The Case for the Real Jesus

by Lee Strobel

  I knew that the dating of the alternative gospels was going to be a major factor in determining whether they can be trusted. Rather than delve deeper into that topic at this point, however, I asked Evans to continue discussing the historical criteria.

  “A second issue,” he said, “involves a geographic connection. For example, a document written in the Eastern Mediterranean world thirty years after Jesus’ ministry is more promising than one written in Spain or France in the middle of the second century.

  “A third issue involves the cultural accuracy of the document, in terms of its allusions to contemporary politics or events. This can expose phony documents that claim to have been written earlier than they really were. When we have a writer in the second or third century who’s claiming to be recounting something Jesus did, often he doesn’t know the correct details. For example, whoever wrote the so-called Gospel of Peter doesn’t know Jewish burial traditions, corpse impurity issues, and other matters from Jesus’ time. He gets exposed by mistakes that he didn’t even realize he had made.

  “Then there are motivational questions. Did the writer have an axe to grind? Does he bend over backward to deny something or affirm something that’s dubious? These things are often transparent and we can detect them.

  “We look at the New Testament documents and, yes, they have an agenda: they’re affirming that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God. But they also make all kinds of statements that can be evaluated. Are they culturally accurate? Are they true to what we know from other historical sources? Were they written in a time and place that has proximity to Jesus’ life? The answers are yes.

  “When we get into other gospels, the answers to those questions are almost always no. They’re written in a later period of time—too late to be historically reliable. They were written from other places with strange and alien contexts. We find inaccuracies at key points. We can see they’re derived from earlier sources. Sometimes there’s a philosophy, like Gnosticism, that’s being promoted.”

  A question popped into my mind. “Is this kind of analysis mostly science or art?” I asked.

  “It’s much more science. It isn’t just guesswork and opinion. It’s logical,” he answered. “When you look at Matthew, Mark, and Luke—also John, but especially the Synoptics—and use the same criteria that you would use in assessing secular historians like Suetonius, Tacitus, or Thucydides, the New Testament Gospels perform very favorably. Actually, these other historians were much further removed from many of the events that they wrote about.”

  I picked up my notes. “Helmut Koester of Harvard Divinity School says: ‘Only dogmatic prejudice can assert that the canonical writings have an exclusive claim to apostolic origin, and thus to historical priority.’28 Is it mere prejudice on your part,” I asked Evans, “that causes you to give priority to the four Gospels of the New Testament?”

  “The only way his statement can be true would be if somebody dogmatically asserts it before any evidence is considered,” he answered. “If one examines all the evidence fairly and completely, then it’s a logical conclusion that the canonical writings have an exclusive claim to being connected to the apostles. For crying out loud,” he added with a laugh, “the Gospel of Thomas doesn’t! And would anyone claim that the so-called Gospel of Peter—found in the coffin of a monk in the ninth century—really has a connection with Peter? Come on!

  “If you had ten documents and you arbitrarily selected four of them and said only they have a connection with the apostles, and you didn’t have any reason for saying that—then that would be prejudice, I agree. But if you go through all ten and you discover that you actually do have credible historical evidence for four of them as having some kind of apostolic connection and the others not a chance—then it’s not a dogmatic, prejudicial assertion. It’s a reasonable and considered conclusion, based on the evidence.”

  CHRISTIANITY OR CHRISTIANITIES

  At this point, I brought up The Complete Gospels, in which the Jesus Seminar published sixteen other gospels alongside Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—suggesting to me that they considered them all equal in terms of their historical validity.

  “Some scholars have sought to give these other gospels very early dates of origin,” I said to Evans. “This backs up their claim that first-century Christianity featured a broad range of differing doctrines and practices—all equally legitimate—and it was the more powerful orthodox wing that crushed these other valid Christian movements. Is it true that the earliest Christianity was a fluid melting pot of all kinds of different perspectives about Jesus?”

  The disdain was apparent on Evans’s face. “It’s not true at all,” he insisted. “This is the product of a modern agenda—a politically correct, multicultural agenda motivated by sympathy for marginalized groups. It’s the attitude that says diversity is always good, truth is negotiable, and every opinion is equally valid. The question is: What really did happen in the first century? What’s the evidence? What are the facts?”

  I jumped in. “What are the facts?” I asked.

  “Well, the early Christian movement certainly did have disagreements. But there weren’t ‘Christianities.’ There wasn’t one Christianity that thought Jesus was the Messiah and another Christianity that didn’t; another Christianity that thought he was divine and another Christianity that disagreed; and another Christianity that thought he died on the cross as a payment for sin and another Christianity that scoffed at that. This is nonsense.

  “There were no major questions about any of these basic points in the first decades of the Christian movement. The New Testament writings reflect the testimony of the first generation church, which very much depended on the testimony of Jesus’ own handpicked disciples. To take second-century diversity and exaggerate it, and then to try to smuggle those controversies into the first century by hypothesizing that there was some earlier version of second-century documents, is just bogus. Real historians laugh at that kind of procedure.”

  “Still,” I objected, “we do see the New Testament talking about controversies in the first century—things like whether converts should be circumcised and so forth.”

  “Yes, and the New Testament quite honestly discusses disagreements when they occur—issues like circumcision, whether Christians can eat meat sacrificed to idols, those kind of tensions,” he conceded. “But that’s not what these scholars are claiming. They’re trying to smuggle into the first century a mystical, Gnostic understanding of God and the Christian life, even though first century Christians had never heard of these things.”

  “So the core message of Christianity…?”

  “…Is that Jesus is the Messiah, he’s God’s Son, he fulfills the scriptures, he died on the cross and thereby saved humanity, he rose from the dead—those core issues were not open for discussion,” he said firmly. “If you didn’t buy that, you weren’t a Christian.”

  Evans’s mention of Gnosticism seemed an apt segue into discussing the most highly touted alternative text: the Gospel of Thomas, whose portrait of Jesus as an imparter of mysterious and secret teachings has intrigued scholars and captivated the public in recent years. The real story behind Thomas, I was soon to learn, was even more fascinating.

  DOCUMENT #1: THE GOSPEL OF THOMAS

  “History preserves at least half a dozen references that say there was a gospel purportedly written by Thomas,” Evans said in response to my question about the ancient document. “And, by the way, they didn’t believe for a minute that this gospel really went back to the disciple Thomas or that it was authentic or early. Nobody was saying, ‘Boy, I wish we could find that lost Gospel of Thomas because it’s a goodie.’ They were saying, ‘Somebody cooked this up and it goes by the name of Thomas, but nobody believes that.’”

  Hmmmm, I thought to myself. An interesting start.

  “Then in the 1890s, archaeologists digging in the city dump of ancient Oxyrhynchus, Egypt, found thousands of papyri, including three fragments of the Gospel of Thomas in Greek
. Only they didn’t know what they were until 1945, when the Nag Hammadi library was discovered at another location in Egypt. Among the thirteen leather-bound codices found in a jar was the Gospel of Thomas in Coptic. That’s when scholars realized that the discovery in Oxyrhynchus represented 20 percent of the Thomas Gospel.

  “A lot of people assume that the Greek version is earlier than the Coptic version. But now the small number of scholars who have competence in the field believe that may not be true. Instead, Thomas was probably written in Syriac. What’s particularly interesting is that most of the material in Thomas parallels Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, and sometimes Paul and other sources. Over half of the New Testament writings are quoted, paralleled, or alluded to in Thomas.”

  “What does that tell you?” I asked.

  “It tells me it’s late,” he replied. “I’m not aware of a Christian writing prior to AD 150 that references this much of the New Testament. Go to the Epistles of Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch, which were written around AD 110. Nobody doubts their authenticity. They don’t quote even half of the New Testament. Then along comes the Gospel of Thomas and it shows familiarity with fourteen or fifteen of the twenty-seven New Testament writings.” His eyebrows shot up. “And people want to date it to the middle of the first century? Come on!”

  I interrupted. “Elaine Pagels told me that she takes what she called a ‘conservative view’ of the dating and puts it about AD 80 or 90. Stevan L. Davies says Thomas ‘is wholly independent of the New Testament Gospels; most probably it was in existence before they were written. It should be dated AD 50–70.’”29

  “Oh, that’s absurd!”

  Undeterred, I continued. “John Dominic Crossan says the current text emerged about 60 or 70, but that an earlier edition goes back as far as the 50s.30 If they’re right, that means Thomas has really early material. Are they wrong?”

  “They’re wrong for several reasons,” he said. “Number one, as I explained, Thomas has too much New Testament in it. Not only that, but Thomas doesn’t have early, pre-Synoptic material. Thomas has forms that reflect the later developments in Luke or Matthew.”

  I was confused. “Explain what you mean,” I said.

  “Matthew and Luke sometimes improve on Mark’s grammar and word choice. Mark is not real polished in terms of Greek grammar and style, while Matthew and Luke are much more so. And in the Gospel of Thomas we find these more polished Matthew and Luke forms of the sayings of Jesus. So Thomas isn’t referring to the earlier Mark, but to the later Matthew and Luke. We also find references to the special material that’s only found in Matthew and only in Luke, both of which scholars think is later, not earlier.

  “And Thomas has material from the Gospel of John. How can Thomas be written in the 50s and the 60s but still have Johannine material that doesn’t get written down until the 90s? It gets even worse when we find that some of the material that certain scholars think is old and independent actually reflects Syrian development.”

  Again, I asked him to elaborate. “The Gospels are published in the Greek language,” he said. “Christianity then spread to all sorts of language groups. Of course, it goes eastward, where people speak a form of Aramaic called Syriac.”

  “So the Gospels were translated into Syriac?”

  “Not immediately. There was a guy named Tatian, a student of Justin Martyr, who created a written harmony of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John in the year 175. It’s called the Diatessaron, which means, ‘through the four.’ What he did was blend all four Gospels together and present it in Syriac. So the first time Syrian-speaking Christians had access to the Gospels was not as separate Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, but as the blended, harmonized form.

  “In blending together the sayings of the four Gospels, Tatian created some new forms, because it was part Matthew, part Luke, and so forth. Here’s the clincher: those distinctive Syrian forms show up in the Gospel of Thomas.

  “What’s more, a study by Nicholas Perrin has found that in places the Gospel of Thomas is also acquainted with the order and arrangement of material in the Diatessaron. All of this means Thomas must have been written later than the Diatessaron in 175. Now everything begins to add up. Of course Thomas knows more than half of the New Testament. By the end of the second century, you’re in a position to know that much. And Thomas reflects Syrian ideas.”

  “Such as what?”

  Evans replied with a question of his own: “How does the Gospel of Thomas refer to Thomas?”

  Feeling a bit like one of his students, I searched my memory. “As Judas Thomas,” I offered.

  “That’s right,” he said. “That name is found in the Syrian church—and nowhere else. Also, the Syrian church was very much into ascetics. They did not like wealth. They did not like businessmen and commercialism. That shows up in Thomas. They were into elitism and mysticism. And guess what? That also shows up in Thomas.

  “But maybe this is the most interesting evidence. If you read Thomas in Greek or Coptic, it looks like the 114 sayings aren’t in any particular order. It appears to be just a random collection of what Jesus supposedly said. But if you translate it into Syriac, something extremely intriguing emerges. Suddenly, you discover more than five hundred Syrian catchwords that link virtually all the 114 sayings in order to help people memorize the gospel.31 In other words, Saying 2 is followed by Saying 3 because Saying 2 refers to a certain word that’s then contained in Saying 3. And Saying 3 has a certain word that leads you into Saying 4. It was a memorization aid.

  “So you have distinctive Syrian sayings, you have Thomas called Judas Thomas, you have Syriac catchwords, you have familiarity with more than one-half of the New Testament—what does it all add up to? Everything points to Thomas being written at the end of the second century, no earlier than 175 and probably closer to 200.”

  I had to admit: that was an extremely impressive case. Still, I knew Thomas supporters would raise arguments to the contrary. “A few scholars point out that there was apparently a collection of Jesus’ sayings called Q that was used as a source by Matthew and Luke and was therefore extremely early,” I said. “Similarly, the Gospel of Thomas is a collection of sayings—so maybe they’re similar genres and therefore Thomas must be early like Q.” 32

  Evans rolled his eyes. “Oh, yeah, what a brilliant argument!” he said, his sarcasm in full bloom. “What they don’t seem to realize is that at the end of the second century, there was another collection of sayings produced, called the Sentences of Sextus. And by the end of the second century, a collection of sayings of the rabbis was produced. So what is it about collections of sayings that argues for the middle of the first century only? The collections genre was just as popular in Syria at the end of the second century as it was anywhere else in an earlier period.”

  I tried another approach. “What about the argument that there’s an earlier edition of Thomas, with more ancient elements, that’s embedded in the text?”

  “Obviously, Thomas is depending on some traditions that have been inherited. So, yes, there’s some earlier stuff in it,” he said. “But when you say there was an earlier Gospel of Thomas—a coherent, whole, discrete unit—now you’re claiming something for which you should have evidence. Frankly, there is no such evidence.

  “That’s when a few scholars turn to what we call ‘special pleading.’ They’re aware of the points I’ve been making today. They know this evidence embarrasses their theory that Thomas is very early. So they hypothesize a different form of Thomas that they claim was earlier than the one we now have. That is, instead of modifying their theory to fit the evidence, they modify the evidence to fit the theory. Well, I’m sorry—where I come from, when you do history and examine documents, you’re not allowed to get away with that. You deal with the evidence that you have.”

  “Pagels claims: ‘The Gospel of Thomas contains teaching venerated by ‘Thomas Christians,’ apparently an early group that…thrived during the first century,’” I said.33 “Do you see any evidence
of this stream of Christianity existing in the early days of the faith?”

  “No, the ‘Thomas Christians’ are the Christians of Syria, and they thrived at the end of the second century. Think about this: If ‘Thomas Christians’ were running around at the end of the first century, how come church fathers writing in the 90s, around 100 and 110, never refer to them? How come they don’t appear on the radar until the end of the second century?”

  Evans left those questions hanging in the air. There was no need to try to provide an answer.

  JESUS ACCORDING TO THOMAS

  I had to admit: Evans had done a persuasive job in establishing that the Gospel of Thomas dates to the late second century and therefore lacks credibility in its depiction of Jesus. However, I was still interested in how this ancient text portrays him. After all, more and more people are exploring Gnosticism, especially on the Internet, where Davies even maintains a “Gospel of Thomas Homepage.”34

  “How does Jesus in the Gospel of Thomas differ from the Jesus we see in the four Gospels?” I asked Evans.

  “Jesus in Thomas teaches a mystical understanding of the good news,” he responded. “That is, inner light, inner revelation, freeing oneself from materialism, greed, and the usual worries of life. Some of the material in Thomas is in step with Wisdom teaching, like the book of Proverbs, and even with some of Jesus’ teaching. It’s just skewed or exaggerated so that it becomes inner, mystical, private, personal, and not very much community or collective. Indeed, some of the mysticism in Thomas is very similar to Tatian’s distinctive views, which again argues for lateness, not antiquity.

  “There’s no longer any interest in this world being redeemed. That, of course, is the Gnostic element. This world is hopeless, it’s lost, it will be destroyed, rather than being restored and redeemed. Israel’s promises no longer mean anything. In fact, there’s a touch of anti-Semitism in Thomas.”