I don't usually send out my book reviews and news articles, just opinion
pieces, but this book was so interesting I wanted to pass it along. This will
be in the LA Times Saturday morning. Hope youall are having a very blessed
Holy Week.
***
Imagine a convocation of New Testament scholars, circa 2100 AD, poring over
a recently discovered cache of ancient scrolls. What a delightful, mystical
figure Jesus cuts here! He's hardly like the fire-and-brimstone version
promoted in the establishment Gospels. Surely this is the *real* Jesus, the
one suppressed for so long by a rigid hierarchy.
Sad, isn't it, that all previous generations of scholars were too hidebound
and fundamentalist to perceive the truth. Like those folks in the Jesus
Seminar, a hundred years ago.
In "Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way" (Oxford University
Press, 256 pages, $25.00), Philip Jenkins proposes that such a scenario is
both amusing and nearly inevitable. Ever since the dawn of the Enlightenment,
western Christian scholars have been trying to throw Churchified Jesus out
the window, and to replace him with a more appealing figure. Yet there's a
catch: for the current generation of liberators to believe they are truly
breaking new ground, they must forget that previous scholars did the same
thing.
It's the "underlying mythological structure" perpetuating this cycle that
interests Jenkins. The discoveries themselves don't warrant the astonishing
claims made on their behalf, so some other need is driving their enthusiastic
promotion.
Take as an example an ancient document, the "Gospel of Mary." It concerns a
revelation of the risen Jesus to Mary Magdalene, and because it depicts her
in a leadership role it is prized by contemporary feminists. But for it to
constitute evidence of Jesus' intentions for the role of women, "The Gospel
of Mary" must have been written when the other Gospels were, about the year
80 AD. A later, fictitious account would be as useless as a historical
romance written last year.
Unfortunately for fans of this Gospel, its contents suggest a date of 180 AD
or later. Its style and concerns resemble Gnostic mythologizing of that later
era, and while it can teach us much about the controversies of the time, it
can tell us nothing about the historical Jesus or Magdalene. This doesn't
prevent feminist scholars from treating the "Gospel of Mary" in the same
literal way that they would mock in Southern Baptists' handling of the Gospel
of Luke. Jenkins calls this "inverted fundamentalism."
A hundred years ago the freshly-discovered document "Pistis Sophia"played an
remarkably similar role. This work, published in English in 1896, featured a
mystical dialogue between Jesus and Mary Magdalene. In 1909 feminist and
theosophist Frances Swiney wrote "The Esoteric Teachings of the Gnostics,"
based on "Pistis Sophia" and celebrating the superiority of its spirituality
over that of the establishment church. In language that could have appeared
elsewhere on this page [the religion page] today, Swiney praises Gnostic
women as "pioneers of the liberation movement of their sex, dialectical
daughters questioning the truth and authority of received opinion."Jenkins
finds is significant both that the same revisionist formulas keep
reappearing, and that current generations maintain firm amnesia about the
crusades of earlier revisionists.
Recently-discovered Gnostic texts pretty much resemble older ones, so why do
we keep thinking such scholarship is daring or new? "The whole idea of hidden
gospels and lost Christianity...appeals at the level of myth," Jenkins
writes. The campfire story goes like this: the real Jesus was hidden by evil
bureaucratic forces who wanted to bar people from the truth and reserve power
to themselves. But wait! Hidden documents have been discovered that can
overthrow this conspiracy! Courageous people are fighting to bring the truth
to light, despite powerful opposition from the oppressive church.
"Phrased in this way, modern perceptions of Christian history sound less like
scholarly reconstruction than the sort of mythology common to many societies,
with their tales of original innocence, catastrophic fall, and fortunate
redemption." During times of social change, people instinctively cling to
interpretive stories that give meaning to life, featuring clearly-defined
good guys and bad guys. The good guys are the rebels, of course; this is
particularly true in the context of American culture, in which both patriotic
rejection of England and Protestant rejection of Rome feed the flames of
romance. Bad guys are the evil Roman church, a stereotype which has endured
for centuries. That ancient texts supply the proof for rebellion echoes
another familiar theme, that of conservative biblical literalism grounding
all things in biblical text.
Thus there exists a powerful desire to inflate the importance of recovered
texts, to place them as early as possible in history, and to use them to
challenge historic faith. The very fact that the texts had been hidden is
taken, illogically, as proof they they're true: if they didn't contain
important secrets, why were they hidden? Where the Gnosticism in the texts is
incompatible with current sensibility (misogynist, anti-Semitic, relentlessly
hierarchical, impenetrably abstruse), difficulties can be elided or
reinterpreted to suit modern fashion. Most important, the work of previous
generations of scholar-rebels must be ignored, so that these revelations will
appear dramatically new. News media can be relied on to trumpet startling
claims, since the man-bites-dog principle readily extends to
Jesus-bites-church. Where texts are flimsy, wishful thinking fills the gaps.
Jenkins says, with admitted cynicism, "If I hadn't believed it, I wouldn't
have seen it with my own eyes."
Jenkins explains his thesis in language that is both clear and fair. The book
is admirably even-handed and far from the taunting, self-righteous tone
revisionists habitually level at conservatives. He relies on facts to speak
for themselves, though there is one fact that points beyond itself toward
something worthy of further contemplation on this spiritually significant
weekend. "[A]fter so much alleged secularization," Jenkins writes, "the faith
that people are struggling to disprove is still Christianity."
*******************************
Frederica Mathewes-Green
www.frederica.com
