Without being able to verify their identities much less the intent behind the words they wrote, I cannot say if this is true or not.
Two things:
From the material pov, that's where scholarship comes in, it has much to say about the identities, motives and messages of the authors. There are many unanswered questions, but there are many answers, too.
Even if we had contemporary biographies of the authors, there would be no reason to accept them as gospel! Contemporary biography is demonstrably not 'exhaustive' nor authoritative' enough to satisfy the skeptic, so even if you had the stuff you want, it would not be enough to convince you of Christianity. I think what is being looked for is evidence to authenticate skepticism itself, but by its own axioms, a skeptic holds any 'evidence' in a poor light.
From the spiritual pov, it's immaterial. Suffice to say a negative attitude towards the text precludes any real spiritual benefit (that is the order of spirituality the text asserts) from it.
Albert Schweitzer for example, refutes the
tradition, but not the essential message of the text: Love God, love thy neighbour. I think I'm right in saying he abandoned 'the Quest for the historical Jesus' (according to the empirical requirement of historicity) as a futile endeavour. The apocryphal and contrary texts are more dubious in provenance than the Canon, and assert a specific agenda which Judaism, and there's no question of Jesus' religious ethnicity, denies.
Schweitzer abandoned such critical investigation to concentrate on living the message, but by our reading he was undeniably 'racist' in his attitude to the people he went to serve, he saw the African as 'my brother, but my younger brother'. Do we refute his achievements
entirely on the basis of this paternal racism?
Then again, such negativism has produced nothing that stands alongside the spiritual works of the saints and sages who did not trouble themselves with material 'facts' in the face of such luminous spiritual insight.
The evidence is pretty weak, ancient texts that have copied and recopied, translated and re-translated, interpreted and re-interpreted countless times over many centuries. Is there no chance that some of the meaning in those texts might have been lost or changed just a little in all that time?
Look to scholarship again, and I'll think you'll find that's an overstated assumption. As you say, a negative argument is not an argument, really. We have a vast work of early Christian exegesis, from the first century on, that cites scripture directly, and argues from it, and these citations do not contradict the texts we have. Scholars have examined all the codex materials we posses, and find no contradiction in terms of message and its implication. So words and even phrases might have changed, but the message would appear to be consistent across them all.
The conclusions we draw from it is, of course, another question. That's a matter of faith.
My faith rests on the reasoned argument that the canon, and many of the apocryphal texts, directly or indirectly, and the substantial historical evidence concerning the emergence of what today we call 'orthodox Christianity', substantiate the claim that Jesus declared His divinity. It's at the root of the schism with the Judaism of the day, it's the central,
declared intention of the Synoptics, the Johannine and Pauline texts, and it's a notion that upset the Hellenists.
We also have clear evidence that the Fathers themselves treated the question with real importance. They rejected many texts on the basis of a dubious provenance and, in some cases, what they saw, as we do today, as clear evidence of self-aggrandisement. (The Gospel of Judas and the Gospel of Thomas being examples of both, as both state, contradicting the other, that they alone 'got it' and the other disciples never did at all — while the question of authorship is even more unlikely that that of the Four Evangelists!)
What you have to remember is there is a lucrative market in the US for authors who write books bucking the 'official' line. Look at how many take Dan Brown to be 'gospel'! Books that come down on the orthodox side get nowhere near the sales or the exposure, so the common and populist view is inescapably slanted. Nor are the assertions made as certain as the author would have us suppose — in many cases their 'agenda' is also quite clear.
I didn't say he didn't say it. I said I have no reason to believe he did say it based on hearsay evidence. No evidence that he didn't say it does not lead me to believe the greater likelihood is that he did.
So the argument's a moot point. It's a question of faith in the absence of fact, but again, the scholarly opinion is it is more likely that He did.
The stuff didn't pop out of nowhere. It used to be argued that Jesus might not have existed at all, but scholars across a number of disciplines (notably sociology) argue that
someone must have for the tradition to emerge the way that it did, and the portrait of the
man, His message, His agenda and His method painted in Scripture is consistent throughout, and the apocryphal materials support it.
Maybe he was just a man with some radical new ideas that upset the religious authorities of his time.
Maybe. But that's not the picture painted by
any of the evidence we have. It's a modern interpretation that reflects the contemporary
zeitgeist, rather than that of His day. It's an anachronism.
And what were those ideas? The
Shema Israel, His
credo, is hardly radical. What was it He said that radicalised Him?
He doesn't have to be "mad, bad or the son of God." A smart guy like Lewis really should have thought that one through a little better.
No, actually He does ... I think you're underestimating just how smart Lewis was ... but I'd be interested in how you reason differently.
