This week a colleague sent me Stephen J. Patterson's review of Craig A. Evans' Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels, a book I would like to read.  The review ends with this quote:

This is a divide that we must increasingly deal with in biblical studies. Competently trained scholars now operate on both sides of this great divide. How we handle that difference honestly and respectfully is our unique challenge. On that score this book fails miserably ....

(If you’ve opened the review link, it comes from the Review of Biblical Literature, a trade publication for scholars devoted to book reviews. It is published by the scholarly professional organization the Society of Biblical Literature. If you would like a taste of SBL’s yearly professional conference, go to the parallel conference (with some of the same speakers) sponsored by the popular Biblical Studies magazine BAR.)

I would say the argument isn’t between religious and non-religious scholars, it is between every individual scholar and their own tendency to look for something recognizable in the past. Christians now want to see Christians then who worship and believe and look like themselves. Pagans want likewise. Women want to see women who behave and speak as they’d recognize and admire. African-Americans want to see ancient Africans who speak to their own experiences and recent history. Everyone winces a bit when they start to like (or identify with) someone or something in the past and that reflection ripples with something we’d find alien or distasteful (ritual self-mutilation, human sacrifice, placid subservience) – and then we must remember that there were no glass mirrors in that past, only the surfaces of water.

(I’m alluding to the famous quote.)

Our job as scholars is to help and correct each other in a spirit of fellowship (too often this done in a spirit of competition) remembering that we are all looking for the same thing: what happened back then. After reading a portion of the last century’s work in my field I must admit we get better results when we cooperate. It is easy to find holes in another’s work – but what is there to build on? Dr. Evans’ self-professed status as a Christian* gives him an advantage in working with Christian from the past, but he must not let his pride in his heritage collapse 2,000 years of difference. (I would say the same to anyone who investigates history.) He has written a book about holes, well and good – now what can he say about the worth of his fellow laborers’ work? (As a scholar himself he certainly knows the difference between a Thiering and a Tabor, let us not confuse the public (who may not) with such rhetorical sleights of hand.)

(Thiering, to put it briefly, makes balloon animals with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Tabor (although this year I’ve sometimes had to repress the urge to suggest he lie down and put a cool cloth on his forehead) is a respected scholar working in the legitimate and difficult field of investigation the family (and indirect decedents – from cousins and nephews) of Jesus.)

[* This is why I do not speak about my own spiritual background (or lack thereof); it creates a conversation about oneself as a person of faith (or nonfaith), whether one is (or isn’t) doing a good job representing (or practicing) that tradition, and whether such a path is a good idea, at all. Being a religion scholar is not one bit of help at worship-day services or when confronted by life’s joyful and terrible moments. I think these are all private matters, separate from my profession – and I think the first rule in speaking about one’s convictions is to err on the side of tact, some places and times aren’t suited for a tract and a talk.]

A religious person may say, "But you are not defending my religion!" I cannot. I cannot even defend my own religion (or lack of religion) when I am acting as a historian. My loyalty is to the evidence. I may nor like the idea that Christianity (or Judaism) was very diverse in the first century C.E. I may find it repugnant and in conflict with other things I hold dear but as I read the Greek, Aramaic, (and later Hebrew) Jewish literature (the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha), I can’t come away thinking anything but that there were profound differences of practice, theology, and politics in Judaism of the time. As I read the letters of Paul I can no longer hold on to the idea (as was once thought) that only one party from Jerusalem followed in Paul’s footsteps to set straight the congregations he worked with. There is no evidence that even any one group tracked Paul between any two cities he worked in – and a careful reading of the arguments he differed with reveal they cannot be from one theological perspective, nor can they be simple variations (or misunderstandings) of what he’d taught. Pieces of them look too much like that Jewish literature, mentioned above, or a bit like the very different Christianities found in the first few centuries of the religion’s existence. After reading Paul’s letters more carefully – and the letters of Ignatius, and the Didache, and the early Gnostic literature – I can’t conclude anything but that early Christianity had profound differences of practice, theology, and politics, also. I may wish things to be as I was taught in school, but I am not an ancient Christian. The evidence from the past says there was no one main church founded by Jesus that shook off a legion of theological misunderstandings to flourish today as [one’s denomination of choice which either descends directly from or accurately restores the apostolic church]. (Nearly every church claims that, if you look around; it’s bad press to say otherwise.)

The past isn’t what I want it to be, it will not tell me I’m alright or make me feel better about being a woman (or being religious (or areligious)). If I want reassurance I don’t look to history:  the past is never purely any one thing. Thus I’m always pleased (and charmed) when I find something familiar in the past, but it is (to mention another famous quote) a foreign country. I don’t expect things to be like they are here.

-Kushana