Craig Evans is a distinguished New Testament scholar who has written extensively on the historical Jesus and served on the advisory board on the Gospel of Judas for the National Geographic Society. He is well placed to evaluate the various theories propounded by both scholars and popular writers, from Bart Ehrman’s Misquoting Jesus to Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.
He begins by commenting on his amazement and concern that these theories are even taken seriously by both those who write them and the publishers that release them. He says, “We live in a strange time that indulges, even encourages, some of the strangest thinking … what I find particularly troubling is that a lot of the nonsense comes from scholars” (p. 15-16). He speculates that it is the “never-ending quest to find something new” that motivates scholars to reject firm evidence in favour of questionable sources and bogus history.
The book does not attempt an individual assessment and dismantling of every book about Jesus. Instead Evans has tried to identify the methodological errors perpetrated by these writers and address them. The first chapter concerns misguided suspicions, those forms of hypercriticism that assume that the NT writers were too forgetful, too illiterate or too disinterested to record accurately their memories of Jesus. The second chapter concerns “cramped starting points”, that is, assumptions made by critics that becoming self-confirming when contrary evidence is dismissed as inauthentic. Both these chapters deal with the criteria one uses to assess whether the canonical gospels are accurate or not; Evans ends the second chapter with a useful discussion of the key criteria used in the study of the historical Jesus. The practical consequences of the misuse of these criteria of authenticity are seen in chapters six and seven, where Evans discussed the scholars (particularly from the inter-university ‘Jesus Seminar’ research group) who attempt to excise sayings of Jesus from the canonical context or separate Jesus from his miraculous deeds.
Chapters three and four concern the use of non-canonical gospels as historical sources for the life of Jesus. These include Gnostic gospels like those ascribed to Thomas and Mary, and the forgery called the Secret Gospel of Mark. In each case Evans demonstrates that the use of these late and polemical texts for historical purposes is highly dubious. A further discussion of historical sources is found in chapter eight, where Evans responds to claims that Josephus’ portrayal of key characters conflicts with that of the gospels.
In chapter five Evans discusses the portrayal of Jesus as a Mediterranean Cynic (which makes out Jesus to be kind of hippy). Chapter nine concerns exaggerated claims, particularly that early Christianity was diverse and multi-form. Evans notes how these claims often “conclude with pleas for greater tolerance and openness to new forms of Christian experience” (p. 180). Chapter ten comments on the remarkable leaps of guesswork made by popular writers who claim to have unearthed secret conspiracies that overturn treasured views about Jesus. Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code is probably the most famous and successful of this kind of “hokum history”. Here Evans has some fun demonstrating how flimsy these “historical” findings are.
Evans concludes his book with a final chapter entitled “Will the real Jesus please stand up?”, in which he reviews what is known about the historical Jesus based on reliable evidence and sensible historical methods. He writers, “thus far these [recent] discoveries have tended to confirm the reliability of the Gospels and disprove novel theories. I suspect that ongoing honest, competent research will do more of the same” (p. 235).
Review of “The Early Earth” by John Whitcomb (1972)