Scholarly book review of “Reinventing Jesus: What the Da Vinci Code and othe Novel Speculations Don't Tell You”

Scholarly book review of “Reinventing Jesus: What the Da Vinci Code and othe Novel Speculations Don't Tell You”

This work is admittedly a primer of in-house, parochial apologetics for conservative evangelicals who have perhaps read The Da Vinci Code or watched a couple of critic vs. apologist debates. The avowed goal is merely to refute contemporary challenges to a traditional Protestant view of Jesus Christ. The utter lack of scholarly seriousness is evident from the sheer fact that the authors lump Dan Brown's imbecilic Da Vinci Code in with critical works by John Dominic Crossan, the Jesus Seminar (whom they vilify as “a fringe group of scholars,” pure calumny), and others, as if they are equally garden pests to be dispatched with the same apologetical can of Raid so the faithful can settle back peacefully into their dogmatic slumber (Komoszewski & Sawyer,. 2006). The “methodology,” if there can be said to be a methodology of distortion, is, first, to project onto one's opponents the mirror image of one's own dogmatic motivations. The result is to characterize their hypotheses as mere tools to argue for heresies the critics just happen to prefer for unknown reasons.

The first section contains 3 chapters dealing with ancient classical oral history. I prefer the term "oral history" to "oral tradition," because, as the authors point out, with a post-Reformation dislike of "tradition," & a 21st century dependence on the written word, when we hear "oral tradition," we are more apt to think of garbled gossip than of precise, carefully preserved history. The authors carefully define the "gospel" -- it is "good news," not merely "warm & fuzzy ideas," or "weird beliefs." They then explain & document the methods of ancient classical teaching, memorization, & oral history & show how its evidence is everywhere behind the written text we now call our New Testaments. Finally, they examine the message & person of Christ as displayed in the New Testament & how unlikely it would be to have such an extraordinary, unpredicted character composed after the fact by public relations conscious religion builders. I especially appreciate the authors' acknowledgement that there is good evidence to suppose that the entire New Testament was completed before AD 70, a view that is gaining ever greater respectability among those who work the most closely with the text either scientifically (such as the papyrologists) or critically (Komoszewski & Sawyer, 2006).

The second section contains 5 chapters explaining how & when the New Tesatment books were written & then copied & preserved through the centuries. As with each chapter in the book, the chapters in this section begin by repeating the myriad of skeptical questions lay people have been told undermine the Bible's authority. In Chapter 4, those questions include, "what if the copies were corrupted?," "what if they were copied so poorly we can't ascertain the original?," & "hasn't the text been copied & recopied, translated ...