Apocryphicity

There are an additional three more blog postings relating to my Heresy Hunting article to bring to your attention: Rob Bowman’s response to my last post on Women in the Gospel of Thomas, Darrell L. Bock’s response to the original article on the SBLForum site, and a response to Bock by N. T. Wrong. I will respond to these when the opportunity arises. I only incidentally discover these; if anyone knows of other postings that I have not mentioned, please let me know.

Rob Bowman has posted another response to my Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium article, this time focusing on the apparent “misogyny” of Gos. Thom. 114. Just to recap the discussion, I stated previously that assessments of the logion as “misogynist” were anachronistic and showed a lack of awareness of scholarship on the text. In response, Bowman excerpted a number of non-conservative scholars (including Pagels, Patterson, and Meyer) who agree that the saying is indeed misogynist. These may not be the best scholars to appeal to in this debate, however, as they write often for popular audiences and their comments on the texts may suffer from the same lack of depth as the apologists I criticize. Mind you, I’m no expert on this text, so I hesitate to say too much about it. But I will limit myself to a few points in my defense.

1. I don’t think Rob can argue that the apologists say little about the logion besides labeling it misogynist. Rob simply supports their conclusion with the views of other scholars. My concern was with the neglect of other scholarship which would more rightly put the saying in its context. Put simply, it looks misogynist to us, but to the author and audience, it may not. That’s what I mean by anachronistic. Far too often these texts are evaluated through modern eyes. The same care that we see being employed with Paul’s “misogyny” in 1 Cor. (i.e., evaluating his comments in the context of life in Corinth, or being careful to consider them in the context of his letter or letters as a whole, or considering the possibility of interpolations, etc.) should be applied also to CA texts.

2. The logion should not be taken too literally. Making a female male can have a range of possible interpretations, including encratism (celibacy and a refusal to bear children). Therefore, Jesus’ statement that he will “make her male” is not hatred of women. Also, keep in mind that the text is arguing against the statement of Peter here that “women do not deserve life,” not supporting it. If we are to see the various apostles in Christian literature as representing different forms of Christianity, then Thomas is portraying Peter as a spokesperson (likely) for orthodoxy. So, who is “misogynist” now?

3. Again, it is important to read a given section of a text in the context of the whole. When discussing log. 114 in my classes I direct the students also to log. 22 in which it states: “And when you make the male and the female into a single being, with the result that the male is not male nor the female female.” This appears to reflect the text’s theology of returning to a state of the primordial, androgynous, undivided human. Perhaps this is the key to understanding log. 114.

4. Also to be considered is the possibility that Gos. Thom. is a document that has gone through multiple stages of composition (much like some of our canonical materials). Log. 114, which to some extent stands out in contrast with other sayings in the text (such as 22), may be a late addition to the gospel and therefore not a good reflection of the author/community’s theology. I realize that we must avoid eliminating sections of texts we find unattractive with such theories, but it should be considered given that we have evidence of the text (and other CA texts) changing considerably over time.

I am not trying to rescue the text for the view that Gos. Thom. reflects an early Christian feminism. I have nothing invested in such an idea. All I am suggesting is that an offhanded comment taking one saying out of 114  and using it to label a text “misogynist” is not being fair to the text. It is also a disservice to the reader to ignore scholarship that looks at the text in more depth and/or presents a different interpretation.

Rob Bowman has posted two new responses to my Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium article from the latest issue of SBL Forum. The first addresses my point that the modern apologists tend to disparage the apocryphal texts as bizarre by seizing upon one or two aspects of the texts despite the fact that much of the texts are otherwise benign (thinking specifically here of Gospel of Thomas and Gospel of Peter). I stated in the article: “Such focus on the ‘bizarre’ elements of the texts misrepresents their contents. There is plenty of material in the canonical texts that is bizarre or objectionable but it would be unfair to characterize Acts simply on the basis of the cursing stories, or Luke on Jesus’ disappearing act (4:30) or the sweating of blood (22:43-44), or John on its anti-Semitism.” Rob’s second post deals specifically with Anti-Semitism in John.

Rob’s posts argue that the examples I cite of “bizarre elements” in the canonical texts are not so bizarre and the charge of Anti-Semitism in John is unsubstantiated. He concedes, however, that many readers and commentators have struggled with these issues; and I think that is sufficient for my argument. These are troubling aspects of the texts, whether or not they can be tamed by exegetical athletics. Similarly, some of the “bizarre elements” in Gos. Thom. and Gos. Pet. can also be tamed or explained if one takes the time to do so. It is unfair, I think, to label Gos. Thom. 114 “misogynistic.” For one thing, such an assessment is anachronistic; for another, it is far too simplistic a way to interpret the saying. I won’t attempt to do so here as there are far too many other experts on the text who could do so, and have done so. Unfortunately, the apologists (like Witherington) do not consult these works; they simply draw attention to these sections of the texts that will alarm their readers.

Dan Wallace, co-author with Darrell Bock of Dethroning Jesus (one of the books I mention in the article), has also posted a response to the “Heresy Hunting” on the Parchment and Pen blog. His concern is, again, that I am just as biased in my defense of CA scholarship as the apologists are in their assessment of the CA. One respondent to Wallace’s post commented: “Come on Dan, they’re lost – methodologically, psychologically, and eternally.” Sigh.

Timothy Paul Jones, author of Misquoting Truth, added his voice to the debate in another comment. He states, “What is being exposed is the lack of historically-defensible continuity between the Christian Apocrypha and the historical Jesus…The problem with the Christian Apocrypha was and is that the origins of the claims found therein do not represent testimony from eyewitnesses of the life and ministry of Jesus.” I do not object to the authors’ arguments that the CA say nothing about the historical Jesus; I object to how they make their arguments (e.g., Gospel of Thomas says little about the historical Jesus because it is a second-century Gnostic text dependent upon the Synoptic gospels and other NT texts; okay, but what about the scholarship that is not cited that argues otherwise? Should this not at least be acknowledged?). Jones goes on to say that, my statement on this blog that “Liberals tend to view the texts with neutrality, without needless value judgements or disparaging comments” is the “pinnacle of hubris.” I do not think that liberal scholars are without fault; I think some of them, like all scholars in all disciplines, can be found guilty of bias, particularly in pushing too far in their attempts to establish an early origin to some of the texts. But they begin from the position that the CA (and my point was about the CA not the NT texts) are valid expressions of early Christian thought that should be examined sympathetically.

Jones also objects that I have misunderstood his assessment of the Gospel of Peter. He writes, “I’m also not certain how closely Burke read the books that he critiques—he cites me as disparaging the resurrection account found in Gospel of Peter in a section of Misquoting Truth where I, in fact, contend that Gospel of Peter could represent an authentic strand of testimony to the resurrection of Jesus, albeit one that cannot be clearly traced to eyewitnesses of the risen Lord.” But in the article, my comment was: “However, often the apologists excerpt the texts simply to highlight their differences from the canonical texts. Of course, only those sections of the CA texts that are particularly odd are provided and commented upon. The favorite targets appear to be the resurrection account from the Gospel of Peter…” And that is precisely what Jones does: he discusses only what is different about Gos. Pet. (specifically, the painlessness of Christ’s death, and the talking cross).

My recent article in SBL Forum, “Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium,” has elicited some responses in the blogging community—some positive, some negative. Rob Bowman of Religious Researcher has offered the first part of a lengthy response (HERE). I appreciate the time and effort he has put into the response—indeed, the real goal of the article was to get so-called liberals and conservatives talking about the issue. I’d like now to offer my own response to Rob’s comments.

1. Rob calls his response “Defending Heresy” and accuses me of being an apologist for the Christian Apocrypha (CA). A similar charge is made by Danny Zacharias at Deinde; April DeConick, on the other hand, has come to my defense, stating, “Objectivity is not neutrality. Tony's piece in my opinion is objective. He writes as a historian who points out the Christian apologetic agenda of some popular writers who are misrepresenting other scholars' work as well as the ancient documents they are writing about. This is not neutral. Who says that neutrality is what we are after?” I am not defending heresy. If anything I am defending CA scholarship, but only because it is misrepresented, not because it is superior in any way.

2. Rob accuses me of “rhetorical gamesmanship” in the terms I use for the various writers I discuss. He takes issue with me calling them “apologists,” which he says is a “term of disapprobation.” That is not how I intended the term, however, and I’m not sure the writers would see it as offensive; indeed, one of the reviewers quoted in the opening pages of Craig Evans’ Fabricating Jesus calls it “contemporary Gospel apologetics at its very best” (Gerald O’Collins). While I’m no fan of apologetics, my use of the term “apologists” was meant to be value neutral. Are the CA scholars equally apologists? I’m not so sure. It depends on the quality of their scholarship—are they letting their assumptions guide how they evaluate the literature? For example, are they advocating, as is often charged, replacing the canonical gospels with the non-canonical? This is absurd. All that CA scholars like myself (though there may be some who are a bit radical) ask for is a neutral discussion of the texts—that is, to examine them as artifacts of early Christian thought without assessing them as aberrant, as “forgeries,” or “false.” I will concede that Rob is right in noting that my terminology is somewhat inconsistent, even incorrect in the case of calling Baigent et al “scholars” (a little bit of a slip there).

3. Rob takes issue with some of my generalizations about the marketing of the apologists’ works. For example, he points out that Witherington’s What have They Done with Jesus? does not fit in with the other books because it was published by Harper, not a conservative press. He is right, though my argument was phrased more cautiously: “many [emphasis added] of the books are published by conservative presses.” Witherington’s book is an exception, and I’m not sure what Harper was thinking. Jenkins’ Hidden Gospels is another (by OUP). He also states, “But it may be pointed out that books by conservative scholars sometimes enjoy a wider breadth of endorsement than secular works. Bock’s book The Missing Gospels, for example, was endorsed by Martin Hengel (University of Tübingen) and Larry Hurtado (University of Edinburgh) as well as various conservative scholars.” But Hengel is hardly a “liberal,” and I’m not sure where to situate Hurtado. Rob is right that the two sides, liberal and conservative, are firmly entrenched in their own scholarly worlds—i.e., they tend to cite only scholarship produced by their ideological peers. But my final paragraph calls for an end to such entrenchment.

4. Rob takes issue with me drawing upon brief comments on specific texts out of context of a writer’s larger argument—e.g., I criticize Komoszewski’s and Wright’s assessments of the Gospel of Peter even though, as Rob says, the writers’ aims were not to offer thorough reviews of the text. He is correct, but I think it is one thing to note the existence of an apocryphal text which has particular features (e.g., that it presents Jesus as less, not more, human) and another to describe its unique features as “bizarre embellishment” (Komoszewski p. 163) or “strange, somewhat surreal” (Wright, p. 69) (and worse things are said of other texts, particularly the Infancy Gospel of Thomas). That seems to be the crucial difference between liberal “scholarship” and conservative “apologetics”—liberals tend to view the texts with neutrality, without needless value judgements or disparaging comments.

5. Rob also says I misrepresent Witherington’s views on the Gospel of Thomas. But again, my aim was not to agree or disagree with his assessment of the value of this text as a tool for establishing the teachings of the Historical Jesus, but how he unnecessarily disparages the text. One can discuss the historical credibility of the Jesus in the text without labeling some of its sayings as “pantheistic,” “misogynist,” and “obscure for obscurity’s sake!’” Worse still, these assessments are incredibly shortsighted and deserve deeper analysis (if Witherington is not willing to do so, then he should not simply offhandedly dismiss them with comments that will incite his readers to view the text negatively).  I haven’t “missed” Witherington’s point, it’s just not relevant to what I aim to prove.

6. The same charge is made of my use of Jenkins. Rob states, “If Burke wishes to disagree with Jenkins, let him do so, but his failure to engage Jenkins’s argument when it is so directly relevant to Burke’s claim and when it appears in the very pages that Burke cites from Jenkins’s book is inexcusable.” Jenkins’ point in this section of his book is that the heresiologists were essentially correct in their assessment of Gnostic literature. The larger version of my article does mention some of the comments the modern apologists offer about the ancient heresy hunters, but most of the time they agree that the discovery of the Nag Hammadi Library has shown how wrong Irenaeus and his ilk often were. I also mention how the modern writers seem unaware they are guilty of the same offense. Regardless, I do not agree that it was necessary to engage Jenkins on this point.

7. Rob criticizes me for mischaracterizing the works of Bock and Evans. He says they provide thorough overviews and discussions of at least some of the texts. He is right that these two works have particular depth but that does not excuse their intentions, which are to discourage their readers from appealing to the texts for studying Jesus. Even Evans, who sees some historical value to a few of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas, ignores a vast amount of scholarship on the text and focuses only on the authors that enable him to date the text late and conclude that it is dependent on the NT gospels. I’m not sure that we can call such a discussion, in Rob’s words, “very nuanced.” And Bock presents excerpts from the texts only to show their differences from the NT texts; can we call this “even-handed”?

The paper I presented at 2008 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, "Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium", appears in an edited, popularized form in the current volume of the SBL Forum. It can be accessed HERE.

I have been rereading Darrell L. Bock and Daniel B. Wallace’s Dethroning Jesus: Exposing Popular Culture’s Quest to Unseat the Biblical Christ (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) for a paper I am writing. I was struck by one statement in particular:

“Certain narrow perspectives reign on many campuses almost without any expression of alternate viewpoints. What makes this a scandal is that educational universities, especially state universities, are supposed to be places where intellectual perspectives held by the full array of the populace represented by the schools are weighed. These public schools should not be think tanks of a singular point of view. The give-and-take of diverse viewpoints is what makes the educational experience. Yet in many universities, when it comes to religion, representation by believers within the various religious perspectives is lacking, as evidenced by the numerous students who say their faith has come under attack in courses on religion” (p. 21).

The statement shows a surprisingly misguided view of the goals and methodology of Religious Studies in the Academy. In our courses we do not seek to provide instruction, or even a forum, for all viewpoints on religion (though here by “religion,” I think the authors mean Christianity). What we do seek to do is examine religious texts and related historical events with the same scientific methodology as other university/college disciplines (e.g., literary criticism, social-scientific criticism, etc.). Religious or faith-based perspectives have no role to play in the Academy, i.e., unless it is to study these perspectives in others. Yes, sometimes my students comment that their faith is “under attack” in my classes, but that is never the intent. They are told from the start that they do not need to agree with the methodology of the discipline, just learn it; indeed, they could even learn it expressly in order to refute it if they wish (but such refutation should take place outside the classroom).

One of my strongest students of recent years was a conservative Christian. Every class he challenged what I was teaching, but never using faith-based arguments. Instead he questioned the evidence behind my statements and occasionally corrected my readings of texts with his handy electronic-KJV. He is a good example of how one can object to some of the conclusions reached by some scholars yet still work within the methodology of the discipline. To allow “various religious perspectives” into the classroom invites disaster.

Today is the day that all the bibliobloggers give their “I’m off to SBL” post. And I’m no exception. I will be presenting a paper during one of the Christian Apocrypha sessions. The paper is a synthesis of my reading and ruminating about modern Anti-Apocrypha polemic (see previous posts accessible through the side-bar on the left). Here is the abstract of the paper:

The popularity of Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code has led to a surge of attacks on Christian Apocryphal literature by conservative NT scholars (e.g., Ben Witherington III, Craig Evans, Darrell L. Bock). The work of these scholars is transparently polemical—for example, Evans states that his book, Fabricating Jesus, was written “to defend the original witnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus” (p. 17). And their methods are not new; indeed they use the same rhetorical strategies employed by such early heresiologists as Irenaeus, including the use of sarcasm and invective to describe their opponents, the intentional misrepresentation of the heretics’/scholars’ views and the content of the primary texts, the excerpting of material from the texts in order to expose their absurdities, and the demonization of their opponents by associating them with the powers of darkness. “Heresy Hunting in the New Millennium” illustrates the parallels between modern critics and the ancient heresy hunters but focuses particularly on how the two groups use and abuse the apocryphal texts. Perhaps we can learn from the contemporary debate something about the reception of the Christian Apocrypha in antiquity.

I decided to read the finished product in my ongoing Wednesday evening New Testament Apocrypha course. The students were required to complete a book review of Darrell Bock’s The Missing Gospels. The paper launched into a discussion of Bock’s book. From what I gathered from the discussion, the students on-the-whole were not favourable toward the book. Perhaps this is due to being bombarded by primarily liberal points-of-view on the texts over the past three months; perhaps they hope to do well on the review if they adopt what they expect me to say about it; perhaps they are all just really bright.

The principal objection was towards Bock’s bias. They see the book as aimed at a believing audience who want Bock to provide them comfort, to prove for them that the Jesus of the “alternative gospels” is not the true Jesus.  They identified certain rhetorical strategies used by Bock to show the superiority of the “traditional Jesus” (i.e., the Jesus of the New Testament and Apostolic Fathers), primarily because these texts are considered the earliest sources and also because Bock believes the traditional views of authorship of the texts are genuine. The students would have preferred it if Bock made this bias more transparent at the beginning of his book.

I have plenty of objections to the book, and to similar works by Witherington, Jenkins, Evans, etc., but these can be found in the earlier posts and the SBL paper. One thing I did mention in class is my frustration at how these authors and their opponents (the Christian Apocrypha scholars) avoid communicating with one another. I had hoped to have one of the apologetic authors respond to my paper at the SBL, but efforts to do so have failed. It might have made for a more animated discussion.

When I return from San Diego I will offer a post mortem of my session, as well as some comments on other CA-related papers.

The latest Review of BIblical Literature features a review of Craig Evans's apologetic work  Fabricating Jesus (previously discussed HERE) by Stephen Patterson. Patterson has pubished widely on the Gospel of Thomas; but, unlike my own review of the book, Patterson's review devotes little space to Evans's approach to the CA. It focuses instead on Evans's approach to the canonical gospels and to the scholars wth which Evans's takes issue. Here is an excerpt from the review:

After spending an unpleasant week with this book, it is all too tempting to let Evans’s own words come back to haunt him: “I am appalled at much of this work. Some of it, frankly, is embarrassing.” But this would not do. My real difference with Evans is that I do not share his evangelical stipulations about the text. This is a divide that we must increasingly deal with in biblical studies. Competently trained scholars now operate on both sides of this great divide. How we handle that difference honestly and respectfully is our unique challenge. On that score this book fails miserably and can best serve as a counterexample of how not to engage one’s colleagues in discussion and debate.

Several weeks ago I posted the first five of ten concerns I have about the treatment of Christian Apocrypha in recent apologetic books, books principally aimed at combating the popularity of The Da Vinci Code. Happily, that first post led to some discussion here and on April DeConick’s Forbidden Gospels blog. Hopefully, this second post will elicit more discussion. Note that I have added a few citations from the apologetic writers as examples of the phenomena—these are not meant to be exhaustive.

6. All Christian Apocrypha scholars are created equal. The apologists’ main opponents are the so-called “new school” or Harvard school featuring the likes of Elaine Pagels, Helmut Koester, and Bart Ehrman (Bock, Missing Gospels, uses this term to great effect). The tendency, though, is to characterize them as a unit, as if all of them were in agreement on every CA text. Certainly their approach is similar—i.e., they are all sympathetic to the texts and their authors/communities—but not all of them agree on such issues as the dating and origins of the literature (e.g., Ehrman disagrees with other “liberal” scholars on the dating of the Gospel of Peter). In addition, there are numerous other scholars of this literature, rarely cited, who are not as radical as the “new school” in their dating of the texts. To characterize all CA scholarship by its most radical works misrepresents the field.

7. Neglect of the “orthodox apocrypha.” The apologists focus their energy primarily on the gospels that are in the public eye—such as, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Mary, the Gospel of Philip, and the Gospel of Judas. Rarely are the “orthodox apocrypha”—i.e., non-Gnostic apocryphal texts such as the infancy gospels, the Pilate cycle, and Marian apocrypha—discussed, but when they are they are mischaracterized as Gnostic (as if all rejected literature must have been Gnostic; see Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 154). The problem with this is that all apocryphal literature thus appears to be written by Gnostics who, as noted previously, are trying to supplant canonical texts with their own bizarre takes on Jesus’ role and teachings. However, the orthodox apocrypha are so named because their views of Jesus, his family, and the apostles are not so different from the canonical texts and quite self-consciously attempt to supplement, not replace, the canonical texts. It is a shame to see this literature neglected, particularly since, unlike the Gnostic texts, they have enjoyed a long history of transmission and have influenced both eastern and western culture.

8. Demonizing Gnosticism scholars as modern Gnostics. The apologists sink low when they turn to insulting their opponents by calling them modern Gnostics or Neo-Gnostics (see Bock, Breaking the Da Vinci Code, p. 129; Witherington, What Have They Done, p. 47). Mind you, the CA scholars themselves may not consider this insulting, but the apologists’ audiences would see them as heretics, perhaps even as demonic (see particularly Witherington, Gospel Code, p. 74: “these scholars, though bright and sincere, are not merely wrong; they are misled. They are oblivious to the fact that they are being led down this path by the powers of darkness”). One would have to ask the individual scholars if they are truly Gnostics, but my suspicion is that they are merely sympathetic to some aspects of the Gnostic viewpoint, not believers. Is a person who studies a subject necessarily a believer in it? I study Christianity, does that make me a Christian? (Actually, I’m an atheist, an admission that my students and peers find more disturbing still).

9. Characterization of CA texts as containing “bizarre” embroidering (see Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 163-166; Jenkins, Hidden Gospels, p. 105). Certainly some parts of the CA are bizarre to modern readers. But the NT texts too are pretty bizarre. The canonical gospels feature a man who is born from a virgin, speaks to voices from heaven, walks on water, multiplies food, heals afflictions, and rises from the grave. How are these things any less “bizarre” than a talking cross (Gospel of Peter) or a cursing Jesus (Infancy Thomas; see the canonical Acts for plenty of examples of cursing holy men)? We all (scholars and non-scholars) know the canonical texts so well that often we give little thought to how strange these texts are. I like to begin my courses on the Bible by encouraging the students to see the biblical texts in all their “bizarre” glory.

10. Scholarly isolationism. My final pet peeve applies to both apologists and their opponents. Both sets of scholars seem unwilling to interact with each others’ work. The apologists tend to cite themselves and their peers for support against the claims of CA scholars, while the CA scholars simply ignore the presence of the apologists and other conservative scholarship. I’ve mentioned here before that both groups can learn from each other: the CA scholars can learn from the apologists to temper their enthusiasm for the literature and resist the urge to unjustifiably (note the emphasis) elevate it above canonical literature (e.g., by dating it too early, or by preferring it as a source for the historical Jesus), whereas the apologists can open themselves up to the possibility that the texts could preserve early traditions and that the authors of the literature and their communities are worth studying for their own sake as expressions of early Christian thought and expression. There is probably some common ground upon both groups could agree. Certainly early Christianity was varied and there was intra-Christian conflict with many of the groups expressing their views in writing. Where the groups divide is on the issue of whether there existed an early orthodoxy that both originated with Jesus and the disciples and that finds its expression in the NT. To me, and many other scholars, this viewpoint goes beyond the evidence. But so too does any declaration that the non-canonical texts somehow preserve the history and viewpoints of the early Jesus movement any better than the NT.

First, Timothy Paul Jones points out a typographical error. I wrote: “First, even if we grant that full-blown Gnostic Christianity is a late second century phenomenon (well, mid-first century really if we include Valentinus and Marcion)” but should have written “well, mid-second century…”). Oops.

Bryan L. asked for my opinion on why the non-canonical gospels fell out of use. Was there a concerted effort to suppress the texts? It would seem so from reading the canon lists and Athaniasius’ 39th Festal Letter. But such limitations on the canon can only be enforced in areas where the Western church had power and influence. As that power and influence grew, the Western canon became enforced. That said I agree that certain texts seem to have been more popular in certain areas and this popularity would have a natural effect on shaping the canon (though were they popular because the people liked them or because their preachers/bishops, etc. liked them and chose to read no other texts?). Gnostic texts, of course, had a limited audience (average readers/listeners would find them hard to understand and the texts’ views on asceticism unattractive).

Peter Head wrote: “For me most of these are only problematic when absolutised and generalised. Try using ’some’ for 1 and 4; and ‘many’ for 2 and 3. Then I’d (probably) have to agree with them (as you probably would too).” Peter is correct—I would agree with these arguments if the qualifiers were attached. But the problem with these arguments is precisely that they are absolutized and generalized, and are so because they rest on apologetically-motivated assumptions. That is what makes them faulty arguments.

Danny Zacharias has asked for citations for each of the faulty arguments. I will include complete citations when my work on this material is transformed into a formal paper. For now, I offer these select examples: 

1. All non-canonical texts are Gnostic. See the discussion of the Gospel of Peter by Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, p. 69-70 (he considers the lack of pain experienced by Jesus on the cross and the text’s anti-Jewishness as signs of Gnosticism) and the discussion of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas in Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 154 (“Although we are distinguishing the infancy gospels from the ‘Gnostic’ gospels, in many cases the former belong to the latter category”).

2. Canonical texts are early compositions and non-canonical texts are late. Craig Evans (Fabricating Jesus) dates the composition of the Gospel of Thomas to ca. 175 or 180 (rather close to the date assigned to the extant Greek papyri). He does so for several reasons (see pp. 67-68): because of the gospel’s apparent awareness of many of the NT writings, because it contains Gospel materials that scholars regard as late (i.e., M, L and John), because it reproduces Matthean and Lukan redaction, and because it shows familiarity with traditions distinctive to East Syrian Christianity, which did not emerge before the middle of the second century. All of these reasons are debatable but looking at the dating question purely by the material evidence, Evans’ position would be akin to dating Mark to ca. 150 because the earliest manuscript evidence is believed to be from 175 CE (P45). Peter Head commented that this manuscript should be dated to the mid third century. If so, this makes the physical evidence for Mark even bleaker (though Head states that we know Mark was in existence certainly by Irenaeus’ time, for the bishop mentions all four canonical gospels; mind you one could always make the argument that we don’t really know that Irenaeus is referring to canonical Mark—a similar argument is made by Evans about whether or not our manuscript evidence for the Gospel of Peter is truly the “Gospel of Peter” mentioned by Serapion [in office 199-211 CE])

3. The Non-canonical gospels are not “gospels.” See Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, ch. 4. The canonical gospels are “primarily narrative, with teaching interspersed within an overall storyline reaching a definite climax, while the latter (such as “Thomas”) consist simply of a collection of sayings, arranged as much for the purposes of meditation or memorization as for any thematic sequence or continuity…though the Gnostic documents do sometimes call themselves ‘gospels,’ they manifestly belong to a different genre” (p. 67).

4. The writers and readers of non-canonical texts were hostile to the canonical texts. See Wright, Judas and the Gospel of Jesus, p. 81 (and Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, p. 152-153). Here he takes issue with Elaine Pagels’ view that ancient Christians could read the canonical and Gnostic gospels side-by-side, with the canonical for public worship and the Gnostic for advanced-level teaching. Wright admits that this is what Valentinians did but still criticizes Pagels for the view: “it could only be sustained by a systematic and sustained rereading, and in fact radical misreading, of the canonical gospels themselves” (p. 81). Whether the Valentinians and others were right or wise to do so is not important, only the fact that they did.

5. Extant versions of non-canonical texts are identical to their autographs. See, for example, the discussion of the Infancy Gospel of Thomas by Komoszewski et al, Reinventing Jesus, which is based on the Greek A recension of the text by Tischendorf, now shown to be a late, expanded version of the gospel. I find this approach to the texts particularly problematic in the scholarship on the Gospel of Thomas for it routinely neglects the Greek fragments of the text which, though incomplete, are better witnesses to the original text as they predate the Coptic by two centuries and are likely in the text’s original language.