Three Cheers for (Most) Scholars

Edith Hamilton, in her very helpful survey of ancient, primarily Greek and Roman, mythology, Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes, begins by discounting the authority of the Latin poet Ovid as a reliable source for these tales. Her reason is that Ovid was too skeptical of the stories. He was, as it were, an unbeliever, and so his telling of the tales lacks the passion of those who appreciated them for what they were.

I find her skepticism of her source intriguing because we find a similar skepticism on the part of those who evaluate the biblical writers. In Biblical studies, the opposite logic is applied. The less sympathetic an author is to his subject, the more reliable he is assumed to be.

As well, biblical skeptics argue that the more a primary source (the gospels primarily) deviates from what has come to be understood as orthodox and historic Christianity, the more authoritative punch he is assumed to have.

Very curious, both assumptions.

It is assumed that historic Christianity was not the product of Jesus’ teaching, but the product of the pragmatic needs of the early church. Thus in recent years the so-called gospels of Thomas or Judas have become the darlings of the religious press, packaged as the victims of conspiracies by the religious gatekeepers determined to keep their ‘real’ story of Jesus away from public consideration.

A skeptical view of the accuracy of the gospel record underlies the Atlantic Monthly article by Robert Wright entitled “One World, Under God”. (We have been interacting with some assumptions which inform his thinking. We have already addressed these assumptions here, here, and here.)

In building his case, Mr. Wright identifies some of the more commonly held opinions of Jesus: that he preached love and compassion and forgiveness, and so forth. These are all nice, but that was not the ‘real’ Jesus, he contends. He says:

But there’s a funny thing about these admirable utterances: none of them appears in the book of Mark, which was written before the other Gospels and which most New Testament scholars now consider the most reliable (or, as some would put it, the least unreliable) Gospel guide to Jesus’ life.

From this Wright goes on to conclude, at least implicitly, that the ‘later’ gospels (those not named ‘Mark’) were influenced by the need for Christianity to be more global and ethnically inclusive, so that the Jesus emerging from those books was one far more amenable to a wider culture.

There are massive assumptions packaged in this one sentence.

First is his appeal to ‘most scholars’. This sounds very democratic and quite authoritative. Fortunately the truth of an issue is not determined by how many we can find (or assume to find) voting in our favor. Certainly the scholarly credentials of those voting might want to be measured and weighed.

Second, he assumes that distance from a source undercuts its reliability. The assumption that because Matthew, Luke, and John (the latter is a gospel Wright tends to ignore) are written later they are in some way less reliable is an assertion that does not hold up.

It does not seem to matter that someone like Luke is clearly compiling a book based upon research, given with the stated intention of providing an accurate record of what had been reported. Luke is intent on getting to the bottom of what had been passed around. Reliability matters to Luke.

As it does to Mr. Wright as he depends heavily on Luke’s record regarding the Apostle Paul. Mr. Wright quotes freely from the book of Acts and discounts the Gospel of Luke. However, these two books are part 1 and part 2 of the same work, written by the same author with the same intention at the same time. Funny that Luke could be accurate in part 2 (helping Wright’s thesis) and untrustworthy in part 1 (damaging to Wright’s thesis).

Most scholars (ahem) would find this appallingly disingenuous.

It is not wrong to puzzle over the differences between the four gospels. They are each very different. Why is that? At the very least, we can see that their differences were inspired by different audiences and different purposes. But this in no way compromises the integrity of any.

Richard Bauckham, a Scottish scholar (not one of the ‘most’ apparently) has written convincingly that each of the four gospels reflects not the accumulation of the pragmatic myth-making of a developing church but rather the reportage of eyewitness accounts.

C. S. Lewis, while no “fundamentalist” according to his own assertion, was a literary scholar (another not counted among the ‘most’!) who was certain simply from the character of the gospel texts that what was recorded was reportage, not myth or fiction. And as one who had seen his own work (and that of his friends – the ‘ring’ in Tolkien’s work was said to be the atom bomb) reconstructed and interpreted in ways far from his own intention, he suspected that the reason that some (most?) scholars could make wild assertions about Plato or Aristotle or Luke or John was because the principles were dead and could not set the record straight.

To question the integrity of the Biblical texts is popular sport, no doubt. Mr. Wright is not arguing for gospel unreliability. He just assumes it because it suits his purposes. That’s a bad assumption, no matter how many ‘scholars’ he marshals to his support.

Of course, many of us who claim to believe in the integrity of the biblical books choose to ignore their content. Most scholars would say that that’s a very bad idea.