Today I attended the Theology for all 'Other gospels' masterclass organised by Tyndale House (one of the Cambridge University theological houses).

It was pretty awesome. It was great to meet up with David (a friend from church who is doing an English PhD at Cambridge), meet and talk to Christian scholars from around the world (I met a guy who is a southern baptist - but sadly we didn't get to talk all that much), to find out more about theological books / sites / and things I ought to read, but most of all to hear the lectures and Q&A themselves.

I regret not thinking of mentioning the day to wren10514, who recently commented on her interest in the Codex Sinaiticus. Hopefully she'll find the online audio of the talks to be a sufficient stubstitute.

There were two lectures. I intend to blog about the two lectures in a bit of detail later in the week when the audio and presentations are available online (so anyone who is interested can listen to them themselves), but here is a short overview.

The first was an introduction to textual criticism, which is the branch of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification and removal of transcription errors in the texts of manuscripts. The talk had been planned for some time (at least six months), but as luck would have it textual criticism was in the news only recently - with the BBC news article The Rival to the Bible. The article is packed with errors and faulty implications, so it provided useful fodder for introducing what textual criticism is, how it is viewed by the public (the reporter presumably being someone quite uninformed on the subject), and introduced the views of probably the least representative / unorthodox scholars in the field, Bart Ehrman and David Parker. By lucky coincidence the lecturer was Dr Dirk Jongkind (Research Fellow Tyndale House and Fellow of St Edmund’s College Cambridge), who is an expert in / specialises in the Codex Sinaiticus.

I'm probably going to write a moderately lengthy post explaining the errors in the BBC article, but as a first approximation... The article presents this as some new revelation which is going to rock the world of Biblical scholarship, but in fact the Codex Sinaiticus has been in print for about 140 years (I looked at a copy of it in the Tyndale library after the talks), the Greek critical text that almost all modern English Bibles are translated from (Nestle-Aland 27) is essentially based on the Sinaiticus, that there are differences between Codex Sinaiticus and other manuscripts is why textual criticism exists (and has done since the 2nd century) - and is not shocking at all (indeed it's the norm for all pre-printing press texts), the inclusion of non-canonical texts is not unusual (many Christians today have the non-canonical apocryphal texts in their Bibles for instance), and the inclusion of a text does not imply that it had the same authority (as with the apocrypha today), particularly important here is that the two texts (The Shepherd of Hermes and The Epistle of Saint Barnabas) are included after the Apocalypse (Book of Revelation), etc. It's also irritating that the author does not seem to understand what the theological term 'inerrancy' means (I accept that the term is perhaps unhelpful in the implication of the word's common meaning).

The lecture began with a basic explanation of textual criticism followed by lots of examples of where there are variants, why certain variants are considered better than others, how those variants come about (intentionally or unintentionally), and so on. The next major bit was an explanation of Ehrman's theory on why there are variations in the text, and a look at whether the text supports his assertions (by looking at many of the variants he argues support his argument). I was quite disappointed here really - I knew that Ehrman's views were far from the mainstream, but still I thought they'd have a lot more substance than they did. Then there was some more general stuff about textual criticism, how many variants there are, what the major text families are, how many variants there are, and what effect the variants have on the meaning of the text. I learned that the vast majority of the variants have no effect on Christian belief, and that where they do they only make a difference to Christian belief if that is the only verse you're basing your theology on. To take an example referred to in the BBC article, when Jesus is reaching out to heal someone in Mark 1:41 in most manuscripts reads "And moved with pity, he stretched his hand", while in the Sinaiticus it reads "And having become angry, he stretched out his hand". So if you had some theological reason to wonder if Jesus became angry, which variant was correct would matter a lot, but this isn't an issue because there are no variants (i.e. all manuscripts agree) that later on in Mark 3:5 "[Jesus] looked around at them in anger and, deeply distressed at their stubborn hearts, said to the man, "Stretch out your hand." He stretched it out, and his hand was completely restored."

After that we had coffee, then Q&A, and then lunch.

The second talk was by Dr Simon Gathercole (Lecturer in New Testament at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Fitzwilliam College), and was about 'the other gospels'. It consisted of an introduction to The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Thomas, and The Gospel of Judas. We got copies of each (well, English translations of course), and as a result I've now read all three.

The talk contrasted the differences between the canonical gospels and those three, looked at them in detail, pulled out the key theology of each, what we know about the sects that used them, explained a little bit about how the canonical New Testament texts became canonical, and contrasted the cultural, theological, and historical factors supporting the canonical gospels, compared to these other gospels. There was also a bit of a discussion about how the canon was formed, and how this contrasts with the Da Vinci Code type conspiracy theories that suggest the church cleverly suppressed texts that questioned it's power (in the first and second century, by which time the canon had been defacto established, the church possessed no political power at all, and no structure (like the modern Roman Catholic church) whereby any kind of top down authority could impose such a directive - essentially such claims make for nice conspiratorial fiction, but don't match the historical evidence).

I may write about this lecture in more detail in the near future (or the truly interested could listen to the audio when it becomes available), but for now I'm just going to comment on these three gospels a bit, and contrast them with the canonical gospels.

The gospel of Thomas (c. 140 AD) consists of 114 'secret sayings' of Jesus. It's full of secret revelation, from which the reader will receive salvation (saying 1). It talks about the pre-existence of the soul (saying 19), the idea that the soul is trapped in the world inside the body and that the body needs to be 'stripped away' (sayings 57 and 37), is very critical of Judaism and traditional Christianity (sayings 14, 52, 71), and ends in a very strange way. The ending is so strange I'm going to include it here:

Simon Peter said to him, 'Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.'

Jesus said, 'I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.'