RE-INVENTING JESUS
What The Da Vinci Code and other novel speculations won’t tell you
By J. Ed Komoszewski, M. James Sawyer, and Daniel B. Wallace,
Kregel. 348 pages
Many British evangelicals tend to be cautious about something coming from Dallas Theological Seminary because of its dispensationalist tendencies. This book, however, written by three graduates from the Seminary and including one (Wallace) actually lecturing there, deserves a wholehearted welcome by everyone in the UK. The book is accessible, thorough and informative.
Moreover, it is relevant and thus practical. The year 2006 saw unprecedented attention given to The Da Vinci Code and its rather banal and ridiculous claims, and also to increased attention to the ‘Gospel of Judas’. TV programmes have built on this tendency, essentially examining Early Church history, asking questions about Christology, biblical canonicity and textual history. The average evangelical finds himself assaulted by would-be experts that suggest that the historic Christian faith is essentially a fraud, and the notoriety attached to books like The Da Vinci Code has led to such suggestions trickling down to the general public.
My own concern arises from my interaction with Muslims. Muslims are convinced that the biblical text and canon were deliberately corrupted, and often assert that the Council of Nicæa chose which books would enter the NT canon, rejecting ‘unitarian’ offerings. One recent Muslim missionary publication which I hope to review soon has made much of this, and also suggested that Christianity derived from paganism, notably Mithraism. This comprehensive book is thus a masterly addition to the arsenal of truth that sets the record straight.
The book has 18 chapters divided among five sections. These examine the oral tradition behind the gospels, affirming its historical reliability in the face of assaults from ultra-liberal scholars such as Dominic Crossan from the notorious Jesus Seminar (p. 34). This infamous Seminar, quoted extensively by Islamic polemical sources such as the one I mentioned previously, also receives attention when Re-inventing Jesus examines NT manuscripts (p.53ff). This issue often baffles the ordinary believer, and, by its very nature, Greek manuscript criticism is not the most exciting of disciplines, yet this book manages to handle it in a very reasonably accessible way. The claims of the Seminar are totally undermined (p.69ff). Similarly, readers might recall my review of Bart Ehrman’s work Misquoting Jesus; his assertions are also masterfully answered in this section. More controversially, the authors also take issue with ‘KJV only’ conservatives (p.112).
The arguments of the authors of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, reproduced in The Da Vinci Code, that Constantine and the Council of Nicæa set the canon are ably answered, although it might have been helpful to go into detail about the actual facts of the Council and the contemporary documents demonstrating its concerns. Again, the authors very ably examine apocryphal pseudo-gospels such as ‘Thomas’ and ‘Peter’, and also look at what Gnosticism actually taught about Jesus.
Finally, the authors examine ‘parallelomania’ — the idea that Christianity derived from Mithraism and pagan beliefs, especially Egyptian concepts of ‘dying and rising gods’, which is completely refuted. This is very important for interaction with Muslims because this claim frequently emerges, and again, the average believer is probably ignorant on these issues, so this part of the book is invaluable. All in all, the authors have greatly placed us in their debt, and this book should be widely read by everyone.
