Who Chose the Gospels?: Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy
Language: English
Pages: 320
ISBN: 0199640297
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The Bible contains four Gospels which tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth. And yet, many more Gospels once existed. Who, then, determined which Gospels would, for the next two thousand years, serve as the main gateways to Jesus and his teaching?
Recent books and films have traced the decision to a series of fourth-century councils and powerful bishops. After achieving victory over their rivals for the Christian name, these key players, we are now told, conspired to 'rewrite history' to make it look like their version of Christianity was the original one preached by Jesus and his apostles: the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John became the prime tools for their re-sculpting of the Christian story, leading to the destruction of previously treasured writings like the Gospels of Judas, Mary, and Thomas. Are the four canonical Gospels, then, in the Bible as the result of a great, ecclesiastical conspiracy? Or does this explanation itself represent another 'rewriting of history', this time by a group of modern academics?
Who Chose the Gospels? takes us to the scholarship behind the headlines, examining the great (and ongoing) controversy about how to look at ancient books about Jesus. How the four Biblical Gospels emerged into prominence among their competitors is a crucial question for everyone interested in understanding the historical Jesus and the development of the Christian church.
by his own bomb. How does this principle apply to Justin and his Christian sources? All of Justin’s surviving treatises were written either to defend Christianity from accusations or to present it to those who were interested in adopting Judaism as opposed to Christianity. They were addressed ostensibly to outsiders and not to his fellow Christians. As works which relied heavily on the presentation of argument, they made use of rhetorical conventions and ideals of debate current in that day. One
‘Justin… gives evidence that by the mid-second century the worshiping community used the gospels liturgically (thus as Scripture)’.19 All our evidence suggests that (as queasy as this may make some people feel) these Gospels were none other than Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. We noted in a previous chapter Fredrick Kenyon’s remark about Irenaeus possibly being accustomed to the sight of four-Gospel codices in his day. It is interesting, then, to read Skarsaune laying out the following
tradition (perhaps also use of ‘Lukan-sounding’ tradition), including a prayer whose wording is extremely close to that of the Lord’s Prayer of Matthew 6.9–13 (Did. 8.2). This is the case whether one argues that the author was dependent (directly or indirectly) on Matthew, whether the two are entirely independent, or even whether Matthew is dependent upon the Didache. Second, in four places the writer attributes his ‘Matthean-sounding tradition’ to something called ‘the gospel’ (see 8.2; 11.3;
this period than read Mark. Yet while this is entirely possible, it is still a precarious conclusion to draw from the evidence. This is because, first, contemporary literary sources (Irenaeus of Lyons, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian of Carthage, and so on) show us that the churches which were using the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John were also using the Gospel of Mark. Second, we know that at least by the early third century (if not before) books were being produced which contained more
early copies of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written on codices. In fact, Larry Hurtado observes: ‘So far as biblical texts are concerned… there is no New Testament text copied on an unused roll among second-or third-century Christian manuscripts.’32 Hurtado mentions ‘unused’ rolls because occasionally a scribe wrote on the back side of a roll which already contained writing. These scrolls written on both sides are called opisthographs (from Greek, meaning ‘written on the