D.A. Carson writes about Charles Hill’s new book Who Chose the Gospels? Probing the Great Gospel Conspiracy, just published by Oxford University Press:
For those willing to examine the documentary evidence, there is no better guide than this book by Charles E. Hill. Hill is meticulous, even-handed, careful to distinguish between historical datum and speculation—and a good writer to boot. Not many books that are so informed are such a pleasure to read.”
Dr. Hill recently had an article on The Huffington Post on this issue: “The Conspiracy Theory of the Gospels.”
Here’s an excerpt where he examines one conspiracy theory and the problem with it:
Proof is said to reside in the ancient papyrus documents which archaeologists have dug from the sands of Egypt over the past century and a quarter. The Christian books yielded up by the unbiased, ancient trash heaps are, we are told, mostly books which were excluded from the New Testament. This would seem to show that the four Gospels were once minority reports and that some popular alternatives have been suppressed by the “winners.” All I will say here is that the papyri have both less and more to tell us than this argument lets on.
The problem for the conspiracy theory is a man named Irenaeus. Irenaeus was crystal clear in his claim that the church, from the time of the apostles, had received just four authoritative Gospels—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John—and that all the others were bogus. This is just what we would expect from a fourth-century re-writer of history. The problem is that Irenaeus wrote in the second century, long before the conspiratorial rewriting of history is supposed to have taken place.
Does, then, the conspiracy approach to early Christian history, in either its popular or its academic forms, have it right? Should it bother anyone that those who stress so loudly that the winners wrote the histories are the ones now writing the histories? Let the reader judge . . . but also be aware of conspiracies.
