There are those that claim that St. Paul swooped in and hijacked the 1st Century ‘Jesus Movement’ and turned it into Christianity by turning it into a salvific mystery religion, instead of the slightly-altered Judaism it was ‘supposed’ to be… they even say he made up the Eucharist!
While I have not read these claims in-depth, it has caused me some concern, because it challenges the very root of our religious heritage.
“Those” people are the Jesus Seminar and its like.
There is a long tradition of trying to remake Christ in one’s own image. It’s no surprise that the secularized scholars of the Jesus Seminar have created a Jesus who looks more like them. They do this by editing out any piece of Scripture or Tradition which does not fit their mold for Jesus.
For example, one of the better known of this stripe is Bart D. Ehrman, a professor who became disillusioned with Christianity once he learned that his fundamentalist belief in sola scriptura was not borne out by fact.
Ehrman’s been peddling the notion for years that the gnostic gospels and other apocrypha represent authentic Christianity and that these competing Christianities were little more than warmed-over paganism. This is a useful fiction for the 9% of Americans who do not believe in God for obvious reasons—Ehrman has uncovered the “conspiracy” at the heart of Christianity and so apparently confirmed both the materialists’ biases and granted them the insider status they crave.
How Ehrman works his sleight of mind is illustrative. His standard for the historical Jesus is that the gospels must agree. Therefore, any gospel account not confirmed by other unique extant sources (indeed, these have to be ones which in fact argue AGAINST Christianity, but that’s another point) are presumed invalid.
All of which is well and good except that:
- There is a paucity of ancient sources to begin with
- Applying this same approach would result in denying the existence of several Roman emperors, much less citizens of a subject people in a Roman backwater
- Where the sources do agree Ehrman claims they simply had a similar antecedent which was not itself unique
This is an historical standard applied in no other discipline than in the narrow focus of the Jesus Seminar and similar efforts.
If archaelogists worked this way, we’d claim to know precisely nothing about the ancient world, since our evidence after so many centuries is necessarily fragmentary. If biologists were held to this same standard, evolution and a number of other useful frameworks for scientific inquiry would have to be flushed down the toilet.
Think about it this way:
9/11 was an event experienced and seen by millions. Yet accounts of what happened that day vary significantly. Did 9/11 happen?
Of course it did.
Likewise, Christ’s birth, ministry, death, and resurrection were witnessed by many people at various points. It was the transforming event in many of their lives. Is it not natural that human recollection would be a bit different, or that even where it was the same the person recollecting would emphasize different aspects for different audiences?
One must never hesitate to apply common sense to scholarly-sounding claptrap.
The burden of proof is on Ehrman and his ilk, and despite repeated attempts to undermine the faith, they’ve failed to carry the day beyond the atheists who agreed with them before they wrote anything at all.
Such chicanery does little for me but to confirm the Truth of the Catholic Church, and I thus welcome such ham-handed efforts to embrace whatever pleasant fiction wallowing in one’s sins may require. “Let the dead bury the dead”, as Christ said.
Where you will sometimes even hear him be called a “Liar” by some Muslims.
