The Bible Hunters

Last night I began watching a fascinating new show on the Smithsonian Channel, The Bible Hunters.  I thought this show was going to be about Biblical archaeology, but in fact it’s about textual criticism, paleography, and the discovery starting in the Victorian era of early textual variants of some of the New Testament texts along with previously lost non-canonical texts.  It’s amazing to realize how fragile the Bible’s textual tradition can be and to relive the combination of pluck and serendipity that led to the discovery of many early texts.  Unfortunately, the show is marred by a tinge of sensationalism, as though the discovery of these texts radically undermined millennia of tradition.

For example, the show’s webpage states that “until the 19th century, most Bible-reading Christians believed the Old and New Testaments represented the Divine Word of God, presented in text without error.”  The show suggests that the discovery of textual variants of some canonical texts rocked this conception of the Bible.

Well, I mean, sort of.  The only “Bible-reading” Christians prior to the 16th Century or so were educated elites, monks (who also were a kind of educated elite), and the like.  From the very early centuries of the Church, real elite students of the Bible (people like, say, Origen), recognized that the Bible was full of complexity, even at the grammatical level, and couldn’t always be read “literally.”  Yes, Origen and other pre-modern Christian theologians would have said the Bible is without error, but what they meant by that is not exactly what modern fundamentalists mean by it.  It was also not exactly what the Victorians who first made these modern textual discoveries would have thought about how to read the Bible.  So while the parts of the Victorian world may have been shocked by some of these discoveries, these discoveries would not have been nearly so complicating to many earlier generations of Christian scholars.  Indeed, those early scholars lived when the “lost” texts were in circulation, so they would not have been shocked at all. Effectively, even through to today, various forms of modern Biblical criticism have helped Christian theologians rediscover and redevelop earlier forms of hermeneutics that can affirm the divine inspiration of the text without wooden literalism.  Hardly a radical break with our past.

The show also suggests, ala the tired Da Vinci Code craze but in a more subdued fashion, that the presence of early non-canonical Gospels and other related texts reflect alternative Christian communities that were substantial rivals to what eventually came to be established as the “orthodox” branch of the Church.  In fact, it is true that a plethora of non-canonical texts, including some of the “Gnostic” gospels, were widely circulated alongside what came to be included in the canonical scriptures, but this doesn’t mean there were significant early Apostolic Christian movements that didn’t believe in the divinity or resurrection of Jesus.  It just means that — like today — there was lots of religious literature around and that there were always shades of viewpoints, with some running to extremes.  Here is how scholar Larry Hurtado — who is actually interviewed briefly on the show — has put it:

The general point I wish to make at this point is that, based on the nature of the remnants of the early manuscripts of the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary, in neither case do we have any reason to link these copies with distinctive circles of Christians. That is, it would be dubious to posit a circle of ‘Thomas’ Christians or ‘Mary’ Christians as connected with these manuscripts. Indeed, I suggest that this should be taken as illustrative more widely of how apocryphal gospels functioned. There were obviously Christians who wrote these and other gospel-texts featuring figures such as Thomas and Mary, and there were obviously other Christians who enjoyed reading these texts, as reflected in the remnants of early
copies of them, and the subsequent translations of these and other such texts. But the features of the extant artefacts of the early reading and readers suggest that these texts were (typically?) copied for, and read by, individuals, the texts likely circulated and copied among those Christians who expressed an interest in them. As to the social connections of these individuals, at the most, we should probably imagine loose networks of sorts, rather than defined circles or sects of Christians.

L.W. Hurtado, Who Read the Christian Apocrypha?, online preprint from The Oxford Handbook of Early Christian Apocrypha, eds. A. Gregory & C. Tuckett (OUP, 2015), pp. 153-66.

So, I’ll probably watch some more episodes of this show, but it’s too bad that even the Smithsonian Channel needs to veer into the sensational and can’t quite stick with the more reserved and plodding work of documenting scholarship.