The New Testament as Dan Brown conspiracy theory
Fr Richard Ounsworth OP finds this new re-imagining of the gospels contrived and irritating

25 December 2009

The Restored New Testament
By Willis Barnstone
Norton & Co, £34

I have already reviewed two Bibles for this newspaper, both produced from well-established and indeed revered translations, intended to bring the word of God to the faithful, especially the Catholic faithful. They were, we may say, acts of more-or-less mainstream Christian devotion. This latest offering is manifestly not that.

Which is not to say that The Restored New Testament is not an act of devotion of a sort. Barnstone has a clear love for the texts of the New Testament, and for Jesus. But this Jesus is not the Christ of orthodox Christian faith but a Jesus that is not uncommonly believed in by a certain kind of biblical scholar, "a young rabbi who preached in the synagogues, and who in his lifetime would have been called "Yeshua ben Yosef"'.

And just as he takes leave to imagine a Jesus that he finds more attractive and more credible than the Christ of Christianity, so he allows himself to recast the New Testament. He does not limit himself to the canonical texts; in fact he has no interest in the idea of a "canon" in which the Church detects the inspiration of the Holy Spirit as the guarantor of true witness to the apostolic faith.

He is attracted also to the "Yeshua" that he finds in the so-called Gnostic Gospels: "This unreformed Yeshua is a drink of fresh water from a brook on a summer meadow or hill in Judea", and Barnstone follows those scholars - not a majority, but not a tiny number either - who suggest that the Gospel of Thomas in particular is earlier than the canonical Gospels and maybe gets us closer to the "historical Jesus".

So after the four canonical gospels Barnstone gives us his new and very good translations of the "Gospels" of Thomas, Mary (Magdalene) and Judas, and I can see no reason why these should not be read and studied. It is, though, perhaps a little sneaky to call a book that does this the Restored New Testament, with the implication that somehow these were hitherto either lost or hidden.

There is a little of the Dan Brown conspiracy theory about this. I suppose if one does not believe in inspiration, or the authority of the Church to determine the canon of scripture, then one can simply devise one's own canon according to one's historical theories or aesthetic preferences.

And perhaps one will come to the conclusion that the orthodox canon, if it is not in fact determined by the Holy Spirit leading the disciples of Christ into all truth, must instead have been devised according to some human and ulterior motive.

In particular, Barnstone feels passionately that the Christian Church since the second century has been deliberately obscuring the Jewishness of Jesus and his earliest disciples - or as Barnstone insists, Yeshua and his students.

When, for example, he considers the story of Jesus's appearance before the Sanhedrin at the beginning of his Passion, we find a conspiracy of Da Vinci Code proportions: "The very invention of the story in order to blame the Jews for extreme perfidy depends on a false separation of Jews ... good Jews who are no longer identified as Jews but are now Christians, and bad Jews who pass only as Jews. The historical cover-up has endured for two millennia."

This cover-up, he suggests, is found most of all in the deliberate obscuring of the Jewishness of the "goodies" in the New Testament.

Why do we not call Jesus "Yeshua", Mary "Miryam", Paul "Shaul"? Is it not suspicious that we still call the disciple who betrayed Jesus "Judas", and have not anglicised it to "Jude"?

Well, it would be ridiculous to deny that anti-Semitism has been a powerful force in the history of Christianity, and perhaps some readers of the New Testament are unaware of the Jewishness of Jesus and his disciples and of St Paul and the other apostolic writers. If so, then perhaps a fresh translation that gives us the Aramaic names these men probably had is no bad thing. I must confess I find it rather contrived and irritating after a while, but perhaps I am fortunate in being more familiar with the thoroughly Jewish milieu of the New Testament, able to see in the word "Jesus" the Greek "Iesous" that translates the Hebrew "Yehoshua" and the Aramaic "Yeshua".

But it is quite unfair of Barnstone to imply that he is uncovering a 2,000-year-old plot to pretend that Christianity did not emerge from Judaism and that Christ and the Apostles were not Jews.

For every modern Scripture scholar who appears in the footnotes of this book denouncing the Church for inventing the figure of Judas there are a dozen or more others whose serious and sober scholarship engages seriously with the historical and theological questions of the origins of Christianity and is entirely ignored.

Barnstone himself is a serious scholar of literature, especially of poetry. Indeed, he discerns in many of the words of Jesus a poetic resonance which he shows by printing them as poetry within his translation; he does the same thing with many of the Epistles, and with the Apocalypse. Some of this versification is more convincing, some less.

I cannot decide whether I think these translations are powerful and resonant, offering a fresh and exciting reading of texts that are always in danger of becoming stale, or irritatingly idiosyncratic and eccentric. Perhaps they are both.

I suggest that readers make up their own minds. Just beware of accepting uncritically the impression that scholars all acknowledge a picture of Jesus and the origins of Christianity that the Church has been hiding from you for generations.