(A modern Liberal approach to the study of the Gospels)

Nov. 25, 2007

Getting On With It

By Harry T. Cook

With the hounds of the anti-heresy squad baying at my heels, I thought I may as well buckle down on my on-again, off-again major research on the four documents known as According to Thomas, According to Mark, According to Matthew and According to Luke - the English term "according" being an inadequate translation of the Greek ?at? meaning "down from." Those documents being known as "gospels," you would say, for example, "the gospel down from Mark" - as in "the word or the story came down from a person or a tradition denominated 'Mark.'"

The central hypothesis of my research is that the four gospels named in the previous paragraph have at their core a humanist outlook on life, which, over time, has been overlaid with mythological material, a vessel, as it were, to transport it intact from one generation to the next. As Paul said to the Corinthians (II Corinthians 4:7), We hold this [substance from the] treasury in a clay implement, perhaps referring to "the light of the knowledge of God in the face of Jesus Christ" mentioned in the previous verse. The reference may be to what we would call today a ceramic lampstand.

In any event, the light is one thing, the lamp another. The gospel is one thing, the means of its transmission another.

In a future work I dare to hope might be published, I propose to show that the birth and resurrection narratives in Matthew and Luke along with the so-called miracle stories are myths (that is to say, stories crafted to meet other such myths that were so prevalent in the First Century Mediterranean world) intended to preserve the essence of an ethical code thought by those who called themselves "disciples of Jesus" to be the means by which human beings could most successfully live together. One could call such an outcome "salvation."

Although my methodology will not be that of Thomas Jefferson's, who with penknife excised from his New Testament all but what he took to be the authentic sayings of Jesus, the result of my work may resemble it. One difference will be that Jefferson evidently believed such a person as Jesus as depicted in the gospels actually existed pretty much as depicted. I am not so sure of that proposition, if only because it has become apparent to me that the Jesuses of the various narratives are sometimes different persons with different agenda.

With that latter observation in mind, I propose further to show that the gospels are early church history, documents compiled and edited by interested parties of what I call "Jesus Judaism" (to distinguish it from an emergent, post-Temple synagogue Judaism) from the mid-70s C.E. through the end of the First Century and quite possibly into the Second. I will try to demonstrate that the gospel narratives were compiled as we find them in the service of the communities out of which they came.

My interest over the past decade or so in the work of John Dominic Crossan, Paula Fredriksen and Elaine Pagels has emboldened me in my own as I consider the three of them to be the eminent New Testament/early Christianity scholars of the present era - not only because I arrived at a few of the same provisional conclusions as they, but because they have seemed to have had no other agenda except, where possible, to disclose the mostly elusive truth about the gospels and their provenance.

Insofar as I have been able to tell, Crossan and Pagels bring no identifiable sectarian or denominational necessities to their scholarship, though they both have great reverence for the traditions out of which the substance of their research material has come.

Even while looking over my shoulder at the approaching hounds, I place myself as a striving, minor journeyman among those aforementioned masters in that I have not, even in preaching much less in teaching or publishing, felt compelled to honor sectarian and denominational boundaries. In rare cases in which the results of research may turn out to support one term or another of the church's official catechism, no one will be more overjoyed than I.

The readers of this website are not unacquainted with the kind of research I am describing because some of its early fruits have been evident (and meant to be evident) especially in the posted sermons. I do not deceive myself in thinking that many will be interested in the riper fruit of this enterprise. But I shall try to harvest it nonetheless and from time to time issue progress reports.

© Copyright 2007, Harry T. Cook. All rights reserved. This article may not be used or reproduced without proper credit.