The Cradle, the Cross, and the Crown (31 page)

Summary

A. Schweitzer, in his famous survey of modern Jesus research
The Quest of the Historical Jesus
, observed over a century ago that in many instances a scholar's portrait of Jesus is strangely reminiscent of the scholar responsible for the portrait.
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As A. Loisy noted long ago, many reconstructions of Jesus appear to be pale reflections of the researcher himself.
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More recently J. D. Crossan charged that it “is impossible to avoid the suspicion that historical Jesus research is a very safe place to do theology and call it history, to do autobiography and call it biography.”
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Feminists discover a feminist Jesus in the Gospels; liberal Protestants tend to find a liberal Jesus; and so forth. Crossan himself has been subjected to a creative and clever critique by N. T. Wright, who exposes the questionable criteria and sources underlying Crossan's work in the form of a delightful parody.
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These tendencies demonstrate the powerful influence that a scholar's presuppositions may exert on his research and conclusions. Thus it is important to seek to understand and evaluate the presuppositions and philosophical commitments of scholars that may impact their reconstruction of Jesus' identity and teachings. In particular, the sources and methods utilized by scholars engaged in historical Jesus research can exert an influence on their conclusions that is as strong as their presuppositions. Not surprisingly, dependence on noncanonical sources for one's view of Jesus generally results in a portrait of Jesus that is quite different from the traditional Christian view. The next section therefore briefly examines some of these noncanonical sources and evaluates their usefulness in understanding Jesus.

DEPENDENCE ON NONCANONICAL GOSPELS FOR AN UNDERSTANDING OF JESUS

Introduction

At the end of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first, North America witnessed an enormous increase of interest in the so-called lost Gospels, accounts of the life and teachings of Jesus excluded for various reasons from the NT canon.
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Some have even claimed that literally thousands of written accounts of Jesus' life existed in the early church. According to these authors, although the canonical Gospels distort the true story of the real Jesus because of theological and political agendas, the truth about Jesus of Nazareth is still preserved in these apocryphal works such as the Gospel of Philip and the
Gospel of Mary Magdalene. One such author used these noncanonical Gospels to argue that Jesus' deity was an invention of a politically motivated Roman emperor and that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene.
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Others writing for a scholarly audience have also preferred noncanonical works to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For example, in his
Four Other Gospels
, J. D. Crossan argued that the Gospel of Thomas, an early stratum of the Gospel of Peter, and Secret Mark were earlier than the canonical Gospels and were utilized by the evangelists when they wrote their own Gospels.
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In his
Historical Jesus
, Crossan placed these three sources along with Q in his first stratum of sources and utilized these sources to portray Jesus as a wandering Cynic philosopher.
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Clearly, one's choice of sources in historical Jesus research has a significant impact on one's reconstruction of Jesus' life and teaching. Portraits of Jesus that take as their point of reference the canonical Gospels are significantly different from portraits of Jesus derived from alternative gospels.

In this section we discuss whether these alternative Gospels are helpful resources for understanding who Jesus really was. We briefly examine three of the lost Gospels on which some historical Jesus scholars rely, particularly the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, and Secret Mark. We suggest that these alternative Gospels are too late to reflect credible testimony about the Jesus of history. We also argue that the canonical Gospels remain our most helpful resources for understanding the life of Jesus of Nazareth not merely because they are canonical but because they are our earliest sources and reflect eyewitness testimony regarding Jesus' life and teachings.

The Gospel of Thomas

Some of the early church fathers of the third and fourth centuries referred to a Gospel associated with the name Thomas.
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Fragments of this lost Gospel were discovered among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri in the 1890s,
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but these fragments were not positively identified as belonging to the Gospel of Thomas until the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices, 13 leather-bound books written in the Coptic language that were uncovered in Egypt in 1945. The second codex found at Nag Hammadi contained the full text of the Gospel of Thomas.
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The last 25 years have seen the Gospel of Thomas occupy an increasingly central role in attempts to reconstruct the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Of the scholars who rely heavily on the Gospel of Thomas in providing a portrait of the historical Jesus, few have been more prolific or influential than J. D. Crossan. Crossan listed Gospel of Thomas
I (material in Thomas paralleled by the canonical Gospels) in his first stratum of sources for the Jesus tradition. According to Crossan, this earlier layer of tradition in Thomas “was composed by the fifties C.E., possibly in Jerusalem, under the aegis of James's authority (see
Gos. Thom
. 12).”
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According to Crossan, the Gospel of Thomas predated the canonical Gospels and preserved more reliable traditions of Jesus' sayings. But this bold assertion overlooks considerable evidence supporting the older consensus view that the Gospel of Thomas was written in the mid-second century or later.

First, careful comparisons of the theological tendencies, vocabulary statistics, and preferred grammar of the canonical Gospels and Thomas strongly suggest that Thomas depended on the canonical Gospels and thus postdates them rather than vice versa. W. Schrage carefully examined every saying in the Gospel of Thomas that has a parallel in the Synoptic Gospels. He concluded that the evidence best supports Thomas's reliance on the Synoptic Gospels.
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More recent publications have demonstrated that the very parallels to which some scholars have appealed as proof of the priority and independence of the Gospel of Thomas are better explained if Thomas depended on the Synoptic Gospels.
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R. Bauckham recently noted that Gospel of Thomas 13 asserts an authority superior to that of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew and thus clearly postdates the composition and distribution of those Gospels.
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H.-M. Schenke's analysis of the compositional history of Thomas that he presented to the Jesus Seminar in 1991 concluded that the Gospel of Thomas was extracted from a commentary on the sayings of Jesus, probably Papias of Hierapolis's “Exposition of the Lord's Sayings.” This suggests a date of composition somewhere around the year 140. Schenke pointed out that this date corresponds with evidence in saying 68 which he translated, “And they (i.e. your persecutors themselves) will no longer find a (dwelling-) place there where they persecuted you.” Schenke argued that this statement clearly referred to the Bar Kokhba revolt in 132–135 that resulted in the expulsion of the Jews from Jerusalem by Roman authorities. Consequently, saying 68 provides an earliest possible date for the composition of Thomas. Schenke, who earlier identified himself as a “member of the Koester school of thought” that dates the Gospel of Thomas to the second half of the first century, argued that the evidence of saying 68 calls for “a reabandonment of the early dating attempted within the Koester school of thought.”
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S. J. Patterson joined S. Davies, H. Koester, J. D. Crossan, and the Jesus Seminar in dating the Gospel of Thomas to the middle of the first century.
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But Patterson admitted that some portions of Thomas, such as saying 7, were composed and added to the collection as late as the third or fourth century. Saying 7 reads: “Jesus said: ‘Fortunate is the lion that the human will eat so that the lion becomes human. And foul is the human that the lion will eat, and the lion will become human.’”
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Patterson, appealing to the research of H. Jackson, argued that the text expressed imagery common among the ascetic monks of Upper Egypt beginning in the second century in which the lion symbolized the fleshly passions that the ascetics sought to suppress. Patterson suggested that the saying was added to the collection after it reached Egypt and was adopted by these ascetics.
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Of course, if the saying is original to the Gospel, then Thomas would belong in the second century as was previously thought.

H. J. W. Drijvers, R. Schippers, and N. Perrin have dated the Gospel of Thomas close to 200. Perrin argued that the similarities between the Gospel of Thomas and Tatian's
Diatessaron
, which led Quispel to suggest that Tatian had used Thomas as a fifth Gospel in his harmony, were actually the result of Thomas's dependence on Tatian. Consequently, the Gospel of Thomas postdates the
Diatessaron
, which was most likely produced around 150–160. Perrin deduced the dependency of Thomas on Tatian using four steps: (1) the Gospel of Thomas was first composed in Syriac, a hypothesis Perrin defended persuasively by showing that numerous catchwords that link the sayings of Thomas depend on a Syriac original; (2) the Gospel of Thomas displays literary unity and reflects the work of one author; (3) due to the unity and compositional strategy behind the Gospel of Thomas, the author likely relied on written Syriac sources for his knowledge of Synoptic tradition; and (4) Tatian's
Diatessaron
is the only Syriac text of the Synoptic tradition that could have been available to Thomas.
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Since compelling evidence of the Gospel of Thomas' late date is prompting even scholars previously committed to an early date to abandon this theory, preference for Thomas over the canonical Gospels in reconstructing the life and teachings of Jesus is inappropriate.
Although some scholars are attracted to the Gospel of Thomas because it has no miracles, no passion narrative, and no resurrection of Jesus, Thomas appears to have been composed too late to expect it to be more reliable than the canonical Gospels.

The Gospel of Peter

The church historian Eusebius of Caesarea (c. 260–c. 340) made mention several times of a heretical Gospel associated with the apostle Peter.
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A narrative of the trial, crucifixion, and resurrection of Jesus that was discovered in excavations at Akhmim in Egypt in 1886–87 has been identified, perhaps incorrectly, as the lost Gospel of Peter.
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In historical Jesus research, the scholar to make the most extensive use of the Gospel of Peter is J. D. Crossan.
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After a detailed comparison of the Gospel of Peter with the canonical Gospels, Crossan concluded that the earliest stratum in the Gospel of Peter was the hypothetical Cross Gospel.
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He argued that this early narrative was utilized by the Synoptic writers and John and served as the only source of the canonical evangelists for the passion narrative.
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Strong evidence suggests that the Gospel of Peter does not preserve reliable independent tradition about the death and resurrection of Jesus. Instead, the document was a revision of the canonical Gospels embellished with second-century legends.

In the narrative of the guard at the tomb, the content and vocabulary of the Gospel of Peter suggest a close relationship with Matthew.
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Crossan noted one sustained verbal parallel in Matthew and the Gospel of Peter that indicated one document was dependent on the other: “so that the disciples do not come and steal him” (
mēpote elthontes hoi mathētai autou klepsōsin auton
; Matt 27:64;
Gos. Pet.
8:30). The sustained parallelism is
best explained by a dependence of one Gospel on the other.
¹⁰⁷
Although L. Vaganay had earlier argued that
Gos. Pet.
8:30 was dependent on Matt 27:64b, Crossan proposed that Matthew was in fact dependent on the Gospel of Peter.
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An examination of special features common to the Gospel of Peter or Matthew in the shared words provides the most objective means of determining the direction of the dependency. The vocabulary and grammar strongly suggest the Gospel of Peter's dependence on Matthew. R. Gundry described the words as a “series of Mattheanisms.”
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J. P. Meier's examination led him to the conclusion that “when it comes to who is dependent on whom, all the signs point to Matthew's priority.…The clause is a tissue of Matthean vocabulary and style, a vocabulary and style almost totally absent from the rest of the Gospel of Peter.”
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Since the shared series contains several prominent Mattheanisms, it seems more likely that the Gospel of Peter was dependent on Matthew than vice versa.
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Compositional strategies of the Gospel of Peter suggest that it is a second-century work and dependent on the canonical Gospels. The author projected material from narratives describing Jesus' earlier life and teaching into his passion narrative using a compositional strategy also found in second-century works such as the Protevangelium of James.
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Moreover, the author tended to multiply miracles and to introduce new details into the narrative in an effort to defend Christian claims in a manner that closely parallels the tendencies of second-century literature.

Certain details of the Gospel of Peter also betray its comparatively late origin. The angel's question from heaven to the cross at the moment of Jesus' resurrection, “Did you preach to those who sleep?” in
Gos. Pet.
9:38 (see below), betrays the author's knowledge of the later doctrine of Jesus' descent into Hades between his death and resurrection in order to preach to the believers held there. Scholars in recent years have questioned whether the doctrine is taught in the NT.
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It is doubtful that the doctrine arose earlier than the time of Justin Martyr (c. 100–c. 165). The first clear reference to it appears in the writings of Irenaeus in the late second century (
Against Heresies
4.27.2). Thus the reference to preaching to those who sleep in the Gospel of Peter suggests that the document was composed no earlier than the first quarter of the second century.