As Tag mentioned last week, there are often specials about the life of Christ this time of year. Many of these claim to put forth an “independent” or “scientific” analysis of things. My caution with this concept is that there is an assumption which I believe to be false. That assumption is that any of us can analyze information without any presuppositions or preconceived notions. The wiser realization is that we come to various important issues with strong presuppositions. We can try to be fair, but we must know our tendencies. If I look at the scientific claims for the origins of the universe assuming they are wrong, I cannot evaluate them objectively. If I make a movie about the history of Jesus of Nazareth assuming the claims for a miraculous resurrection cannot be true, that will lead to a definite bias.
One area that is often explored in these specials is the idea of the “other gospels” of Jesus Christ. These gospels purport to offer new and exciting information about the life of Jesus. These include writings like the gospel of Phillip, the gospel of Mary, and the gospel of Thomas. Some of these writings, called “gnostic gospels”, were discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt. They are called gnostic gospels because they show obvious influences of a Greek world view called Gnosticism. One of the interesting claims of these gospels of an intimate relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene.
To better understand these gnostic writings, imagine for a moment that the gospels were rewritten in modern times by a Marxist. There would be some changes to texts, the inclusion of material that supports that worldview, and would read very differently than it does now. The beliefs of a Marxist in collectivism would shape the rewriting of the stories. In either case, the names of the characters would remain the same, but their words and actions would be changed to support the ideas of the writer.
If in later times those texts were discovered by historians, they would immediately notice the differences between these gospels and the ones in our Bible. How would they tell whether or not the ideas were those of the original authors? Laying aside for a moment the differences between the writing styles of the two areas, and the language issues, they could evaluate the content. By identifying Marxist concepts, they would see 19th century ideas overwritten in a 1st century text.
In the case of these “new gospels”, we can clearly see ideas of the 2nd and 3rd century Gnostics overwritten into accounts of the lives of various New Testament characters. Thus, as far as the living out of the Christian faith, these texts are neither inspired by God, nor are they a suppressed part of scripture that the church held back for political reasons. It makes no more sense to give credence to the Gnostic gospels than it would be to give it to a modern rewrite of the gospels. They would not be based upon eyewitness accounts, nor could eyewitnesses correct mistakes in those texts.
We do not have in existence any texts about the life of Jesus that date any earlier than our four gospels. It may indeed be possible that some earlier common text was used in the writing of Matthew, Mark and Luke. The evidence for this is in the common language we find in the three gospels. It is also possible that the gospel writers collaborated in some way. If some earlier text exists, it has never been discovered. The four gospels we have were either written by eyewitnesses, or written in cooperation with the eyewitnesses of the life of Christ (see Luke 1:1-4). They are the earliest and best accounts we have of the life of Jesus of Nazareth. We believe them to be both the Word of God, and historically reliable accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
In Him,
Don