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Each weekday in the month of August, we will pursue “prepositional truth” by zeroing in on a single Greek preposition in a single verse, noting the theological richness so often embedded in the humble words we so often overlook.
In 1993, a consortium of progressive Bible scholars and lay persons known as the Jesus Seminar published The Five Gospels, their first report summarizing the results of their search for “the real Jesus.”
It’s an understatement to say the title came as a surprise to most orthodox Christian believers.
The church has long recognized Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the four authoritative biographies of Jesus. What then, are we to make of the Gospel of Thomas, a recently discovered document that was enthusiastically championed by the Seminar?
The following year Robert J. Miller added new fuel to the fire with The Complete Gospels, a collection of 20 ancient biographies of Jesus (implying they should all should be regarded with equal seriousness), including the Gospels of Mary, Judas, and Peter.
During a 2006 MSNBC debate about Dan Brown’s controversial novel The Da Vinci Code, British journalist Andrew Sullivan declared, “There’s a very important historical point here, which is that in the last 30 years we have discovered real Gospels – hundreds of them – that are not the official Gospels, that were part of the discussions in the early Church.”
The number of “real Gospels” keeps accelerating, as does the rhetoric.
Suffice it to say we are living in an era in which scholars, novelists, and others hoping to capitalize on these new discoveries are rushing to get their thoughts into print and into the public imagination.
Where does that leave rank-and-file Christians? If following Jesus is fundamentally dependent on being able to discern the actual words and actions of Jesus, how can we know which Gospels to trust?
One of the presuppositions of progressive scholarship is that Jesus’ identity was up for grabs during the first few centuries of the church. Multiple “Christianities” competed for attention. That diversity came to a screeching halt in A.D. 325 at the Council of Nicaea, where orthodox views prevailed and other perspectives were officially ruled out.
According to these claims, what became known as orthodoxy won the day through force. That means the Bible you hold in your hands is the result of a power play. In his global bestseller, Dan Brown asserts that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John made the cut not because they were “true,” but because they embodied the political and social biases of the victorious bishops.
Those are serious charges.
Orthodox scholars and historians haven’t exactly been sitting on their hands the past few decades. Their books may not be available in the paperback rack at your local airport, but they are united in their evaluation of the “many Gospels of equal value” hypothesis: It’s nonsense.
For instance, the Gospel of Thomas, which was discovered in a trove of Egyptian documents in 1945, deserves rigorous study. But there are compelling reasons to reject it as the fifth Gospel.
Thomas is a bit like the book of Proverbs – a collection of 114 sayings attributed to Jesus. There is no accompanying narrative of Jesus’ travels, miracles, or relationships. Nor is there anything concerning his Passion – his trial, suffering, and crucifixion during his final week – stories which account for at least 30% of the material in the four traditional Gospels.
According to Thomas, Jesus was either a mystic or a Gnostic (someone for whom salvation is a chiefly a matter of knowledge).
In saying number 14 he declares, “If you fast, you will bring sin upon yourselves, and if you pray, you will be condemned, and if you give to charity, you will harm your spirits.” That doesn’t sound much like the Jesus we know.
Later he says, “Split wood, I am there. Lift up a stone, and you will find me there.” That’s more like pantheism (God-is-everything-and-everywhere) than a Jewish perspective of creation.
Notoriously, the Gospel of Thomas ends with Peter saying, “Miryam [Mary Magdalene] should leave us. Females are not worthy of life.” Jesus replies, “Look, I shall guide her to make her male, so she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every female who makes herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.”
That may provide interesting fodder for 21st century debates about gender fluidity, but it is utterly out of step with the way Jesus relates to women in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Manuscript evidence suggests that Thomas was written between A.D. 175 and 200, long after the last eyewitnesses of Jesus’ ministry had left the scene. In the words of Bruce Metzger, widely regarded as the 20th century’s chief expert on biblical documents, “The right way to put it is, the gospel of Thomas excluded itself.” It doesn’t hold a candle to its four rivals.
If we revisit Andrew Sullivan’s remarks, we can affirm that while there were probably not “hundreds of real Gospels,” the church of the first few centuries certainly knew there were plenty of documents in circulation that claimed to know something about Jesus.
But none of them – not one – came remotely close to winning a place alongside the four canonical Gospels.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – alone – were written within the lifetimes of the original apostles; reflected eyewitness testimony; aligned with the orthodox teaching of the church’s first teachers and missionaries; and were widely read in pulpits around the Mediterranean world.
The Acts of Peter and the Gospel of Judas may indeed have been part of the conversation of the early church. But from everything we know, that conversation didn’t last very long.
That brings us at last to our verse and its relevant prepositions. We read in 2 Peter 1:21, “For prophecy never had its origin in the human will, but prophets, though human, spoke from (APO) God as they were carried along by (HYPO) the Holy Spirit.”
This is one of the Bible’s most important statements concerning its own authority.
The word “authority” assumes the reality of an “author.” The Word of God is authoritative because it is from God. Theologians assert that while the books of the Old and New Testaments came from the pens of human authors, they did not originate in human minds or imaginations.
Does that mean the Bible was dictated by the Holy Spirit, and the human authors were little more than flesh-and-blood tape recorders?
While we may occasionally hear that perspective from an enthusiastic preacher, theologians throughout history have almost universally rejected it. Instead, they carefully distinguish between the source of God’s Word and the means by which it is conveyed.
John, for instance, wrote his Gospel and his three epistles in a style that is quite different from Paul’s. Luke’s narrative style in his Gospel and Acts would never be confused with the way James composed his short letter.
As is often the case, we arrive at a point of mystery. The Spirit “carried along” the human authors (as we read above in 2 Peter 1:21) in such a way as not to violate their personalities or run roughshod over their writing styles. Yet somehow their words were not just their own, but the very words of God.
Over the centuries, men and women yearning to hear God’s voice have discovered it in the four canonical Gospels.
Which should lead us to affirm, as we read in so many advertisements, “Accept no substitutes.”