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A review by beejai
Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels by Craig A. Evans
challenging
informative
inspiring
slow-paced
5.0
John Dominic Crossan writes a biography of Jesus and he has the man come away looking like a skeptic. He portrays almost a Jewish version of Carneades. Reza Aslan writes a biography of Jesus and has the man coming away looking like, well... a zealot. His Jesus is almost the exact opposite in every way to the so-called conclusions drawn by the Jesus Seminar. I have said that many of these biographies tell us a lot more about the author than they do of Jesus himself. This isn't an original idea. As far back as a hundred years ago, real scholars were leveling the exact same criticism against Bultmann and his ilk.
How can this be? How so many scholars (or so-called scholars) look at the exact same material and draw such vastly different conclusions from it? That question is beautifully answered here by Craig Evans. Point by point, chapter by chapter, Evans addresses many of the common mistakes, faulty scholarship practices, and biases that are common to many scholars like Ehrman, Crossan, and such. He looks at things like trying to impose the views of fringe 2nd-4th century writings on the early church, holding to a standard of criterion for the gospels and epistles far more stringent than any other writings anywhere in antiquity, imposing anachronisms or the views from cultures that would have had no place in 1st century Palestine, and so on. He uses many examples from current scholarship, but he does more than that. Evans gives the reader the tools so that we might be able to spot when similar errors might appear in future works.
Evans also includes a chapter dealing with nonscholarly errors that have had been popularized in our time like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and The Davinci Code. He then finishes up with a short chapter on why we can be relatively certain that the larger picture of Jesus painted in the Synoptics and John is both reliable and accurate. I really want to give this book five stars, but I do not know how valuable it would be for someone who does not have a familiarity with many of the scholarly works he addresses. Almost every example he uses comes from a book I have read. I am not sure how much would be lost on someone who has not extensively read Crossan, Borg, Ehrman, et al. So I am posting this as four stars... but it really should be five.
How can this be? How so many scholars (or so-called scholars) look at the exact same material and draw such vastly different conclusions from it? That question is beautifully answered here by Craig Evans. Point by point, chapter by chapter, Evans addresses many of the common mistakes, faulty scholarship practices, and biases that are common to many scholars like Ehrman, Crossan, and such. He looks at things like trying to impose the views of fringe 2nd-4th century writings on the early church, holding to a standard of criterion for the gospels and epistles far more stringent than any other writings anywhere in antiquity, imposing anachronisms or the views from cultures that would have had no place in 1st century Palestine, and so on. He uses many examples from current scholarship, but he does more than that. Evans gives the reader the tools so that we might be able to spot when similar errors might appear in future works.
Evans also includes a chapter dealing with nonscholarly errors that have had been popularized in our time like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, and The Davinci Code. He then finishes up with a short chapter on why we can be relatively certain that the larger picture of Jesus painted in the Synoptics and John is both reliable and accurate. I really want to give this book five stars, but I do not know how valuable it would be for someone who does not have a familiarity with many of the scholarly works he addresses. Almost every example he uses comes from a book I have read. I am not sure how much would be lost on someone who has not extensively read Crossan, Borg, Ehrman, et al. So I am posting this as four stars... but it really should be five.