Apocryphicity

This is the second in a series of posts on Andreas J. Köstenberger’s and Michael J. Kruger’s recent book, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity has Reshaped our Understanding of Early Christianity (Wheaton, ILL: Crossway, 2010). Since the first post, I have come across two other on-line responses to the book from Tim Henderson (at Earliest Christianity) and from Michael Bird (at Euangelion).

The first part of The Heresy of Orthodoxy deals heavily with the Bauer thesis and it’s most vocal and visible recent defender Bart Ehrman. The first chapter outlines the thesis in a fairly neutral fashion, save for the occasional remark about how it has led to a championing of diversity in today’s age. The authors also mention some of Bauer’s critics and supporters.

The second chapter, “Unity and Plurality: How Diverse was Early Christianity?”, explicitly challenges the Bauer thesis.  Bauer examined five urban centres and made the argument that heresy preceded orthodoxy in these areas.  K&K’s criticisms are valid at times; indeed, we have a lot more information about heretical groups (thanks largely to the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library) than Bauer had in his time, and we also have more nuanced views about what constituted “Gnosticism” in the early centuries. So, for several of these urban centres, Bauer’s arguments are now unsustainable; particularly because, as K&K note, Bauer neglects much of the first-century evidence for some of these areas. However, he does so with reason: “the New …

This is the first in a series of posts on Andreas J. Köstenberger's and Michael J. Kruger’s recent book, The Heresy of Orthodoxy: How Contemporary Culture’s Fascination with Diversity has Reshaped our Understanding of Early Christianity (Wheaton, ILL: Crossway, 2010). It is one of a number of books written in reaction to works by scholars (particularly Bart Ehrman) associated with the “Bauer school”—i.e., influenced by Walter Bauer’s landmark book Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (Rechtgläubigkeit und Ketzerei im ältesten Christentum, originally published in 1934). I suppose that I, too, would be considered a member of this “school”; so, I am very interested in critiques of Bauer’s work and those who have followed in his footsteps. Also, I have written previously, both here and in print, on examples of what I have called anti-Christian Apocrypha apologetic. And K&K’s book certainly falls into that category.

First, a basic description of the book. Like previous works of this kind, it is published by a press known for fairly conservative (or simply theological) books: Crossway. The testimonials filling the opening pages are all by conservative writers, several of whom have written books very much like this one (e.g., Darrell Bock, Dan Wallace). The forward by Howard I. Marshall seems to anticipate any criticisms of the authors’ theological perspective: “The authors write as adherents of what would probably be identified as an evangelical Christianity that maintains a belief in the divine inspiration of Scripture, but, so far as I can see, their …

Darrell Bock, author of The Missing Gospels: Unearthing the truth Behind Alternative Christianities (2006), has a new book out this month entitled Recovering the Real Lost Gospel: Reclaiming the Gospel as Good News (you can read the promotional blurb HERE). Bock is one of several evangelical scholars who have written some critical, though largely uninformed, indictments of the Christian Apocrypha and the scholars who study it. To read more about their literary endeavours, click HERE.

The short article I wrote for the JBL Forum a few years ago entitled "Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium" (read it HERE and some reactions and discussion HERE) has now appeared in its original longer form in the latest volume of the journal Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses (contents and abstracts available HERE).