Robert W. Funk (1926–2005)

For nearly 100 years Biblical scholars have developed ways of telling when when a story has been revised or edited, when two stories have been combined together, when a tale has been added to, when manuscript copyists (who wrote by hand) have skipped over words or added in a correction or comment as if they were the words of the original author, and methods of telling which parts of a story are older and younger.

Unfortunately, it is the nature of scholars to disagree: each scholar must make a name for himself by promoting his own ideas. This obscures the historical consensus built by years of work.

This work was a second valuable experiment in getting scholars to agree. It was a shock to many readers because it was deliberately not shrouded by jargon or presented only in a seminar for fellow specialists. (Scholars have realized that their conclusions upset people and many now hesitate to write in a way or forum where they might be overheard and understood.)

This book explains what New Testament scholars think is historical in the New Testament gospels, to what degree, and why. After a century of meticulous work, very few scholars think the gospels were eyewitness accounts (for why read [[Throckmorton]]'s [Gospel Parallels]) or that ancient historians (and the gospel writers were biographers and theologians, not historians) wrote history without any addition of legend, hearsay, or ways of telling the story that made for a better tale than the original. (These were oral cultures where only epic poems and memorable prose stories survived.)

This book was a deliberate attempt to explain and to be clear about what Biblical scholars do and how they think. It was an attempt to summarize what 100 years of work has learned. The textual archaeology at the basis of these conclusions is the foundation of any training in Biblical scholarship and history: those who object wholesale have either missed 40 years of German scholarship or are afraid of making someone mad.

This book also is a bit of a time capsule: since its publication there have been new archaeological and textual discoveries, further research, new academic trends, and the inevitable development of conclusions that come from further study and consideration. This book is helpful because it is intended for ordinary readers and it is unusually honest -- and the reaction to it seems to have frightened many scholars into other kinds of work or back into jargon. (Part of that is our fault for not being more public about our work as decades passed.)

Notice there is no equivalent for the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament.

It may be a long time before a body of scholars tries being this honest, again, and for that reason alone this book (and its predecessor) are worth reading.
This book was preceded by a companion work, [The Five Gospels]. Scholars affiliated with this effort have published a readable collection of all the gospels that survived antiquity, [The Complete Gospels] and a translation which follows how the letters of Paul read to a historian's eye, [The Authentic Letters of Paul].

Worth reading with [[Throckmorton's]] [Gospel Parallels] or [Synopsis Quattuor Evangelium] close at hand (these books list similar passages from the four gospels side by side and save a lot of flipping around: the one with the frightful Latin title goes back to the old scholarly custom of using Latin. It contains the Greek New Testament, an English (or German, if you prefer that language) translation, and the Coptic of the Gospel of Thomas (with a guess at how it looked in Greek) for comparison.)

-Kushana… (more)