CHAPTER 4 - Other Gospels?
CHAPTER 4
Other Gospels?
“I propose a single stream of tradition for the passion-resurrection traditions from the [Gospel of Peter’s] Cross Gospel into Mark. . . . My theory, then, is that canonical Mark dismembered Secret Mark’s story of the young man’s resurrection and initiation.”
JOHN DOMINIC CROSSAN1
“The claims that these writings contain independent valuable historical evidence for the life and teaching of Jesus do not stand up to scrutiny.”
GRAHAM STANTON2
“. . . the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, to cite just two examples . . . drip with indications of lateness, yet some scholars hope to date forms of these writings to the first century. They do this by attempting to extract early, hypothetic forms of the text from the actual texts that we have. But they do this without any evidence.”
CRAIG EVANS3
Whether due to theological dissatisfaction with the canonical Gospels or due to historical curiosity, talk of “lost Gospels” is in vogue today. Fortunately for such interest, we have good reason to believe, as we shall note more fully later, that many accounts of Jesus’ life did circulate in the first century (as noted in Lk 1:1). I doubt that there is a New Testament scholar alive today who could contain her or his excitement should one of these documents come to light.
Nevertheless, and unfortunately for our interest, none of the noncanonical “gospels” currently circulating are authentic first-century works. This deficiency proves especially unfortunate for scholars who have reconstructed alternative pictures of Jesus and his earliest followers to a significant extent based on these documents.4 In the case of at least some of these scholars, the wish may be mother to the thought. As Craig Evans, a scholar who has worked extensively in these sources, warns, “In marked contrast to the hypercritical approach many scholars take to the canonical Gospels, several scholars are surprisingly uncritical in their approach to the extracanonical Gospels.”5 On the whole these works bear all the signs of lateness rather than reflecting early Palestinian Jewish tradition. 6 At the end of the chapter we shall briefly survey some other noncanonical evidence, though the results of that examination also prove slender.