Modern historical study of the Gospels seems to give us a new portrait of Jesus every spring--just in time for Easter. The more unusual the portrait, the more it departs from the traditional view of Jesus, the more attention it gets in the popular media. Why are scholars so prone to fabricate a new Jesus? Why is the public so eager to accept such claims without question? What methods and assumptions predispose scholars to distort the record? Is there a more sober approach to finding the real Jesus? Commenting on such recent releases as Bart Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus, James Tabor's The Jesus Dynasty, Michael Baigent's The Jesus Papers and the Gospel of Judas, for which he served as an advisory board member to the National Geographic Society, Craig Evans offers a sane approach to examining the sources for understanding the historical Jesus.
Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels
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"The quest of the historical Jesus has been seriously misled by much poor scholarship and distorted almost beyond recognition by recent pseudoscholarship. But now Craig Evans out-skeptics the historical skeptics, demonstrating from his own intimate familiarity with the biblical texts and his mastery of ancient sources how unfounded are many of the claims made and how ridiculously bizarre are the hypotheses thought to give some support to The Da Vinci Code and its like. The mature judgment of such an accomplished and front-rank scholar cannot be ignored or lightly gainsaid--a welcome draft from a clear spring after all the muddied waters of recent years." ----James D. G. Dunn, Lightfoot Professor of Divinity Emeritus, University of Durham, and author of Jesus Remembered and Christology in the Making
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"Fabricating Jesus exposes the misinformed nonsense that has confused the reading public over the past few years. Craig Evans is a well-read and thoughtful scholar who knows all the ancient texts. In this well-written book, he exposes the misguided assumptions and dubious sources that lie behind the wild theories that have plagued the public. He has also presented Jesus and the Gospels in their proper historical context. With enthusiasm, I recommend this book for scholars and all interested in Jesus and Christian origins."
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192 of 217 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Taking Aim at Sensational Claims by Other Scholars,
By C. Price "Layman, Lawyer, Blogger" (Southern California) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: 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.
120 of 150 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Taking on the skeptics,
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This review is from: Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Hardcover)
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.
32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fabricating Jesus,
This review is from: Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Hardcover)
"Fabricating Jesus" is a challenge to the "sloppy scholarship and misguided theories" proposed in recent books and movies about Jesus. The author, Craig Evans, discusses numerous proposed historical sources for Jesus such as the Gospel of Peter, the Egerton Gospel, the Secret Gospel of Mark as well as Nag Hammadi texts like the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary. One of the appendices is devoted to the newly discovered Gospel of Judas--Dr. Evans was one of the scholars who worked on the reconstruction of that text.
Evans also discusses archaeology, historical methodology and the criteria for determining historical reliability. Numerous theories about Jesus are examined ranging from relatively serious proposals to the truly bizarre. Craig Evans, is the author of numerous books and articles, and is a world-class historical Jesus scholar, one of the few who not only knows Greek, Hebrew and Aramaic, but also Syriac and Coptic which are necessary for the study of ancient documents like, for example, the Nag Hammadi texts which were written in Coptic. Dr. Evans has studied under or worked with some of the most prominent biblical scholars in this generation. Fabricating Jesus contains a glossary, extensive end notes, recommended reading, author index, subject index, scripture index, and an index of extracanonical ancient sources. The book was written for non-specialists, but the material is "meaty" and the average reader may find that it is not always easy reading. Still, the book well worth the effort and is truly outstanding!
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