Weird postmodern ideas about the Bible
Postmodern ideas about history challenge any authoritative version of the past given by the Bible as suspicious and founded in power play. Yet interestingly, the Bible is then compared to flimsy challenges of whacky alternative theories. For instance, the Gospel of Judas has been heralded by the Western media as a serious challenge to the Bible. Upon reading it, the archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, noted, “It’s actually a fairly conventional book of its kind—and there were dozens like it around in the early centuries of the Church. People who weren’t satisfied with the sort of thing the New Testament had to say spent quite a lot of energy trying to produce something which suited them better. They wanted Christian teaching to be a matter of exotic and mystical information, shared only with an in-group.”
According to The Da Vinci Code, the church suppressed the real version of events that can be found in so-called gnostic gospels like the Gospel of Mary and the Gospel of Thomas.11 These are, in fact, not gospels at all but rather collections of random sayings and stories put together to form a challenge to the first-century Christian gospels. Nevertheless, these sources were compiled and written much later than the canonical gospels, only exist in fragmentary form, and were rejected as specious at the time. Oddly, such facts do not dampen the zeal of theorists intent on casting suspicion on the authoritative versions attested by historical evidence and the witness of the church. This is all a part of the postmodern challenge that can be answered with historical data and a scholarly account of fourth-century Gnosticism.12 This challenge itself, though, should first be understood as being a product of the postmodern culture.
Zacharias, R. (2008). Beyond opinion: living the faith that we defend. Nashville: Thomas Nelson.
