The P. T. Barnum Syndrome

Have you heard about the “pesher technique”?  Golly, it unlocks the real meaning of the New Testament so we don’t have to believe all that stuff that we as children only thought it was teaching when we read the Gospel of John.  It’s amazingly simple.  All you do is translate the New Testament from Greek “back” into Hebrew, and then—get this—you subject it to the code of interpretation used by the Essenes of Qumran.  Wow!  And all this time we thought it was all about the incarnation of the Word who taught us and then died an atoning death so we could be saved by placing our faith in him.  I mean, this is exciting!  Now we can chuck all that.

(Lord, I hope no one takes me seriously.  It’s that kind of world.)

It’s like finding out that if we translate Shakespeare back into the original proto-Arabic (since his works were really written by an ancestor of Salman Rushdie’s) and apply the method of interpretation used by the Mayas, we find that they are really about the colonization of Africa by extraterrestrials.

And then there are the radical feminists, for whom the truth seems to be whatever they make up that can be sold to the gullible.  Oh, yes; there were millions of Wiccans slaughtered by the Catholics in the Middle Ages.  Never mind that historians quickly jumped on that one.  Its inventor said it was a useful figure, so it would stand as declared.

Elaine Pagels has made a career out of this sort of thing, declaring that she was shocked when, upon entering her doctoral program at Harvard, she learned that two of her professors, Helmut Koester and George MacRae, had filing cabinets full of “gospels” and “apocrypha” written during the first centuries after Christ.  She writes, “When my fellow students and I investigated these sources we found that they revealed diversity within the Christian movement that later, ‘official’ versions of Christian history had suppressed so efectively that only now, in the Harvard graduate school, did we hear about them.’”

Do I detect just a tad of Ivy League elitism here?

There’s just one detail here that should be noted:  She made it up.  There was no “suppression.”  One can go to any well-stocked library and find the Gnostic works in question.  I learned about those cockeyed texts in seminary between 1958 and 1961 (near Harvard, incidentally) and read some of them.  The church fathers regularly discussed them, and they were never, so to speak, swept under the carpet.  They were simply left to die of their own weight.

Pagels also claims that in A.D. 367, Athanasius, he of the Athanasian Creed, wrote an Easter letter “in which he demanded that Egyptian monks destroy all writings, except for those he specifically listed as ‘acceptable,’ even ‘canonical.’”  Then some zealous monks, she writes, spirited the forbidden books away and buried them “on a nearby hillside near Nag Hammadi.”  You can look up that Easter letter, which says none of what Pagels claims is in it.

It has become big business for certain sensationalistic television channels to proclaim that this program or that is going to present “new” information that will revolutionize the way we think about Christianity.  One channel keeps running “Banned from the Bible,” the very title of which gives the impression that there was some hanky-panky involved in the formation of the canon.   Then the impression is that some evil, cunning bishops in the early church, obsessed with gaining political power for themselves, out-maneuvered their enemies and established a faith that Jesus and the apostles would never have dreamed of founding.  Hey, folks, these people, far from fighting for political power, stuck their necks out and, as bishops, were often the first to die for their faith.  If they were going to do that, they wanted to be pretty doggone sure it was the “faith once delivered to the saints.”  Not many of us die for a lie or a mere opinion.

Come on, people.  We all know Christianity is the only faith that can be attacked with impunity these days (just try attacking the Muslim faith’s story of its origins), but if you’re going to do it, at least use logical arguments and facts.  When you feel it necessary to make up preposterous stories to attack the church, you only make it look better by contrast.

Or, under the First Amendment, you can go back to what that weirdo scholar said a few decades back, that Christianity originated as a mushroom cult.  Lots of credibility there.