Euangelion
Over at Eerdword is a post by Tony Burke about his new book Secret Scriptures Revealed: A New Introduction to the Christian Apocrypha, and it includes these colorful comments:
I have seen in my students that their individual reactions to these texts are much like their reactions to biblical scholarship in general. Students from conservative Christian backgrounds, where the authorship of the gospels or the historical veracity of traditions about Jesus are never questioned, tend to feel cheated, misled, and manipulated by their church leaders when they encounter the challenges posed by (liberal) biblical scholarship. But students from Christian communities that are more open to discussing the results of scholarly inquiry feel much less anxiety in biblical studies classrooms. Their beliefs and experience of Jesus are less tangled up in texts and traditions and more connected to Jesus the man. From this perspective, noncanonical gospels can be considered sympathetically as additional interpretations of Jesus, though perhaps more distant from their subject in time and place than the canonical texts.
The harm, then, is not so much to Christianity as to Christian orthodoxy — i.e., to Christianity that propagates a very narrow definition of “truth” and encourages the eradication, or at least the repression, of contrary viewpoints.
Christian faith can be built on both canonical and noncanonical traditions. Indeed, it has been throughout the history of Christianity, where stories and images from both categories of texts have met regularly in homilies, popular literature, art, drama, and iconography.
Okay, I like any book that gives a good, fair, sympathetic, and historically nuanced look at the Christian Apocrypha. These writings are important for understanding of the development of the early church, its texts and traditions, and diversities. Indeed, not all apocrypha is late, gnostic, and bad for you!
Still, Burke makes a few dodgy assumptions: (1) That Christianity is ideationally vacuous and you can pretty much make up and believe any crap you like and still be a Christian. Well, no, that is now how it works. Christians always had a story with certain theological fixtures which were not for negotiation and those who tried to tinker with them were ruled out of bounds; and (2) The attempt to discern between true and false belief goes back to our earliest sources, esp. Jesus, Paul, and the Johannine literature. Here I must recommend Kruger and Kostenberger on The Heresy of Orthodoxy as a good antidote to this sort of thing.
So while I certainly look forward to this book by Tony Burke, I’m not buying into what I would call the “episcopal hermeneutics” that Burke is operating with.
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