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In Hidden Gospels: How the Search for Jesus Lost Its Way (Oxford), Jenkins, distinguished professor of history and religious studies at Penn State, exposes Jesus Seminar types as—to put it bluntly—agenda-driven ninnies. Such scholars, fascinated by texts like the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, and others unearthed at Nag Hammadi in 1945, dig for what they want to find (evidence of alternate and legitimate "Christianities") and then spare no extravagance in touting its importance. With such titles as The Secret Teachings of Jesus: Four Gnostic Gospels and The Complete Jesus, their books promise to erode orthodox Christianity, conveniently replacing it with a kinder, gentler, and much more politically correct version.

Jenkins's problem with this body of work isn't primarily that it contradicts traditional faith, but that it rests on bad scholarship. Revisionist claims about hidden gospels require that such texts be both older and more reliable than the non-hidden sort, but Jenkins argues persuasively that they are not. Nor can the sects (notably gnostics) that produced the hidden gospels be put on equal footing with the nascent Christian church. "Just as the canonical gospels were in existence before their heterodox counterparts," Jenkins writes, "so the orthodox church did precede the heretics, and by a comfortable margin." Of course, nobody would read The Hidden Texts of Comparatively Late Fringe Groups.

The scholars running willy-nilly after wishful theories might be excused if they were merely jumping to conclusions in the wake of shocking new discoveries, but this ground has been broken before. Today's revisionists would know that if they bothered to read anyone else's work. Jenkins points out that nearly all of the "revolutionary" claims made in the past 30 or so years—Jesus didn't think he was God! Matthew, Mark, and Luke shared notes!—are at least 100 years old. The period between 1880 and 1920 was particularly fertile for radical theories, a fact many contemporary scholars stubbornly or stupidly ignore, and most of the theories weren't even new then. Jenkins goes so far as to assert that "the search for alternative Christianities has been a perennial phenomenon within Western culture since the Enlightenment."

Those muddle-headed revisionists of the previous century had their own able critic: Albert Schweitzer. His The Quest of the Historical Jesus, first published in 1906 and reissued in complete form this year by Fortress Press, summed up popular theories (particularly as expressed in the multiple Lives of Jesus then circulating) and found nearly all of them wanting in historical rigor. The theories were not as new as their proponents claimed and not nearly as well grounded. Most damningly, though, the theories blatantly reflected contemporary sensibilities and therefore couldn't possibly describe a first-century figure. Unlike Jenkins, Schweitzer follows these complaints with his own radical theory, but up to that point the two men are on a similar mission.

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July (Web-only) 2001, Vol. 45