Dr Paul Allen

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 Thom