Burridge Reviews “Jesus Tried and True”

July 28, 2015 by Tony

The latest Review of Biblical Literature features a review of Jesus Tried and True: Why the Four Canonical Gospels Provide the Best Picture of Jesus (Wipf & Stock, 2013) by H.H. Drake Williams III (read the review HERE). Drake’s book is yet another example of anti-Christian Apocrypha apologetic. Burridge characterizes (and indicts) the work well in saying:

Despite the claims of its title and subtitle, Jesus is never “tried,” and the canonical gospels are never properly examined. Instead of an academic study, we have a rhetorical exercise, an apologetic seeking to defend the “superiority” of the canonical gospels by a polemical attack on the noncanonical texts claiming that name. The book’s declared purpose is “to summarize the latest discussion for educated readers and draw conclusions” (xx), but actually its intention is to reassure those who share the author’s assumptions that not only is Jesus fully God and fully human according to the “Chalcedonian Statement” (xv and 143) but that all four canonical gospels promote this view centuries earlier and are therefore and ipso facto, “superior.” Despite the wild claims on the TV or in Newsweek about the latest discoveries in the desert or the arguments put forward by “a group known as ‘the Jesus Seminar’” (xix), this book suggests that these readers should not worry or be alarmed, for Jesus is “tried and true.” Unfortunately, no matter how much the axe is being ground, it is actually pretty blunt.”

2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium Proceedings Available Soon

July 25, 2015 by Tony

The proceedings from the 2013 York Christian Apocrypha Symposium are now in the production stage of publication and should be available for purchase at the 2015 symposium at the end of September. Here is the cover artwork (click to see full size):

Philip Jenkins on “King Jesus” and “The Many Faces of Christ”

July 24, 2015 by Tony

Philip Jenkins, author of Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (2001), has posted a series of articles on Robert Graves’ 1946 novel King Jesus in anticipation of his latest book The Many Faces of Christ:The Thousand-Year Story of the Survival and Influence of the Lost Gospels, due in October from Basic Books. The connection between Graves’ novel and the Christian Apocrypha is summed up as: “Obvious flaws apart, so much of King Jesus is fascinating, not least in terms of the alternative theories about Jesus and early Christianity that Graves presents. So many of these, moreover, are familiar to us today in the form of supposedly astonishing discoveries from recently found Gnostic gospels. Reading King Jesus, though, we see that these ideas were standard components of a 1940s bestseller, written the year before the celebrated finds at Nag Hammadi (and two years before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found).” Jenkins began discussing the novel in a post on Aletia, “Rediscovering King Jesus,” and then in three posts on Patheos (“King Jesus,” “Jesus the Essene,” and “Jesus, Ebionites and Jewish Christians”). Here is the abstract for The Many Faces of Christ:

The standard account of early Christianity tells us that the first centuries after Jesus’ death witnessed an efflorescence of Christian sects, each with its own gospel. We are taught that these alternative scriptures, which represented intoxicating, daring, and often bizarre ideas, were suppressed in the fourth and …