CADRE Comments

[Note: last substantially updated Wednesday morning April 16, 2014] Just to be clear -- although clarity is hard to come by on this topic -- the "Gospel of Jesus' Wife" text that will be making it to publication for Easter 2014 is the possibly-forged snippet published (at the subsequent hyperlink) as a critical edition article (since a single copy of one snippet with only a few vague words and phrases doesn't need a full book for a 'critical' edition) by Dr. Karen King and Harvard University. This GJW is not the very full text supposedly found (by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson) in a drawer in a British museum after being supposedly lost/suppressed for 2000 years, which is probably nothing other than a translation of the well-known 1st century romantic poem Joseph and Asenath . Totally and completely different texts, but the marketing histronics around each of them are kind of similar. For details about the non-King GJW, our article from October 2013...

Is it Easter Season yet? -- last I heard this was still coming Easter season 2014, but it's been in the process of coming now for several years (since at least 2010). I haven't heard anything new about it being still on the way, but since things are kind of slow here right now I'm bumping this post up again to remind people not to panic if someone tries to make hay out of this along with the (so-called) "Gospel of Jesus' Wife", which was pre-marketed the previous autumn (2012) but referring to a much different text (one likely a modern forgery unlike this text). In fact it was a bit of recent news about the 2012GJW which inspired me to wonder whether the 2013GJW was also still coming this Easter: the Smithsonian had made a documentary on the 2012GJW that somehow didn't get released in the USA after a strong scholarly case was made about the text's forgery. A reader at Mark Goodacre's blog happened to find a French version of the documentary on Yo...

It's pretty normal nowadays for revisionist historians and commentators, when promoting the "lost texts" of early Christianity, to lambaste Imperial Rome for imposing a canon-from-above, and for outright destroying competitive texts, in a bid to force compliance with Imperial ideas of orthodoxy. This is almost hilarious as a claim throughout most of the 4th century (300s CE), since the ruling elite during most of that time were one or another kind of Arian, not of the "Orthodox" party. (Arians believed either that Christ was a lesser created deity taking human form, or more popularly that Jesus was a totally human hero promoted up by God the Father to deity status. Not unlike typical claims for previously pagan Emperors, by the way.) Still, the fact of the matter is that there were indeed document purges in the Roman Empire during the Christian history (including the trinitarian Christian history) of the Western and Eastern Empire. So it isn't unreasonable, ...

The Christian Cadre is pleased to present, in two parts, an interview with Christian apologist David Marshall, who has released two books this year (through Harvest Home publishers); one on the topic of the promotion of alternate Gospel texts, and one on the topic of the New Atheism. David was a missionary, a teacher, and a student of comparative religion in East Asia for 13 years, during which time he also did what he could to help prostitutes sold into slavery in Taiwan. After teaching at Siebold University in Japan, he moved to the United States to start Kuai Mu Institute. He now lives in Seattle with his wife and children; but travels around the United States, the Pacific Rim and (during this October) the United Kingdom on research trips and speaking engagements. His first three books were: • True Son of Heaven: How Jesus Fulfills the Chinese Culture (1996, revised 2002) • Jesus and the Religions of Man (2000) and • Why the Jesus Seminar Can’t Find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Cou...