Gospel Truth by Russell Shorto

Author:Russell Shorto [Shorto, Russell]
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-6592-5
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2017-05-05T16:00:00+00:00

The Gospel According To Mack

You end up with the first of three modern “gospels” that are representative of contemporary scholarship. This is the most radical of the three, and it is one of the most intriguing and provocative reconstructions in the history of critical scholarship. Burton Mack, professor emeritus of the School of Theology at Claremont, represents the far fringe of the broad spectrum of scholars who give primacy to Q. His method has been to try to separate Q into various layers of tradition so that, as one peels back these layers, one edges closer and closer to the first followers of Jesus, the people who actually heard his words from his own lips, stored them in their minds, and passed them along for others to write down. He ends up with a Jesus who fires off tart one-liners—”Love your enemies,” “Sell your possessions”—and an imagined group of followers who wove these into a new model for living.

In a series of books starting with A Myth of Innocence in 1988, Mack has outlined a bold thesis: that the four canonical gospels contain almost no historically authentic material about the life of Jesus. There is no virgin birth in Mack’s picture of the historical Jesus, no miracles, no Temple incident, no Last Supper, no death and resurrection. From this perspective, Jesus may never even have died on a cross, for the crucifixion stories, in this view, are later, and therefore suspect. And while he demolishes the historicity of all of these elements, Mack also unearths a Christian equivalent of the lost city of Atlantis: a whole community of people previously lost to history, the original followers of Jesus.

If Mack is right—if Q is the earliest layer of the Jesus tradition, if this kind of wisdom collection predates not only the four gospels but Paul’s writings as well—then the historical Jesus and Christianity itself must be radically rethought. Mack is about as sweeping as one could possibly be: “The discovery of Q may create some consternation for Christians because accepting Q’s challenge is not merely a matter of revising a familiar chapter of history. It is a matter of being forced to acknowledge an affair with one’s own mythology.”6 Mack charges the media with the task of bringing this new insight to popular attention. Christianity, Mack claims, began not with a historical figure of divinity or a man with insights into the divine, but with a simple teacher along the lines of a Greek sage. This was the “real” Jesus. His followers tried to keep his countercultural wisdom alive, but as soon as it spread, it degraded into a “religious society on the model of a hellenistic mystery cult,”7 featuring a divine hero with all the attributes familiar to a Greek audience: a miraculous birth, miraculous powers, a miraculous return from death. Christianity stole Jesus away from the people of Q. Burton Mack thinks it’s time that we acknowledged that.

This is the extreme position. Think of the gospels as four ancient

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