar believes they were wed,” he replied. “It’s the irresponsible, the Dan Browns and Michael Baigents of the world, who use the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Philip to try to make that case, but they utterly fail. Those texts are not only unhistorical, but even they don’t say they were married. Only the truly gullible — or those advancing their own theological agenda—buy into that.”

DOCUMENT #4: THE SECRET GOSPEL OF MARK

I have investigated a lot of extraordinary cases as a journalist: police framing innocent people, corporate bigwigs knowingly producing dangerous products, and political corruption of all kinds. But as I sat in Evans’s dining room, listening in astonishment, he unfolded a bizarre story of academic intrigue that rivaled anything I had ever landed on the front page of the Chicago Tribune. On the surface, the Secret Gospel of Mark’s homoerotic suggestions were shocking enough; beneath the surface, the story behind the gospel left me shaking my head in bewilderment.

“The story goes like this,” Evans began. He took a sip of water and then settled into his chair. “Morton Smith was a professor of Judeo-Christian origins at Columbia University for years. At a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature in 1960, he announced that two years earlier he had made a historic discovery at the Mar Saba Monastery in the Judean wilderness.

“In the back of a 1646 book was two and a half pages of a letter ostensibly from Clement of Alexandria, who lived in the second century, to someone named Theodore. Smith speculated that a monk copied the letter onto the blank pages at the back of the book to preserve it, maybe because the original papyrus had been crumbling.

“The letter was in Greek, and Smith said it was written with an eighteenth-century hand. Here’s what was so interesting: the letter contained two quotes from a previously unknown mystical or secret version of the Gospel of Mark. It describes Jesus raising a young man from the dead, and then later the youth comes to him ‘wearing a linen cloth over his naked body’ and ‘remained with him that night’ so that he could be taught ‘the mystery of the kingdom of God.’ Frankly, the homoerotic suggestion was hard to miss. The letter then ends very abruptly, just after it indicates that something really important was going to be revealed.”

“How important was this discovery?” I asked.

“Well, if it really was written by the author of the Gospel of Mark, then it would certainly be significant,” Evans said. “Smith later wrote two books analyzing it—one 450-page scholarly treatment published by Harvard University Press, and a more popular edition for a general audience. A few prominent scholars from the Jesus Seminar said Clement’s letter could contain an earlier version of Mark than what we have in the New Testament. They made some pretty bold claims about it. But from the beginning there were rumblings that this might be a forgery.”

Indeed, the headlines in the New York Times at the time of Smith’s announcement reflected the brewing controversy. “A New Gospel Ascribed to Mark,” said the newspaper on December 30, 1960. The next day came this headline: “Expert Disputes ‘Secret Gospel.’ ”

For a journalist, the next question was obvious: “Why wasn’t the document simply examined by experts? ”

“Because,” Evans said with a grin, “It’s gone. Vanished. Smith said he left it at the monastery, but today nobody can find it, so it can’t be subjected to ink tests and other analysis. But he did photograph it, and after he died in 1991, large color photographs of the text were studied by Stephen Carlson.”

Carlson, a well-regarded patent attorney and amateur biblical scholar, thoroughly investigated the case, bringing in handwriting experts and writing The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark in 2005.⁴¹

“What’s your opinion about the authenticity of the letter?” I asked.

Evans’s answer was dramatic: “I think the clues clearly lead to the conclusion that the letter is a hoax and that Smith is almost certainly the hoaxer.”

I sat back in my chair. This was absolutely incredible to contemplate: a prominent professor—lauded by Pagels as having “impeccable . . . scholarly credentials”⁴² — supposedly falsifying an ancient letter and fooling a lot of other scholars, who formulated their own elaborate theories based on the spurious text.

“Are you saying Smith not only forged the document,” I said in amazement, “but that he then wrote a 450-page scholarly book analyzing it?”

“Yes,” Evans replied. “It’s bizarre. Actually, if you really read his book, you’ll find much of it was filler. But I’ve met people who say, ‘I

knew Morton Smith, and he was fully capable of doing such a thing.’ I do think, though, that the question of his motive is the weakest part of the case. He himself was gay, which was a closely guarded secret in the 1950s. He had been denied tenure at Brown University and may have wanted to demonstrate his intellectual superiority by pulling off something like this.”

Evans picked up Carlson’s book and searched through it until he came to the quote he was after. “Carlson put it this way,” he said, reading:

[Smith] was denied tenure in 1955 at the university where he started his career. Smith was forty years old and might have been perceived as over-the-hill. A successful hoax could be exactly what Smith needed to prove to himself that he was smarter than his peers and might even jump start his career in the process.⁴³

Evans closed the book. “Who knows? I certainly can’t divine someone’s intentions,” he concluded. “But why he did it is a rather secondary question. The big issue is whether he did, indeed, write the text—and I believe the evidence is compelling that he did.”

“MORTON THE BALDY”

I prodded Evans to elaborate. “What’s the evidence?” I asked. “When experts examined the magnified photos of the text, they could see what they call ‘forger’s tremor,’ where the text isn’t really written, but instead it’s being drawn by a forger in an attempt to deceive. There are shaky lines, pen lifts in the middle of strokes — all kinds of indications that this was forged. On top of that, when the Greek letters were compared to a sample of Smith’s own writing, they found the Clement text had the same unusual way of making the Greek letters theta and lambda as he did. That’s a powerful link.

“Plus, the photos indicated the presence of mildew on the book — something that wouldn’t occur in a book from the dry climate where the monastery was located. More likely, the book was from somewhere else — Europe or North America. Also, there was no evidence of this book being in the Mar Saba library prior to Smith’s ‘discovering’ it.

“And here’s something strange: the book had ‘Smith 65’ written on it. Would you, if you were a guest in somebody’s library, looking at his rare books, write ‘Strobel 65’ on the title page? I find that very strange. If it’s your book, however, you might not hesitate. By the way, a copy of that book back in the 1950s would have cost only a couple of hundred dollars and easily could have been smuggled into the monastery library.

“But one of the most intriguing clues involves another Mar Sara document that had been cataloged by Smith. It’s written in the same hand as the Clement letter. But there are two unusual things about it. First, Smith himself dated this sample to the twentieth century, rather than the eighteenth century when the Clement letter was supposedly written. And second, it’s signed ‘M. Madiotes.’ ”

The name didn’t mean anything to me. “Who’s that?”

“Very good question. It sounds like a Greek name, but it turns out it’s pseudo-Greek, coming from a root that means ‘sphere,’ ‘cueball,’ or ‘bald.’ Interestingly, Smith was prominently bald for his entire adulthood. So could the name mean ‘Morton the Baldy’? Certainly seems possible.”

In his book, Carlson said, “It’s not uncommon for the hoaxer to plant deliberate mistakes or jokes as clues to the fake’s true nature.”⁴⁴ Secret Mark, he said, “abounds in jokes” that point toward Smith as the hoaxer.⁴⁵

Also intriguing, wrote Carlson, is that Smith’s next major work, Jesus the Magician, “was careful not to rely on Secret Mark itself,” even though it would have seemed appropriate to do so. In fact, he said, “Secret Mark did not become a major factor in his scholarship apart from the books disclosing it to the world.”⁴⁶

Evans said this makes perfect sense to him. “After all, Smith considered his other books to be real scholarship. He was enough of a scholar that he wasn’t going to damage his own work by incorporating into his footnotes and references a work that he knows is phony.” “Anything else?”

“There are a lot of other clues, but one that’s particularly damaging is the fact that before he announced the existence of Secret Mark, Smith had earlier written about Mark’s mystery of the kingdom of God and forbidden sexual practices—themes that he also finds in Secret Mark, which he just coincidentally happened to have ‘discovered.’ That’s extremely suspicious.”⁴⁷

An Episcopalian priest-turned-atheist, Smith has been described as someone who reveled in enraging the establishment, “provoking the conventionally faithful,” and painting a portrait of Jesus that was “far from the respectable, rational, middle-class Christianity of most of his readers.”⁴⁸ His writings claimed Jesus was a magician who used hallucinatory techniques to initiate his closest confidants “into ecstatic visions of heaven . . . to share with them his experience of liberation from Jewish law.”⁴⁹ Wrote Carlson:

Secret Mark supports not only Smith’s love of controversy but also his favorite target. It was written during the 1950s, during an especially oppressive moment in American history when mainline ministers were urging the police to crack down on gay men gathered in public parks. What could be more upsetting to the Establishment in this historical moment than the intimation, revealed in an ancient text by the author of the oldest gospel, that they are crucifying Jesus Christ all over again?⁵⁰

“What does it say about biblical scholarship,” I asked Evans, “that many scholars accepted Secret Mark apparently without asking enough critical questions?”

“I think it’s an embarrassment,” came his reply. “Too many well-publicized scholars are so fond of oddball documents and theories that they were too ready to accept Secret Mark as genuine. In fact, some in the Jesus Seminar were too quick to say, well, yes, there probably was a Secret Mark floating around and, well, yes, it probably is earlier than the canonical Mark.

“And Smith,” he added, “had to be laughing.”

DOCUMENT #5: THE JESUS PAPERS

I knew I was going to get an earful when I brought up Baigent’s recent bestseller The Jesus Papers. Scholars uniformly scoff at Baigent’s conspiracy theories and poorly supported allegations, which sound convincing to those untrained in ancient history but which quickly collapse upon examination by experts. The coauthor of Holy Blood, Holy Grail isn’t a historian; his degrees are in psychology and “mysticism and religious experience.” Still, I couldn’t ignore a book that has received as much media attention—and that has sold as many copies—as The Jesus Papers.

“Baigent reports the discovery of two papyrus documents, both written in Aramaic and dated back to the time of Jesus’ crucifixion,” I said. “The writer calls himself ‘the Messiah of the children of Israel,’ and he clarifies to the Sanhedrin that he never intended to claim that he was God, but that he merely embodied God’s Spirit. Wouldn’t you concede that if this is legitimate, it would be a huge discovery?” “Well, of course. If we were to find something that we had good reason to believe Jesus actually composed, then that would be breathtaking,” he said. “But the flimsiness of this entire thing is just ridiculous. Baigent says he met somebody who said that in 1961, while excavating underneath a house in Jerusalem, he found two documents written in Aramaic, which he showed to two famous archaeologists who confirmed their date and authenticity. They dated them to roughly the time that Jesus was put to death.

“Baigent describes how he went into a walk-in safe of an antiquities collector and saw the papyri under glass. He couldn’t take a picture of them, of course. He has admitted that he doesn’t read Aramaic and said the other guy doesn’t either—so how does he know what they say? He’s assured that two well-known archaeologists, Yigael Yadin and Nahman Avigad, have confirmed it. Oh, but did I mention that Yadin and Avigad are dead?

“So we have an author with dubious credibility in the first place; an antiquities dealer who can’t be identified; documents that Baigent can’t read or produce and for which we have no translation or verification; and two archaeologists who are dead. This is just the dumbest thing.” “Yet,” I pointed out, “the book became a bestseller and some people apparently believe it.”

“It’s astounding,” he said, his voice betraying more frustration than amazement. “This is voodoo scholarship. It’s just so silly. It’s possible that there are some documents under glass that aren’t ancient at all and that are spurious or misunderstood. But you have to remember that no papyrus buried in the ground in Jerusalem will survive two thousand years, period. This might happen in the dry sands of the Dead Sea region or Egypt, but it rains in Jerusalem. It’s nothing to get two inches of snow in January in Jerusalem. You can’t bury papyrus in the moist ground and expect it to still be there, legible, two thousand years later. Any archaeologist will tell you that. So there’s nothing to this.

“He’s playing on the ignorance of people as well as the desire for a titillating tale of conspiracy, intrigue, and hiding the truth. And it’s always the Vatican getting involved—buying off people or pressuring people into silence. Baigent says Pope John XXIII asked the archaeologists to destroy these incriminating documents, but they refused.”

Evans’s sarcasm hit full stride. “It’s astonishing for as active and energetic as the Vatican is when it comes to bribing people and destroying documents that they never are able to cover their tracks,” he said, smiling. “Baigent can always find out.”

DOCUMENT #6: THE GOSPEL OF JUDAS

On April 6, 2006, facing the bright television lights of more than a hundred members of the news media, Evans was among the biblical scholars who announced the discovery and translation of the long-lost Gospel of Judas. The National Geographic Society had recruited Evans to be part of a team to assist with interpreting the codex, which was discovered in the late 1970s and took a circuitous route to end up the focus of intense worldwide interest.

Carbon-14 dating indicates the papyrus dates back to AD 220 to 340, although team members leaned toward 300 and 320. The original gospel, however, was written prior to 180, which is when the church father Irenaeus warned that this “fictitious history” was floating around.⁵¹

The most sensational claims in the text are that Judas Iscariot was Jesus’ greatest disciple, who alone was able to understand Jesus’ most profound teaching, and that the two of them conspired to arrange for Jesus’ betrayal. “You will exceed them all,” Jesus is quoted as telling Judas, “for you will sacrifice the man who clothes me.” If true, this would obviously cast Judas and Jesus in a much different light than has traditionally been accepted.

I pulled out a copy of some commentary I had printed out from the Internet. “This person suggests that the Gospel of Judas predates the biblical Gospels and was burned by the church at the Council of Nicea in 325,” I said.

Evans was taken aback. “That’s just not true,” he replied indignantly.

I added, “There was even a crawler along the bottom of a television news program that said: ‘The Gospel of Judas was edited out of the Bible in the fourth century.’ ”

Evans laughed. “Edited out of the Bible? Someone is accepting what Dan Brown says about the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century determining what was in and out of the Bible—which, of course, is pure poppycock.”

“Is there anything historical about Jesus and Judas in this document?”

“Probably not. Notice, by the way, that the document calls itself the ‘Gospel of Judas,’ not the ‘Gospel According to Judas,’ as we have in the New Testament Gospels. So whoever wrote this document may have been indicating that Judas should not be understood as the author of the gospel, but rather that this is a gospel about Judas. In any event, it’s written long after Judas lived. But still, it does have historical significance.”

“How so?”

“It tells us Irenaeus knew what he was talking about when he wrote that this gospel existed; so that’s another point in favor of his credibility. It tells us something about second-century Gnosticism and perhaps a group called the Cainites, who are a bit mysterious to us. Did they really exist? Maybe.”

“What did they believe? ”

“They identified with the villains of the Bible,” he said. “They believed that the god of this world is evil, and so anyone that he hates must really be a hero. So they would lionize Cain, Esau, the people of Sodom—and naturally Judas fits right in there. Just how positive the portrait of Judas is in this new text remains an open question.

“Of course, our tendency is to demonize Judas, but it’s interesting that he carried the money box for Jesus. If you look at the hierarchy in the priestly establishment, you’ve got the high priest, then number two is the captain of the treasury. He’ll be the next high priest, more than likely. And Judas was walking around with the treasury box.”

“So he may have been more prominent than we give him credit for? ” I asked.

“Yes, exactly. It’s interesting too that in the Gospel of John, Jesus says to Judas, ‘What you are going to do, do quickly.’⁵² The other disciples didn’t know what Jesus was talking about. Jesus had apparently made a private arrangement with Judas; we also have other examples of Jesus having a private arrangement with a few disciples.⁵³ It may be that the Gospel of Judas gives us a greatly developed, unhistorical, and imaginative expansion of this theme.”

I said, “You and the other scholars involved with this project have been careful to caution that this gospel doesn’t really tell us anything reliable about Jesus or Judas. But I’ve seen all kinds of wild speculation on the Internet. Does that concern you?”

“When we announced the discovery, I speculated that some popular writers would produce fanciful tales about the ‘true story’ behind this gospel—and apparently that’s happening to some extent,” he answered. “Unfortunately, it’s a reflection of what we’ve seen with some of these other gospels. Just because something’s on a screen or in a book doesn’t mean it’s true. I’d caution people to apply the historical tests I mentioned earlier and then make a reasoned judgment instead of being influenced by irresponsible conspiracy theories and other historical nonsense.”

TESTING THE BIBLE’S FOUR GOSPELS

I took a moment to assess how far we had come. I had started with the question of whether six “alternative” gospels could tell me anything new about the real Jesus. Contrary to the claims of a few far leftwing scholars, however, all of them failed the tests of historicity. The Gospel of Thomas could tell me something about second-century mysticism and Gnosticism, but nothing about Jesus beyond a few quotes lifted from the New Testament. The Gospel of Peter, with its talking cross and giant Jesus, flunked the credibility test. The gospels of Mary and Judas were written too late to be meaningful. The Secret Gospel of Mark is a hoax and the Jesus Papers are a joke.

All of this brought me back to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. How would they fare when subjected to a historian’s scrutiny? I asked Evans what he considered to be the best criteria for assessing their reliability.

“One criterion historians use is multiple attestation,” he replied. “In other words, when two or three of the Gospels are saying the same thing, independently — as they often do — then this significantly shifts the burden of proof onto somebody who says they’re just making it up. There’s also the criterion of coherence. Are the Gospels consistent with what we know about the history and culture of Palestine in the 20s and 30s? Actually, they’re loaded with details that we’ve determined are correct thanks to archaeological discoveries.

“Then there’s the dating issue. The Synoptics were written within a generation of Jesus’ ministry; John is within two generations. That encourages us to see them as reliable because they’re written too close to the events to get away with a bunch of lies. And you don’t have any counter-gospels that are repudiating or refuting what they say. We have, then, a treasure trove from any historian’s point of view. Julius Caesar died in 44 BC, and the historian Suetonius is talking about him in 110 - 120 AD. That’s about 155 to 165 years removed. Tacitus, same thing. The Gospels are much better than that.”

“When would you date them? ”

“Very cogent arguments have been made for all three Synoptics having been written in the 50s and 60s. Personally, I’d put the first Gospel, Mark, in the 60s. I think Mark had to have been within the shadow of the Jewish-Roman war of 66 - 70. Jesus says in Mark 13:18, ‘Pray that this will not take place in winter.’ Well, it didn’t. It happened in the summer. This statement makes sense if Mark was published when the war was underway or about to occur. But if it was written in 71 or 72, as some have speculated, that would be an odd statement to leave in place.”

I interrupted. “But whether Mark was written in the 50s or 60s, you’re still talking very early.”

“Absolutely. Jesus died in 30 or 33 AD, and a lot of scholars lean toward 33. That means when Mark’s Gospel was composed, some of Jesus’ youngest followers and disciples would be in their 50s or 60s. Other people in their 30s and 40s grew up hearing stories about Jesus from firsthand eyewitnesses. There’s a density of witness that’s very significant. And, of course, don’t forget that most of Paul’s writings were composed before the Gospels.”

Seeking to clarify a key issue, I said: “When you say Mark was written some thirty-five years after Jesus’ ministry, you’re not suggesting the author had to think back and remember something that happened more than three decades earlier.”

“No, there’s no one individual who had to try to remember everything. We’re not talking about the story of Jesus being remembered by one or two or three people who never see each other. We’re talking about whole communities, never smaller than dozens and probably in the hundreds, that got together and had connections, villages filled with Jesus people in Judea and in Galilee and immigrating throughout the Jewish Diaspora—lots of people pooling and sharing their stories. People were meeting frequently, reviewing his teaching, and making it normative for the way they lived. The teaching was being called to mind and talked about all the time.”

“Then,” I said, “this would protect the story of Jesus from the kind of distortion we see in the children’s game of telephone, where people whisper something, one to another, until at the end the original message is garbled?”

Evans nodded. “Unlike the telephone game, this is a community effort,” he said. “It’s not one guy who tells it to one other guy, who weeks later tells it to one other person, and on and on, so that with the passage of time there would be distortion. This was a living tradition that the community discussed and was constantly remembering, because it was normative, it was precious, they lived by it. The idea that they can’t remember what Jesus said, or they get it out of context, or they twist it, or they can’t distinguish between what Jesus actually said and an utterance of a charismatic Christian in a church much later — this is condescending.”

Glancing at my notebook, I said, “Richard A. Horsley, head of the religion department at the University of Massachusetts, commented recently: ‘I think it would be a consensus among the New Testament scholars that none of the four Gospels is reliable, if what we mean by that is that we have an accurate historical report of Jesus.’⁵⁴ What’s your response?”

“I disagree with Richard completely,” Evans retorted.

“So your assessment of their reliability is—what?”

“I would say the Gospels are essentially reliable, and there are lots and lots of other scholars who agree. There’s every reason to conclude that the Gospels have fairly and accurately reported the essential elements of Jesus’ teachings, life, death, and resurrection. They’re early enough, they’re rooted into the right streams that go back to Jesus and the original people, there’s continuity, there’s proximity, there’s verification of certain distinct points with archaeology and other documents, and then there’s the inner logic. That’s what pulls it all together.” “What about the argument that the Gospels are inherently unreliable because they are basically faith documents written to convince people of something?”

“In other words, if you have a motive for writing, then it’s suspect?” he asked. “What does that do to the Jesus Seminar publications? There’s always a purpose behind anything that’s written. Some people will say this is not just historiography for its own sake — but I don’t know too much historiography that’s written for its own sake anyway. I think that’s simply a red herring. Faith and truthful history aren’t necessarily at odds.”

I issued another challenge. “The Gospels report Jesus doing miraculous things,” I said. “To the twenty-first-century mind, doesn’t this lead to the conclusion that these writings lack credibility?”

“I say let historians be historians. Look at the sources. They tell us that people in antiquity observed that Jesus could do things far better, far more effectively, far more astoundingly than the scribes could in dealing with healings and exorcisms. In their mind, there was only one way to explain it—it’s a miracle. For us to come along and say, ‘Unless we can explain it scientifically, metaphysically, and philosophically, we should just reject it,’ is high-handed arrogance. Bruce Chilton of Bard College says it’s enough for the historian to simply say that the documents tell us this is the way Jesus was perceived by his contemporaries.”

“What about the allegation that the reason we don’t have any competing gospels from the first century is because they were gathered and burned?”

Evans has little patience for such claims, which he has heard all too often in recent years. “For crying out loud, the Christians had no control over the city. They couldn’t command or coerce anyone to burn anything,” he said. “The idea that there was some sort of culling process or purging that took place in the first century is really absurd.” “How about the claim we see in The Da Vinci Code that Constantine collated the books of the Bible in the fourth century and burned all the alternative gospels? ”

“That’s just nonsense,” he said. “The idea of Constantine telling Christians what ought to be in the Bible and gathering up gospels and burning them—that’s fictional material in Dan Brown’s book. It isn’t legitimate history written by historians who know what they’re talking about.”

THE IDENTITY OF JESUS

As we approached the end of our interview, I found myself admiring Evans’s passion. He isn’t some dry academic. He’s bluntly critical of sloppy scholarship and unsubstantiated theories, but at the same time he speaks with heartfelt conviction about the facts that history clearly does support—and that’s where I wanted to steer our conversation: if the biblical Gospels contain our best information about the earliest Christian experience, then what do they tell us about the real Jesus?

“There is no question in my mind that Jesus understood himself as being the figure described in Daniel 7 and that he was anointed to proclaim the Good News — the rule of God,” Evans began. “He sees himself as one with more than just prophetic authority to proclaim it, but as one who has actually stood before God on his throne and received power and authority to proclaim it.

“He is Israel’s Messiah as he defines it, but not as others did. Others saw the Son of David as coming to kill Romans, including the emperor. That was the popular view. Jesus then shocks everyone by saying, no, actually he wants to extend messianic blessings even to the Gentiles.

“So we’re on very, very solid footing that Jesus has a messianic self-understanding, but, again, that means more than the fact that he was anointed. Any prophet or priest could claim that. No, the anointing is more than that—there is a divine sense. He is God’s Son.

“That’s the importance of the parable of the wicked vineyard tenants. In that story told by Jesus, the vineyard owner leased his place to tenant farmers, but when the landowner would send servant after servant to collect his share, the tenants would beat or kill them. Finally, the owner sends his ‘beloved son,’ and they kill him too. When the parable is interpreted in its context, we see that the vineyard owner is God, the tenants represent ancient Israel, and the servants represent prophets. The point is clear: God sent his son. Otherwise, he would just be one more messenger, one more prophet. No—now he has sent his son, and that’s Jesus himself.

“So the high priest Caiaphas asked Jesus under oath: ‘Are you the Messiah, the Son of God?’ Jesus said, ‘Yes, I am. You will see the Son of Man’ — Daniel 7 — ‘sitting at the right hand of the Mighty One’ — Psalm 110—‘and coming on the clouds of heaven’—back to Daniel 7. Caiaphas understood what he meant. He was outraged! ‘You’re going to sit next to God on his chariot throne? Blasphemy,’ he said. ‘We have no need of further witnesses. You’ve heard it yourselves. What do you say? He’s worthy of death.’

“The scandal of Jesus’ answer to Caiaphas, resulting in the crucifixion, is not that Jesus was just claiming to be anointed by God, as some mere messenger of some sort. That could have gotten him a good beating perhaps, especially if he criticized the ruling priest or made threats. But the calls for his execution had to do with him claiming to be God’s Son. That’s what makes it blasphemous. Not irresponsible, not reckless, not dangerous — it was blasphemous to say, ‘I will sit on God’s throne.’

“So the evidence, fairly weighed, concludes that Jesus understood himself as the Messiah, the Son of God. From a historian’s point of view, that explains why all his followers thought that. I mean, after

Easter you didn’t have people running around saying, ‘Jesus was a prophet.’ ‘No, actually he was a rabbi.’ ‘No, he was the Son of God.’ All of them believed Jesus was the Messiah and the Son of God — why? Because that’s what they believed before Easter.

“Easter did not generate that perspective. One of the worst errors in logic on the part of so-called critical scholarship throughout most of the twentieth century was the idea that it was the Easter proclamation that led people to decide Jesus was the Messiah or God’s Son. If Jesus had claimed neither of those things, if his disciples had not thought those things prior to Easter, then his postmortem appearances wouldn’t have led them to think that.

“Why in the world did they say he’s the Messiah and the Son of God? Because that’s what they thought before Easter—based on his own teachings and his own actions.”

DEITY AND HUMANITY

I intended to wrap up our interview by asking Evans to expand upon his own personal convictions. I anticipated that he would further elaborate on the divinity of Jesus—and yet our discussion ended with an unexpected turn.

“How have your decades of research into the Old and New Testaments affected your own view of Jesus?” I asked.

“Well, it’s much more nuanced, but at the end of the day it’s a more realistic Jesus. Personally, I think a lot of Christians — even conservative, Bible-believing Christians —are semi-docetic.”

That took me off-guard. “What do you mean?”

“In other words,” he said, “they halfway believe—without ever giving it any serious thought—what the Docetic Gnostics believed, which is that Jesus actually wasn’t real. ‘Oh, yes, of course, he’s real,’ they’ll say. But they’re not entirely sure how far to go with the incarnation. How human was Jesus? For a lot of them, the human side of Jesus is superficial.

“It’s almost as though a lot of Christians think of Jesus as God wearing a human mask. He’s sort of faking it, pretending to be human. He pretends to perspire, his stomach only appears to gurgle because, of course, he’s not really hungry. In fact, he doesn’t really need to eat. So Jesus is the bionic Son of God who isn’t really human. This is thought to be an exalted Christology, but it’s not. Orthodox Christology also embraces fully the humanity of Jesus.

“What I’m saying is that the divine nature of Jesus should never militate against his full humanity. When that part gets lost, you end up with a pretty superficial understanding of Christology. For example, could Jesus read? ‘Of course he could read! He’s the Son of God!’ That’s not a good answer. At the age of three days, was Jesus fluent in Hebrew? Could he do quantum physics? Well, then, why does the book of Hebrews talk about him learning and so forth? ”

I was listening intently. “So we miss his humanity,” I said, half to myself and half to Evans.

“Yeah, we do,” he said. “We find ourselves fussing and fuming over the divinity, but we miss the humanity. And from the historic point of view of the early church, that’s just as serious an error as, say, the Ebionite direction, which was to deny the divinity.”

Wanting him to explain further, I asked, “What is it we miss about his humanity?”

“Well, a big part of the atonement. He dies in our place as a human being who dies in our place. God didn’t send an angel,” he replied. “And, of course, there’s the identification factor. We can identify with him: he was tempted as we are. How was he tempted if he was just God wearing a mask — faking it and pretending to be a human? Again, that’s Docetic Gnosticism—Jesus only appeared to be incarnate, only appeared to be human—and a lot of evangelical Christians come pretty close to that.”

“Is there something about his human nature you’d want to emphasize?”

Evans reflected for a moment, then replied. “Yes, Jesus’ own faith,” he said. “He tells his disciples to have faith. Jesus has a huge amount of credibility if we see him as fully human and he actually, as a human, has faith in God. Otherwise, well, that’s easy for him to say! Good grief—he’s been in heaven, and now he’s walking around telling me to have faith? But I take the teaching of Jesus’ humanness, which is taught clearly in scripture, very seriously.”

“Taking everything into consideration,” I said, wrapping up our discussion, “when you think about the identity of the real Jesus, where do you come down as an individual?”

“I come down on the side of the church,” he said. “Doggone it, bless their bones, I think they figured it out. They avoided errors and pitfalls to the left and to the right. I think the church got it right. Even if you only consider the Synoptics, you find that Jesus saw himself in a relationship with God that is unique. The Son of God is the way that’s understood. And then he goes further and demonstrates that he was speaking accurately. If you have any doubts, the Easter event should remove them.

“That’s where you always wind up: the Easter event. Otherwise, you have a Moses-like or Elijah-like figure who’s able to do astonishing miracles — but so what? Yet the resurrection confirmed who he was. And the resurrection is, of course, very powerfully attested, because you have all classes, men and women, believers, skeptics, and opponents, who encounter the risen Christ and believe in him.”

He looked me straight in the eyes. “As I do.”

FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION

More Resources on This Topic

Bock, Darrell L. The Missing Gospels. Nashville: Nelson, 2006.

Carlson, Stephen C. The Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith’s Invention of Secret Mark. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2005.

Evans, Craig A. Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospel. Downers Grove, 1ll.: InterVarsity, 2006.

Jenkins, Philip. Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Witherington, Ben, III. The, Gospel Code,. Downers Grove, 1ll.: InterVarsity, 2004.

Witherington, Ben, III. What Have They Done with Jesus? San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 2006.

Wright, N. T. Judas and the Gospel of Jesus. Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 2006.

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