The Canonical Christ

What right do Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John have to define our understanding of Jesus? Why not let the Gospels of Thomas, Philip, or Judas fill in our historical understanding? What if we've gotten Jesus wrong for 2000 years?!?! Or so the ever-renewing Jesus-conspiracy headlines would like you to think. In this episode, Dad and I discuss a wonderfully concise book by New Testament scholar Simon Gathercole to make the case for canonical Gospel priority, why apocryphal "Gospels" exist at all, and what questions remain for faith even after this particular intellectual dust has settled.

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Notes:

1. Gathercole, The Genuine Jesus and the Counterfeit Christs

2. Dad's book Divine Complexity traces the development of early Christian theology from earliest canonical witness to conciliar Christological and Trinitarian doctrine

3. My book Seven Ways of Looking at the Transfiguration traces surprisingly subterranean connections between very different books and genres of the NT

4. Related episodes: The Quest for the Historical Jesus, The Relationship between the Old and New Testaments