Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Are there really good reasons to doubt the story of the discovery of the Gnostic Gospels? My response to Mark Goodacre by Bart D erman read by John Paul Middlesworth. A couple of days ago, we enjoyed a guest post on the blog by Mark Goodacre, professor of New Testament at Duke University. In this post, Mark provided five reasons for doubting if the story of the discovery of the Nag Hamadi Library, as that story has been recounted by scholars for many years, is in fact accurate.
[00:00:30] Mark's post was a summary of a longer, more detailed and scholarly article that he has published on the subject in 2015. When I first discussed this issue on the blog, I asked Mark's permission to respond to his five points, and he gladly agreed. I, in turn, agreed to let him respond to my responses. Rather than asking you to reread his post, I have reproduced each of his five reasons here and then dealt with them one at a time. Let me say that I don't really have a horse in this race, and my sense is that Mark doesn't either. We would both love to be able to keep telling the story, since it's such a great one, but there's no particular reason for wanting it to be true, other than the fact that it helps make our New Testament lectures a lot more interesting. But whether the story is true or not has no other major impact or even minor on our scholarship or lives. Still, it would be nice to know what really happened.
[00:01:21] Mark's first Reason the Mystery of the Growing Jar like all good legends, the details get even more impressive with repeated retellings. In the earliest versions of this story, the jar in which the manuscripts were found is just under 2ft tall. In later versions, it grows to a remarkable 6ft in size.
[00:01:41] Bart's response I completely agree that as people tell stories, they change the details, often making them more impressive. We all have experienced that ourselves, as we have heard different versions of a story over time. But I don't see why this is a reason for thinking that the basic gist of a story is not true in this context. By true, I mean something that really happened.
[00:02:02] Take a modern example. Out of possibly a trillion options, the one that got away. We have all heard and many of us have told a story about a fish that we caught but were unable to land, either because the line broke or the fish threw the hook or because of our ineptitude in getting the fish into the net or onto the stringer. Of course, this final problem has never happened to me, but I'm sure it has happened to others. As we have heard or told such stories, the fish tends to get bigger and bigger. The fact that the story gets exaggerated over time, does that mean that in fact, the story never happened? That the fisher you or someone else did not lose a fish. No, it usually means that it did happen, but the story was later modified.
[00:02:47] Just because the jar grew in size with retelling has no bearing in my mind on whether the jar was discovered in the way it is narrated in the story.
[00:02:56] Mark's second point the people keep changing. In some versions of the story, two brothers, Muhammad Ali and Khalifa Ali, discover the jar. In others, their brother Abu Almaj, is the one to find it. Sometimes there are only two people present. Sometimes there are seven, sometimes eight.
[00:03:16] Bart's response the same as before. As people tell and retell stories, they often change the details. Sometimes they change the details every time. Sometimes, once they change a detail, they remember the story in the new form with the changed detail, instead of the original form with the original detail. Sometimes they emphasize just the persons who are the most important to the story. In this case, the one who found the jar and the one who took the books back home, and at other times, those who also play incidental roles. Were there seven people there, or were there seven in addition to the main figure, that is eight? These details and the different ways they are remembered and recounted do not affect the question of whether the story itself is a true memory of things or at least the gist of things that actually happened.
[00:04:05] Mark's third point james Robinson is a scholar responsible for the detailed reporting of the find in several different versions over the years. But two of his closest collaborators, who were there with him in Egypt in the 1970s, were skeptical about his story. Buried deep in an abstruse footnote of an expensive volume of photographs of the Nag Hamadi manuscripts, Rodolf Kosser and Martin Krause contested Robinson's story. They had, quote, serious reasons to put in doubt the objective value, unquote, of points in his story, they said. In other words, they didn't believe a word of it.
[00:04:41] Bart's response these two European scholars were publicly antagonistic toward Robinson. As I understand it, in part that was because he got so much publicity for his role in publishing the Nag Hamadi documents. And in part it was because, despite all the attention he received, he himself was not an expert in Coptic or in manuscripts. There doubtless were other things involved as well, so their antagonism may help explain their refusal to accept his account.
[00:05:08] For me, the fact that someone doesn't buy the story is not evidence that the story didn't happen, especially if there is some kind of professional jealousy involved. The questions are why they don't buy it and whether these reasons are compelling. But the mere fact that they were skeptical doesn't seem very persuasive to me.
[00:05:27] Mark's fourth point there are no recordings and no transcripts of the research conducted by Robinson in the 1970s. But a decade later, the alleged discoverer, Muhammad Ali al Salman appeared on camera in a British TV documentary in which he narrated the story afresh. His version has still more anomalies, yet more contradictions with the earlier versions.
[00:05:51] Bart's response if I have learned one thing from all my reading on memory over the past couple of years, it is that all of us remember our pasts differently from the way things really happened and that our later memories are regularly at ODS. With our earlier memories, I have no doubt at all that Muhammad Ali had a different recollection of details of the discovery a decade after he talked with Robinson. In the meantime, he probably recounted the story to others. And as I stressed above, when we retell a story and change a detail, we often remember the changed detail rather than the original detail. This happens all the time, as researchers have shown. There are fantastic psychological experiments that prove this. Some that show, for example, that a scary number of us completely misremember exactly how we learned about the Columbia space shuttle disaster and about 911, even though our memories are precise and we are certain they are true. So the fact that Muhammad Ali later told a story that was different from what he originally told Robinson is neither surprising nor persuasive for the view that the gist of the story as he related it earlier was basically accurate, even if then too, some of the details had changed in his mind.
[00:07:07] Mark's fifth point there was actually a scholar present in Nagamadi not long after the discovery of the codices. He was the French scholar Jean Duress, an expert on Egyptian Christianity. There are pictures of him in the area from the late 1940s. He had the instinct for how to conduct field research. He got among the people there, and he did not ask leading questions. Unlike Robinson, he did not offer them whiskey or Egyptian pounds. He heard legends about blood feuds and the burning of manuscripts, but he attributed them to a kind of sensationalist tittle tatle. His story is more lean, less detailed, and probably more historical. Several peasants no one knew who had found the manuscripts in a jar in that area a few years earlier. Sometimes history is a little less interesting than legend.
[00:07:56] Bart's response I'm not sure how to assess this reason for doubting Robinson's account. On the surface, it sounds like he heard similar stories but simply chose not to believe them. But it would help to have a lot more details about it all. Did Dorest speak directly with the persons who found the manuscripts? Did they tell him a different story from the one they later told Robinson? Did he actually have grounds for thinking that the stories of blood feuds and manuscript burnings were legendary? Or was he just skeptical by nature? If he did hear such stories, and such stories are at the heart of Robinson's account, then doesn't that show that the people involved with the find were telling the basic story as Robinson narrated it years earlier, but that this one scholar simply didn't believe them.
[00:08:42] On the whole, I'd have to say that even though Mark has given good grounds for wondering if the entire story, as it is commonly narrated, may have problems when it comes to the specifics of this or that detail, and that we should therefore try to figure out which details are right and which need to be adjusted. These five reasons, at least, as he has stated them for us here, are not sufficient for me to doubt the story itself as a whole, but I am completely open to being persuaded, even if it will make my New Testament class less interesting.
