HOWLER OF THE WEEK, and it's only Monday:

It's Easter, time to rev up the revisionism

New scholarship suggests Jesus might never have intended to found a new religion
Mar 22, 2008 04:30 AM
Stuart Laidlaw
faith and ethics reporter [Toronto Star]

Jesus needs saving, once again, from his followers. This time, however, it is not from those he preached to or from one of his most loyal supporters who, the Bible says, betrayed him.

It's the Christians who came later.

That's the shared thesis of at least two recently released books about the man crucified almost 2,000 years ago. How Jesus Became Christian by Barrie Wilson and The Jesus Sayings by Rex Weyler both try to take the reader back to Biblical times to uncover Jesus's lost message.

"It seems like Jesus was rejecting power and handing it over to the people," Vancouver-based Weyler says in a telephone interview. "But that didn't sit well with authorities – religious or secular."

Easter always brings a fresh wave of books and TV shows about Jesus as publishers and broadcasters capitalize on the heightened awareness of the man from Nazareth at this time of year, says University of Toronto Christianity professor Mark McGowan.

"For a Jesus book, August wouldn't be that great," he adds.

Easter remains a much more theologically based holiday than Christmas, McGowan says, and savvy publishers know they can release more thoughtful books than they would during the hurly-burly of the Yule season. The Weyler and Wilson books certainly fit that description.

Wilson, a religious studies professor at York University, says the discovery last century of lost gospels such as the Dead Sea Scrolls, which scholars are only now beginning to understand, have led to a flourish of books on the origins of Christianity.

[...]

My emphasis. I'm sure that Barrie Wilson did not say this. He probably said something about the Nag Hammadi Gnostic gospels and what he said was garbled in the article. Anyone who has a clue about such things (evidently not including faith and ethics reporters at the Star) knows that the Dead Sea Scrolls were Jewish documents that did not include any lost gospels. The Dead Sea Scrolls are of interest for the study of Christian origins because they contain lots of new information on first-century Judaism which can serve as useful background to the early Jesus movement.

As for the theory, it's hardly new, and the basic idea has lots of supporters among historical Jesus scholars.

UPDATE: Barrie Wilson e-mails to confirm my theory of how the error in the article arose. He adds:

There's more to the book, I think, than the either the write-up in the Toronto Star or the last line of your blog reveals.

Fair enough.

Also, Lorenzo DiTommaso has a review of both books in the Calgary Herald. Excerpt:

The quest to recover the Jesus of history involves deciding which parts, among all these ancient sources, preserve genuine recollections of his life and sayings, and which parts were later added to the tradition. Given that many people have strong preconceived notions about Jesus or what he represents, such decisions are rarely objective. Jesus is the ultimate Rorschach Test.