Apocryphicity

Those interested in the work of Bart Ehrman (either supporters or detractors) may find interesting a new site called The Ehrman Project. The site describes itself as:

As a scholar, professor, and author, Dr. Bart Ehrman has undeniable influence over students and much of the American public. Yet there are equally qualified scholars who deal with the same issues and come to very different conclusions than Dr. Ehrman. The Ehrman Project is a website dedicated to engaging the ideas that Dr. Ehrman is famously expounding in the complex and nuanced realm of Biblical scholarship. It is not intended to answer all of Dr. Ehrman's claims nor answer the ones it does completely. Rather it is intended to give small snapshots that will potentially motivate viewers to research more information on the particular topic.

After interacting with many students over the years, Miles O’Neill, a campus minister at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, began considering an online resource in response to Dr. Ehrman’s popular claims. Dustin Smith, a Religious Studies major of UNC-CH, enrolled in Dr. Ehrman’s New Testament course in the spring of 2009. Soon after, Mr. O’Neill and Mr. Smith started collaborating together on The Ehrman Project. With the help of numerous students, colleagues, professors, and friends, EhrmanProject.com was able to launch in early 2011.

I have only had a cursory look at it thus far, but found entertaining the videos by Ben Witherington (on the canon) and Dom Carson (on biblical inerrancy). Also featured …

I have been working recently on an introduction to a book on the Christian Apocrypha aimed at a popular audience. The introduction contains a short autobiographical section on what attracted me to study the Christian Apocrypha. I thought it might be of some interest to readers of Apocryphicity.

Why am I such an advocate for the Christian Apocrypha? Have I been “burned…by orthodox Christianity” as Ben Witherington suggests (in The Gospel Code: Novel Claims About Jesus, Mary Magdalene and Da Vinci [Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 2004], p. 172-174, and What Have They Done With Jesus? Beyond Strange Theories and Bad History—Why We Can Trust the Bible [San Francisco: Harper Collins, 2006], p. 4-5)? Am I trying to prove I am a “good critical scholar” by “discrediting” the New Testament? Or have I been “misled…by the powers of darkness”? I hope the answer to all of these questions is no. But the answer is connected to faith—or more rightly, a reaction to a faith once held.

I grew up in England in a Roman Catholic home, though my family was not particularly devout. My father was greatly interested in religious questions—Who was Jesus? What happens when we die? Did Marian apparitions truly occur? When will the apocalypse happen?—but not overly concerned with religious practice; indeed, we rarely attended church. But I did believe. I believed the gospels were written by the apostles of Jesus, I believed I had to be good if I wanted to avoid eternal damnation, and I …

In this final post of my critique of Andreas J. Köstenberger’s and Michael J. Kruger’s The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity has Reshaped our Understanding of Early Christianity (Wheaton, ILL: Crossway, 2010) I focus on K&K’s chapter on the Christian Apocrypha: “Establishing the Boundaries: Apocryphal Books and the Limits of Canon.” 

This chapter asks the question, “whether the diversity of apocryphal literature threatens the integrity of the twenty-seven-book canon as we know it” (152). Again, K&K are challenging the pop-scholarship of Bart Ehrman which asserts that all Christian texts, canonical and non-canonical, are equal, that some apocryphal texts could easily have made it into the canon.  K&K justifiably, I think, criticize Ehrman for a statement he makes in Lost Christianities in this regard: “But where did [the New Testament] come from? It came from the victory of the proto-orthodox. What if another group had won? What if the New Testament contained not Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount but the Gnostic teachings Jesus delivered to his disciples after his resurrection? What if it contained not the letters of Paul and Peter but the letters of Ptolemy and Barnabas? What if it contained not the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John but the Gospels of Thomas, Philip, Mary, and Nicodemus?” (Ehrman, p. 248). Ehrman’s point is sound, that the New Testament represents the views of one particular group (or several likeminded groups) in early Christianity; whether or not they are a group with greater claims of …

I resume my critique of the Andreas J. Köstenberger’s and Michael J. Kruger’s The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity has Reshaped our Understanding of Early Christianity (Wheaton, ILL: Crossway, 2010) with the final chapter of the first section of the book: “Heresy in the New Testament: How Early Was It?” The chapter essentially minimizes the observable differences between various texts within the NT and among early Christian leaders (Peter, Paul, James). I am not going to argue with K&K much on this topic, except to say that the interpretation of the evidence depends on one’s presuppositions, for the most part, about the book of Acts. Early in their discussion, they say, “Assuming the historical accuracy of Luke’s account…” (p. 75). Doing so leads to an opinion of the early church and its leadership as harmonious and united. My own view is that Acts is a relatively late text (80 CE at the earliest but possibly even later) that has little interest in an accurate portrayal of the early history of the church. Acts minimizes the conflicts that we see more transparently in Paul’s letters; thus, one who considers Acts reliable will be inclined also to minimize these conflicts.

However, my primary objection to this chapter is with the assumptions K&K attribute to proponents of the Bauer-Ehrman thesis. They complain strongly about the “anti-supernatural bias in Bauer’s historical method” (102). “What we are arguing,” they write, “is that the Bauer-Ehrman thesis is wrong not just because these …