There is no church document which denies that fiction is a valid vehicle for revelation or teaching.
This may be true, but you are overgeneralizing it to distort what the Church teaches. It is absurd to claim that the Gospel is mostly made up of fictional stories. It goes against Church tradition, and is one of the oldest heresies against our faith.
It’s the same when people try to confuse the historicity of the birth of Christianity by comparing the Gnostic gospels with the cannon. There is a modern day reference that my Pauline Literature professor strongly urged us to read. It’s called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony, by Richard Bauckham, and it discusses in great detail (538 pages worth!) the four cannonical Gospels as an oral history based on the eyewitness testimony of the life of Christ. He includes a discussion on the Greco-Roman methodology of writing histories and makes a clear distinction between oral history and oral tradition. Now, I am not an expert in this, but apparently the critics (of religion) who flourished during the Enlightenment tried to advocate for people to doubt the authenticity of the Gospels because oral tradition is a lousy way to preserve information. Oral tradition is a method of “preserving” history by passing stories down from one generation to another, but because the primary means of communication is oral, it is subject to memory lapses and the stories can change dramtically. (Remember playing “Operator” as a kid?) Oral history is much different though. With Oral History, there is a primary author who is writing down testimony of eyewitnesses to both record individual events and to build a narative. The Greco-Roman methodology was thus to include proper names of people who provided the eyewitness testimony, and especially to frame the testimony by beginning with a mention of their name and an ending of the same.
With that in mind, I picked some gospels and started to take a look at the difference between them.
First, I examined the gospels of Judas, Thomas, and Mary. Other than the main characters whose names are well-known from the canonnical texts, I found not a single proper name of a human (there were lots of names of powers and principalities, though). Then I looked at the cannonical Gospel of John. The Gospel begins with a beautiful presentation of Christ as God and then immediately goes into the preparatory ministry of John the Baptist, his relationship to Christ (as the one who was not the Light, but the one to bear witness to the Light), and the one who introduced him as the Lamb of God to Peter and Andrew. With the framing structure in mind, I would say that John the Baptist was the one who provided that eyewitness testimony (for that specific passage)to the beloved disciple (John the Evangelist) who composed our fourth Gospel. Specifially, his testimony begins with the mentioning of his name and ends with the last occurance of the mentioning of his name – thus his testimony is framed by his name. Where the beloved disciple is mentioned specifically, then by definition that was his own personal eyewitness testimony that he included in the Gospel. Chapter 11 seems to be permeated by eyewitness testimony from Mary and Martha (which is sort of ironic if you think about the claims of those who say the Church is burying the Gospel of Mary for nefarious reasons – it is in John where you will find the true contributions of Mary to the Gospel). And just reading through the Gospel, you can see this pattern everywhere.
So, with this in mind, it is a much different experience reading the Gnostic gospels. I did read the Gospel of Thomas a while ago, before I started any serious scriptural studies, and it sort of shook me up. I mean, I found it creepy, actually, but I didn’t know why I thought it was creepy. It just wasn’t right. Now, I read the text, and it just doesn’t have any credibility whatsoever. It comes across as nothing more than folklore.
And, apparently there is a very good reason for that. Again, I am not an expert in this, but from the little I’ve read on the texts of the Apocrypha (not the deuterocanonical books in the Old Testament, but the Apocryphal books that have been designated as such by the early Christian Church,) in particular the Gnostic gospels are guilty of authors from different faith traditions who were trying to project their own faith onto the life of Jesus. So, if their faith was one in which they believed their physical body would be transmutated into a spiritual ethereal being, then they would write about Jesus coming to provide that service for them. Another theory is that people love good stories, and because there were long gaps in the lives of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, authors would fill in the gaps by making up stories about their lives – literally folklore.
At any rate, it will be very interesting to see how public Bauckman’s work becomes. Scripture scholars are already raving about this work, and it was only published last December! Hopefully we will have a strong public advocate to argue against both the champions of the Gnostics and the ones who claim our cannonical Gospels couldn’t possibly have credibility because of the inherent weaknesses of oral tradition. I am hoping to read his book myself, but, gah! Too much to read, and never enough time… >.>
So… anyway… Professional scripture scholars do a pretty good job at looking at the historicity of our cannon. For those who were at all worried about Patg’s post, I really wouldn’t take it seriously.
Shylah
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