Day 567 of 1000

We had one of those company events that, on one level is enjoyable.  We had the chance to spend some time with the people with whom we rub shoulders all day, but for whom you have no idea how they live their non-work lives.  I work with some genuinely nice people and generally enjoyed myself.  At the same time, the venue of the event was a little out of my comfort zone.  The odd and interesting part was that, after dinner, one of my colleagues (and a pretty good guy) began to emphatically explain his ideas about “christianity”.  The reason I did not capitalize the word Christianity and put the scare quotes around it, is because his ideas were so far removed from generally accepted knowledge, even for most liberal scholars, that I was aghast.

The idea was that the so-called Gnostic gospels were contemporary with the New Testament canon and that neither the canon nor the doctrines of Christianity were established until the Nicene Council of 325 A.D.  The sad part is that Kelly and Christian ran into this same kind of nonsense in one of their (of all things) English classes in college.  It does not take a whole lot of investigation to realize that, using the most charitable take on this possible, these are fringe views held by fringe scholars.  It was a lively discussion and I promised to send him some references.  This was really not so much a discussion about Christianity, but a discussion about what we know from history about Christianity.  The following is an excerpt from a Tim Keller article about the DaVinci Code novel that gets the idea across:

Helmut Koester of Harvard has argued that the Nag Hammadi Gnostic-Jesus texts were written very early, almost as early as the Biblical gospels themselves. And Elaine Pagels, who did a doctorate under Koester at Harvard, has popularized this view in The Gnostic Gospels and the more recent Beyond Belief:The Secret Gospel of Thomas.

But this is very much a minority view across the field of scholarship. N.T.Wright says, “It has long been the received wisdom among students of early Christianity that the Gospel of Thomas…found at Nag Hammadi…is a comparatively late stage in the development of Christianity.” (New Testament and the People of God, p.436) The great majority of scholars believe the Gnostic-Jesus texts to have been written 100-200 years after the Biblical gospels, which all were written within the first 30-60 years after Jesus’ death.Why this consensus?

As N.T.Wright points out in The Resurrection of the Son of God, the early Christians were all Jews. Jews had a thoroughly different world-view than that of the Greeks or the gnostics. They believed firmly that this material world was made good (see Genesis!) and that despite sin God was going to renew it and resurrect our bodies (Daniel 12:1-2.) Jews had no hope (or concept) of disembodied souls living apart from the body.What does this mean? We know from the Pauline letters, some written only 13 years after Jesus’ death, that all the early Christians claimed to have met Jesus and that he was still alive. But it would have been impossible for Jewish believers to claim “Jesus is alive” without also believing he was raised physically from the dead.

Helmut Koester and others posit that the first Christians believed, as the gnostics, that Jesus was only ‘spiritually risen’ and decades later the idea of a bodily resurrection developed. But N.T.Wright shows that Christianity could never have arisen as a movement among Jews unless the original believers knew Jesus had been raised bodily from the dead.This means in turn that the attempt to create a Gnostic-Jesus must have been much later.The writings could not have represented an early but repressed true version of Jesus-faith.Wright asks: “Which Roman emperor would persecute anyone for reading the Gospel of Thomas [since it so closely reflected Greek thinking]?….It should be clear that the talk about a spiritual ‘resurrection’ in the sense used by [the gnostic writings] could not be anything other than a late, drastic modification of Christian language.” (Resurrection, p.550.) There is far, far more that could be said in criticism of the thesis that the Gnostic-Jesus is older than the Biblical Jesus. But I’ll stop here.

I will probably send him a couple scholarly volumes by NT Wright on what we know about this historically.  I think they might actually get read.