The Bride of Christ?

The long and the short of the matter is this: The fragment tells us nothing about Jesus himself, but may tell us a little about how some heterodox Christians were interpreting Jesus. While it will not revolutionize our understanding of Jesus or undermine traditional faith, it does present an opportunity to discuss crucial issues of faith and scholarship.

First, reputable scholars of whatever persuasion, whether orthodox Christian believers of some stripe or agnostic or atheist believe the canonical Gospels, and particularly the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke and their putative sources, are the best resources for investigating the historical Jesus. Responding to Dan Brown’s best-selling flight of fancy some years ago, Bart Ehrman, the former fundamentalist Christian-cum-happy pagan agnostic Biblical scholar, offered up a stone-cold glass of sober:

    The oldest and best sources we have for knowing about the life of Jesus . . . are the four Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. This is not simply the view of Christian historians who have a high opinion of the New Testament and its historical worth; it is the view of all serious historians of antiquity of every kind, from committed evangelical Christians to hard-core atheists. This view is not, in other words, a biased perspective of only a few naïve wishful thinkers; it is the conclusion that has been reached by every one of the hundreds (thousands, even) of scholars who work on the problem of establishing what really happened in the life of the historical Jesus, scholars who (unlike Teabing and his inventor, Dan Brown) have learned Greek and Hebrew, the languages of the Bible, along with other related languages such as Latin, Syriac, and Coptic, scholars who read the ancient sources in the ancient languages and know them inside and out. We may wish there were other, more reliable sources, but ultimately it is the sources found within the canon that provide us with the most, and best, information.


Second, many who study later non-canonical texts like The Gospel of Thomas speak not of “Christianity” but “Christianities,” claiming that “orthodoxy” and “heterodoxy” are later post-Constantinian concepts anachronistically retrojected into earlier periods when radical diversity reigned.