Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort The Gospels [Hardcover]

Craig Evans is a very well-respected New Testament scholar with a background in historical studies. Although Fabricating Jesus includes brief though able refutations of claims made by The Da Vinci Code, The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, The Dead Sea Scrolls Deception, The Jesus Papers, and The Pagan Christ, the bulk of material addresses popularized claims made by more reputable commentators, such as J.D. Crossan, Bart Ehrman, James Robinson, the Jesus Seminar, and James Tabor.

Evans begins by discussing his own religious background and how it was affected by the critical study of the New Testament and historical Jesus. He uses this personal reflection to try and understand why some respected scholars have embraced such far-fetched theories. One of his explanations is that some of these scholars came from strict, fundamentalist backgrounds. When exposed to the critical studies, they were not flexible enough to accomodate the new information in their existing religious mind set. As a result, their faith was shattered instead of modified. They see little middle ground betweeen strict fundamentalism and utter rejection of traditional positions. Evans points to himself as evidence of a middle ground that actually bases its opinions on better historical evidences.

The next few chapters demonstrate Evans' knowledge of the material, including especially the Jewish context of Jesus' ministry and the early Church, and ability to engage in dispassionate historical inquiry. Taking up some of the more unfounded scholarly conclusions about Jesus, Evans shows that Jesus likely was literate, interested in eschatology, and understood himself to be Israel's messiah. He then proceeds to discuss the criteria of authenticity often used by New Testament scholars, falling back on his background in history to evaluate their strengths and weaknesses. As others have done, Evans demonstrates the limitations of the "criteria of dissimilarity."

Evans also provides sound refutations of two ideas advocated by more liberal New Testament scholars. First, he provides one of the best popularized discussions of the Gospel of Thomas I have read. He moves through the evidence methodically, leaving little doubt that the Gospel of Thomas is a late second century writing that is dependent on the canonical gospels. Thereafter, he provides effective though less thorough discussions of the Gospel of Peter, the Gospel of Mary, and Secret Gospel of Mark. Second, Evans devotes a chapter to the idea that Jesus was a kind of Greek cynic philosopher. His analysis demonstrates just how unfounded are such theories.

Additional chapters address the treatment of Jesus' miracle accounts by some modern scholars and how Josephus' accounts of Pilate and John the Baptist have been misused to create unnecessary tension with the Gospel accounts. Evans closes out with chapters reconstructing the early beliefs of the Church and how they are in line with traditional conceptions of Jesus. He then adds two useful appendices; one on the agrapha (non-gospel sayings of Jesus) and the Gospel of Judas.

Having found a used copy of Fabricating Jesus for only $10, I think I got a bargain. Evans again and again uses sober historical inquiry and a wealth of knowledge about Jesus' and the New Testament's backgrounds and contexts to counter those theories we hear are advanced by those in the know, but which are revealed to be worthy of our initial suspiciouns.

At the very heart of Christianity is Christ. Remove Christ, and you no longer have Christianity. Thus those wanting to attack Christianity concentrate their heaviest firepower on Christ. And we have seen plenty of examples of that recently.

One way to attack Jesus is to attack the four canonical Gospels in which he appears. Parts of modern scholarship have been quite busy in distorting and misrepresenting the Gospels. They do this by questioning the Gospel accounts themselves, by speaking of other gospel traditions, by claiming there were alternative Christianities at the time, and so on.

In its more popular form this assault on Jesus comes out in such works of fiction as The Da Vinci Code. But it also comes out in more scholarly avenues, such as the Jesus Seminar. This volume examines all of these approaches, and finds them wanting. Indeed, Evans says the scepticism about Jesus and the Gospels betrays a "misplaced faith and misguided suspicions".

Craig Evans is well placed to undertake this task. He is a leading New Testament scholar, specialising in the historical Jesus and the Jewish background of the New Testament era. Here he takes head on the various challenges to the Jesus of history and the Gospel accounts.

Consider the reliability of the Gospels. As with all ancient documents, they need to be assessed. We need to know how trustworthy they are as sources for learning about the historical events surrounding the life and teachings of Jesus. Over the years such tests have been developed. We refer to them as the "criteria of authenticity". These are historical and literary criteria for assessing biblical literature.

One such criterion is that of multiple attestation. If we find a saying or teaching of Jesus that appears in two or more independent sources, that makes it more likely that they were circulated widely and early, and were not the invention of a single writer. And such is what we find in the New Testament documents.

Another is the criterion of embarrassment. This states that material that is potentially embarrassing or awkward for the early church is less likely to have been invented by believers after the Easter event. For example, given what a low view of women first century Judaism had, it seems strange indeed that the first people to report the resurrection of Jesus were women. Someone making up this story would surely not have chosen women, whose testimony was considered to be almost nil.

The various criteria taken together show that the four Gospels indeed have a high degree of authenticity and reliability. Says Evans, "Criteria of authenticity, which are remarkably vigorous in their application to the Gospels, confirm the essential core of Jesus' teaching".

Evans next looks at some of the other so-called gospels, the alternative gospels to the four canonical ones. Evans notes how the critics apply overly harsh and stringent tests for the reliability of the four Gospels, but when it comes to these alternative gospels, they approach them with kid gloves, giving them almost a free ride. Moreover, while they try to push the canonical Gospels to late dates, they are happy to give early authorship dates for these extracanonical writings.

Evans says the critics should show some consistency here, and apply the same standards to these new gospels as they do to the more traditional ones. Take for example the Gospel of Thomas. Liberal scholars tend to uncritically accept this as an early and legitimate gospel. But the evidence suggests otherwise.

As to dating, the four Gospels were all written within decades of the life of Jesus. Mark was penned in the 60s, Matthew and Luke in the late 70s, and John in the mid-90s. All of the alternative gospels however are dated to the second century and into the third. Thomas for example was written around A.D.180, perhaps later.

Moreover, it reads completely different from the four canonical Gospels. It is not really a gospel or biography at all, but a collection of sayings, reflecting a Gnostic, esoteric worldview. Says Evans, it clearly does not offer us "independent material that can be used for critical research into the life and teaching of Jesus".

After examining other pseudo-gospels, he moves on to various aspects of theological revisionism about the life of Christ. For example, was Jesus - as some claim - in fact a Mediterranean Cynic? Did he really view himself as the Messiah? What about his healings and miracles? How did he view the Judaism of his day? In all these areas, Evans argues that the traditional (biblical) understanding of Jesus is to be preferred to the new, more radical and speculative accounts.

He concludes by arguing that the traditional Gospel accounts of Jesus may be old, but they are reliable. In contradistinction to the "newer, radical, minimalist, revisionist, obscurantist and faddish versions of the Jesus story," the traditional one is both more convincing and more in tune with the historical and literary evidence.

Craig A. Evans is a moderately conservative New Testament scholar with an impressive list of publications, particularly in the area of the historical Jesus.

In this popularly written book, Prof. Evans shows how archeology, history, textual and other studies support a traditional reading of the New Testament. Take the claim that Jesus was a Cynic philosopher, advanced by Crossan and some others. Such a claim presumes a fair amount of Hellenization in Galilee. In fact, archeological studies cast doubt on even moderate Hellenization. Indeed, Galilee at the time of Jesus appears to have been quite religiously conservative, although not the economic backwater it has often been portrayed as. There is no evidence of a single Cynic in Galilee during the time of Jesus.

Prof. Evans' discussion of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas is the best I've seen. Although Crossan and a few others argue for an early date (perhaps even c. 50 A.D.) the evidence for a later date is overwhelming. In particular, the evidence is strong that Thomas draws on the four canonical Gospels in general and the Syrian harmonization called the Diatessaron in particular.

There are also good sections concerning Josephus, the trial of Jesus, and Jesus' conception of himself in light of certain Old Testament and intertestamental themes. Prof. Evans also includes brief studies of some of the more eccentric recent constructions of Jesus including Barbra Thiering, Dan Brown, and Thomas Harpur.

I'd also recommend a collection edited by Prof. Evans and Stanley Porter entitled DICTIONARY OF NEW TESTAMENT BACKGROUND.