Can We Trust the Gospels?

The key question for studying Jesus is: Can we trust the gospels? I am referring to the four books which are known by the names of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, and which are found in the "canon" of the New Testament--that is, the collection of books that the church, from early on, recognized as authentic and authoritative (hence the often-used phrase "the canonical gospels").There has been a recent spate of books, both scholarly and popular, urging us to think that these gospels were only four among dozens of similar works that were around in the early church, and that these four were eventually privileged, and the others discarded, suppressed, or even banned. The prime reason for adopting these four, it is sometimes suggested, was that they supported a view of Jesus which was convenient for the ruling authorities at a time when, in the fourth century, Christianity was becoming the official religion of the Roman Empire.

Does this mean we have to tear up all the pictures of Jesus based on the canonical gospels and start again? No. All kinds of other documents have indeed turned up, not least a whole cache found in Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt in 1945, some of which give us fascinating glimpses of what people were saying about Jesus at the time of their writing. (The Dead Sea Scrolls, by the way--found not long after the Nag Hammadi documents--say nothing whatever about Jesus or the early Christians, despite many ill-informed assertions to the contrary) But none of them, in fact, is able to trump the gospels we already had.

Is the Gospel of Thomas Legit?

Take the best known, and one of the longest, of the Nag Hammadi documents: a collection of supposed sayings of Jesus known as the Gospel of Thomas. This is the book which, it has often been suggested, could and should be treated as at least equal, and quite possibly superior, to the canonical gospels as a historical source for Jesus himself. The version of Thomas we now have, like most of the Nag Hammadi material, is written in Coptic, a language spoken in Egypt at the time. But it has been demonstrated that Thomas is a translation from Syriac, a language quite like the Aramaic that Jesus must have spoken (though he pretty certainly spoke Greek as well, just as many people in today's world speak English as a second language). But the Syriac traditions that Thomas embodies can be dated, quite reliably, not to the first century at all, but to the second half of the second century. That is over a hundred years after Jesus's own day--in other words, seventy to a hundred years after the time when the four canonical gospels were in widespread use across the early church.

What's more, despite efforts to prove the opposite, the sayings of Jesus as they appear in Thomas show clear indications that they are not as original as the parallel material (where it exists) in the canonical gospels. Sayings have, in many cases, been quietly doctored in Thomas to express a very different viewpoint. For instance, when Jesus says, in Matthew, Mark, and Luke, "Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's;" the saying in Thomas has an extra phrase at the end: "and to me the things that are mine." What is going on here? In the worldview represented by Thomas, the word "God" denotes a second-rate kind of deity who made the present wicked world, the world from which Jesus has come to rescue people. Thomas and most of the other Nag Hammadi documents represent a worldview known as "Gnosticism,' in which the present world is a dark, evil place from which we need to be rescued by "gnosis," a special knowledge of hidden truth--a world quite different from the Jewish world of Jesus and the four canonical gospels.