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Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels

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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.

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.

"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!

Craig A. Evans is a moderately conservative New Testament scholar with an impressive list of publications, particularly in the area of the historical Jesus.

In this popularly written book, Prof. Evans shows how archeology, history, textual and other studies support a traditional reading of the New Testament. Take the claim that Jesus was a Cynic philosopher, advanced by Crossan and some others. Such a claim presumes a fair amount of Hellenization in Galilee. In fact, archeological studies cast doubt on even moderate Hellenization. Indeed, Galilee at the time of Jesus appears to have been quite religiously conservative, although not the economic backwater it has often been portrayed as. There is no evidence of a single Cynic in Galilee during the time of Jesus.

Prof. Evans' discussion of the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas is the best I've seen. Although Crossan and a few others argue for an early date (perhaps even c. 50 A.D.) the evidence for a later date is overwhelming. In particular, the evidence is strong that Thomas draws on the four canonical Gospels in general and the Syrian harmonization called the Diatessaron in particular.

There are also good sections concerning Josephus, the trial of Jesus, and Jesus' conception of himself in light of certain Old Testament and intertestamental themes. Prof. Evans also includes brief studies of some of the more eccentric recent constructions of Jesus including Barbra Thiering, Dan Brown, and Thomas Harpur.

I'd also recommend a collection edited by Prof. Evans and Stanley Porter entitled DICTIONARY OF NEW TESTAMENT BACKGROUND.

This book combines powerful arguments, ease of readability, and proper citation to authority. His footnotes are cited meticulously, and offer resources for further research. I found myself hungry for even more arguments against early dating of Thomas (and the other non-canonical works) than Evans offers, but the arguments that Evans does advance are very strong. Evans also does not waste pages with verbal "fluff."

What I found most satisfying about this work is Evans' direct interaction with many popular critics like Elaine Pagels, J.D. Crossan, Robert Price, and Bart Ehrman.

The only "fad" theory that Evans does not address is the mythicist position (the idea that there never was a historical Jesus of Nazareth). I believe Evans should have done so. Although there is only one living scholar with a Ph.D in a relevant field who holds to the mythicist position (Robert Price), and althought the mythicist position is overwhelmingly rejected by scholars of all religious persuasions, Evans should have addressed the mythicist claims because they are popular among everyday people. Regardless of its wide rejection among scholars, mythicism is a view that must be contended with if Christians wish to connect with everyday people.

There are lots of silly ideas about Jesus going around these days. While fringe scholars have always offered their crackpot theories, we live in a day and age where these authors can actually get a hearing. Ludicrous ideas about Jesus Christ are promoted all over the Internet, and books providing outlandish theories of Christ are consumed by hundreds of thousands.

In his new book "Fabricating Jesus", Craig Evans turns a critical eye towards these distortions of the life of Christ. He criticizes two problems with what he terms the "New Skepticism." The first problem is misplaced faith- placing one's faith in the wrong things. Even many Christians are guilty of this problem. Faith may be placed in the doctrine of biblical inerrancy, or it may depend on us being able to fully harmonize the Gospels. While biblical inerrancy may be an important doctrine, it is unwise to place our faith wholeheartedly on this belief. Misplaced faith can lead to apostasy, and one very prominent example is Bart Ehrman. Ehrman seemed to place so much emphasis on the inerrancy of Scripture that, when he began to doubt this doctrine, it led to the destruction of his faith in Christ. Evans rightly points out that this is a case of severely misplaced priorities. It also explains why some ultra-fundamentalist preachers eventually convert to atheism and become the most intense critics of the Christian worldview. They have placed their faith in the wrong thing.

The second problem is misguided skepticism, which usually follows from unreasonable assumptions that Jesus' contemporaries were incapable or uninterested in accurately recalling the words and deeds of Jesus Christ. Misguided skepticism also follows from overly strict critical methods and unproven assumptions. Some of these assumptions- such that Jesus had no interest in Scripture, or that Jesus had no interest in eschatology, flatly contradict the general tenor of Christ's message as recorded in the New Testament. These assumptions thus artificially restrict the types of things that Jesus might have said or done during his earthly ministry.

After discussing the general problems with the new skepticism, Evans goes on to discuss some particulars. He criticizes the authenticity and validity of the apocryphal writings favored by some critics of classical Christianity. Even though renowned scholars like John Dominic Crossan have made much of these documents, Evans thoroughly demonstrates that these documents are all late, of dubious authenticity, and totally lacking credibility.

Moreover, Evans criticizes the way that liberal and fringe scholars completely divorce Jesus from his historical and social setting in order to advance their theories. Evans reminds his readers that Jesus was a Jew, who lived in a thoroughly Jewish town. Thus, those scholars who try to turn Jesus into a wandering Jewish Cynic or some sort of pagan philosopher have completely lost touch with the historical facts.

Finally, a common theme advocated by some scholars is the idea of multiple Christianities in the first century. Rather than speak of Christianity as a monolithic religious tradition, scholars like Elaine Pagels and Bart Ehrman advocate the plural idea of "Christianities." Evans counters this idea by demonstrating that, while there were some conflicts within the Christian church about peripheral doctrinal matters in the first century, there was unity on the person, work, and necessity of Jesus Christ and his sacrifice. The only way to find other Christianities is to illegitimately import 2nd century documents into the 1st century.

In the final chapter, Evans takes a positive approach to uncover what we can about the true person of Jesus Christ. He argues that the evidence actually favors the classical Christian conception of Christ's person and work. Although some may balk at his conservative views, Evans is actually very fair throughout and he does not overstate his case.

Fabricating Jesus is an essential book for the times because someone needs to counter the fringe theories propounded by critics of Christianity. Some of these theories are so incredible that real scholars virtually ignore them, but it is important for the sake of the man on the street that resources be available to answer these kinds of questions. Evans' does an admirable job of setting the historical record straight without slipping into simple-minded conservatism. The result is a book well worth reading.

This is a highly readable and very convincing work for the mainstream reader about current New Testament research. It's a badly needed response to the nonsense in the Da Vinci Code, and to the work of other skeptics who have filled the front tables of bookstores with outrageous attacks on Christian tradition, Christian history and Christian belief. Evans goes into detail as to what we can know and what we can not know about the historical Jesus. He examines the earliest manuscript evidence we have for the canon (which is fairly impressive). He lays out the latest arguments against the hoax of Secret Mark. He examines all the issues raised by the Gospel of Judas or the Gospel of Mary or the Gospel of Thomas. -- This is an excellent book to give to people who have a strong interest in New Testament scholarship but don't know where to begin their studies outside the bible. It's an excellent book for those who have been negatively influenced by the claims in the popular press that Jesus never existed, or that the Four Gospels don't contain witness to Jesus in His own time. --- I wish there were more books like this, books this impressive and this thoroughly researched. The gap between the academy and the popular reader is too great. -- I recommend also Ben Witherington's latest effort on the same theme. anneobrienrice@mac.com

Craig Evans is a reputable scholar with endorsements from both conservatives and liberals alike. He is a Christian who appears to have moderate to somewhat conservative leanings (theologically). This was my first book by this particular author and I found it to be a good popular level discussion against numerous radical or in some cases downright fraudulant theories about Jesus.
The book opens with some rather interesting pages on the author's background and those of several other scholars. Topics covered include Gnostic Gospels, Earhman's textual criticisms, beliefs Christ was a Cynic, modern popular conspiracy books ("Holy Blood, Holy Grail", etc.),some of James Tabor's theories, and the Gospel of Judas. Evans held my attention and the chapter on the Jewish historians was particullary interesting as were Evans's opinions regarding the Gospel of Thomas.
Overall, the book was enjoyable, informative, and a fairly fast read. I recommend it to anyone looking for a popular level discussion of early Christianity.

Fabricating Jesus is a guide to unlocking fact from fiction when faced with issues of "how modern scholars distort the gospel." This book covers several areas that misleading modern scholars have been trying for years to pass on as truth, even with little evidence to support their claims. It is a look into things like the Gnostic and apocryphal Gospels, teachings that Jesus was a Cynic, miracles and teachings of Jesus, the supposed secrete writings of Jesus, a protected secrete of Jesus and his marriage and children (etc...). Dr. Evans takes the historical evidence and facts and then places it all on the table for examination. This is a well-written book from a highly trained, highly educated, and well-informed scholar. Although Dr. Evans is not as popular a name in the writing circle like Lee Strobel and others, this should not stop you for reading this wonderfully informative book.

Professor Evans systematically destructs the modern theories about who Jesus is. After the Da Vinci Code, there have been other books published concerning the gnostic gospels that certain people give credence. Craig Evans contribution is to add some additional depth to de-bunking these theories. I also learned more about what the Jewish historian Josephus wrote relating to Jesus, Pilate and the early church and how the writings of Josephus have been misused. One great side-effect of all these silly theories about Jesus is to revive interest in the REAL history of Jesus and the 1st century church.

What comes across to me in this book is the length to which pseudo-scholars go to avoid the real Jesus. While this book does not speculate on the motives of such "scholars", it can only come from heart the is very hostile to Christ and hostile to the gospel. It's amazing that the question "Who is Jesus" is as relevant and even as divisive today as it was in the 1st century