The Commentary

In April, the Gospel of Judas was unveiled to the world’s press at a ‘launch’ in Washington. The crumbling papyrus document was found in an Egyptian cave in the 1970s and is said to be at least 1,600 years old. It purports to record conversations of Jesus which teach things very different from the New Testament and vindicates Judas Iscariot.

This follows hard on the heels of the success of Dan Brown’s fictional thriller The Da Vinci Code, the film of which is soon to hit cinema screens now that he has won his court battle against the charge of plagiarism. Again, one of the central accusations in Brown’s novel is that the NT does not represent the true teaching of Jesus. Instead of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John we should all be reading the Gnostic Gospels (discovered at Nag Hammadi in 1945), like The Gospel of Thomas and The Testimony of Truth.

Naturally, the world receives such ideas with delight. ‘We knew all along those Christians were gullible fools and that we were always right to be sceptical.’

However, the case for the validity of the New Testament is not so easily dismissed.

Digging up the past

First, there is the solid historical evidence which dates the NT documents right back into the first century. Apart from all the classic work produced by scholars like F.F. Bruce in past years, I was intrigued to find recently, reading Amy Orr-Ewing’s book Why Trust the Bible? (IVP, 2005), that it is likely that quotations from NT books are to be found among the Dead Sea Scrolls which were put away for safe keeping before the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. By contrast, speaking of The Gospel of Judas, Simon Gathercole of Aberdeen University was quoted by The Daily Telegraph as saying: ‘It is certainly an ancient text, but not ancient enough to tell us anything new. It contains themes which are alien to the first-century world of Jesus and Judas, but which became popular later. An analogy would be finding a speech said to have been written by Queen Victoria, in which she talked about her CDs.’

Importance of the OT

But the case for the NT goes way beyond a matter of who can unearth the most ancient document. The point is that the NT was not written into a vacuum. It comes to us given the whole background preparatory framework of the Old Testament.

Fulfilled prophecy over hundreds of years is the most obvious hallmark of the supernatural revelation of the true and living God (Isaiah 44.6-8). The fingerprints of God are upon the OT as, for example, the bondage in Egypt is predicted in Genesis, the exile in Babylon is foreseen in Deuteronomy, the length of the exile is revealed in advance by Jeremiah. But, of course, in particular the OT completed by about 400 BC looks forward to the coming of the Messiah.

Why trust the NT documents rather than the Gnostic Gospels? The answer is because the NT books fit hand in glove with the previous revelation of God in the OT. Whereas the Gnostic Gospels and the Gnosticism they represent often disagree with the OT and deride the God of the OT. The New Testament teaches the same God, the same worldview as the Old Testament and records the often quite unconscious fulfilment of its predictions and plans.

While the truth of Scripture is eminently reasonable, the readiness with which people run after the fiction and flimsy theories of Gnosticism only reflects how lost the world really is.

John Benton

© Evangelicals Now - May 2006
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