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 Hammadi Library – as that story has been recounted by scholars for many years – is in fact accurate. 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 really don’t 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.
My responses are given in boldface after each of Mark’s reasons, below.
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Here are five reasons to question the popular account:
- The Mystery of the Growing Jar: Like all good legends, the details get ever more impressive with repeated retellings. In the earliest versions of the story, the jar in which the manuscripts were found is just under two feet tall. In later versions, it grows to a remarkable six feet in size!
My response:
Are we sure the three brothers weren’t named Mark, Matthew, and Luke?
Ha! No wonder they disagree.
With regard to the size of the jar, is it known if the twelve / thirteen volumes would, in fact, fit inside a two feet tall jar?
Yup, and yup.
“Like all good legends, the details get ever more impressive with repeated retellings.”
“Sometimes history is a little less interesting than legend.”
The second sentence quoted above is abundantly true. But the first is not: it is true if we rephrase it to the more plausible: “Like *many* good legends…”.
I have seen examples of stories which, when retold, became *less* impressive, presumably because the teller thought: “This is obviously an exaggeration, clearly what really happened is …”. But I had seen the story first hand, I knew it was not precisely told. The story was being “corrected” in such a way as to make it more plausible (but actually not quite true).
I have no idea how common this phenomenon is.
“But I am completely open to being persuaded! Even if it *will* make my New Testament class less interesting…”
I think you underestimate yourself….this whole back and forth has made the story MORE INTERESTING THAN IT EVER WAS. I thought Goodacre was making a stronger case than he was until reading this. This thing beats the Morton Smith story in terms of intrigue and suspense. Also, this back and forth over these assumptions, testimonies, examinations of memory and recall are literally at the very heart of history….nothing could be more relevant or on point than this dialogue. This also proves my theory right that any adversarial collaboration between you or Mark Goodacre produces gold.
The main takeaway in my mind is the lack of certainty we can have in any version of this story.
Getting back to what professors can do to add a little spice to their lectures, perhaps they can simply change the focus. Mention the story as a preface to the Gnostic gospels material, but add in a brief detour about the fallibility of human memory, how “flashbulb” memories aren’t really a thing, and the Challenger memory experiment.
Nobody in Bart’s current classes was alive at the time of the Challenger disaster. 🙂
Interesting. EVERYTHING seems open to question. Mark tells of Jean Doresse, the French expert on Egyptian Christianity who doubted the truth of the discovery tales. He talked with the locals and their stories didn’t impress him. There are pictures of him in Egypt in the 1940s. You tell of Mrs. Jean Doresse, a young visiting French scholar of antiquity, who was asked by the Cairo Museum director to examine the first book and who helped him track down the other books. The director had known her in Paris and had proposed marriage, but though she chose to marry Mr. Doresse, they remained friends.
This looks like an example of how an ambiguous name led to a story getting changed and developing quite different details. Surely his/her gender is known. Which of these stories tells of the real Jean Doresse?
“My response: I completely agree that as people tell stories, they change the details, often making them more impressive. We have all 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 actually happened.”) ”
This sounds ironic.
Isn’t this the Christian response to most of your work?
It probably is, but that’s a misundersanding of my work by a rather wide margin! I deal with this issue at length in my book Jesus Before the Gospels (in fact, that’s more or less what the book is about).
I also remember you giving Richard Bauckham a bad time on the Unbelievable? show when he spoke about ‘the gist’.
Yup, he doesn’t understand how it works when anthropologists deal with it. You’ll see what I mean if you read my book. (It was amazing to me how few studies of memory and oral tradition he used for his book)
Off topic question. are disable people created in the image of god? i assume not, because adam was not disabled when god made him in the story. Could this explain why people with skin disease and other bodily defects were not allowed to join in congregation of holiness?
Are you asking about what people believed in antiquity? There is a lot to suggest that many people thought that disabilities were the result of sin. One NT example of that view would be John 9:2.
The writers of the torah. Since disabled people didnt have all the attributes , how could they be in the image of god?
Well, you and are are in the image of God and my wife tells me that I too have lots of attributes that are not very godlike. The “image” of God did not refer to body parts but to overall similarity in matters like intelligence, consciousness, moral sense, free will, etc….
“in matters like intelligence, consciousness, moral sense, free will”
In other words if god made adam disabled, slow in intelligence(special needs) , he would still be in image of god?
I’m not sure what you’re asking. If you’re asking my opinion, then yes, absolutely. I don’t believe in God, but if I did, I would think that all humans are made in the image of God, not just people like me.
A person born blind did a sin ? “he was born blind…”
According to john, god made the man like that so jesus could do his work. The question is, are disabled people made in image of god?
Yes.
I remember the line from director John Ford’s classic western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
To me, if the man in the video admits they burned some of the find and says he killed another man and ate his heart it is a strong reason to think the general story is true.
One of many elements that remain unclear in this story is the context of discovery. Doresse mentions the surroundings of a 6th dynasty necropolis (?), the farmers claiming to be here just digging for sebakh, accidentally stumbling upon a skeleton that happens to be there, and then being only mildly interested in the content of a jar of low resale value sounds like an embellished story for casual tomb probing. Was any further excavation done on the site or in the area after the discovery got global attention?
I’ve only been to the site once, but I was amused to see holes dug everywhere all around. I suspect people were trying to find more buried treasure! But yes, archaeologists have further examained the area, to no avail. (It was one of the original archaeologists there who told me that a skeleton had been discovered next to the jar. Its whereabouts are no longer known. Assuming that story is true)
Bart, I apologize ahead of time for asking since I am not knowledgeable enough, but here goes. Is anything in the Bible accurate? I haven’t been able to read it anymore because of distrust.
Oh yes, lots and lots of things are accurate. And some things are inaccurate. The task of the critical scholar is to figure out which is which.
Where there are economic advantages to be had from producing stories, stories will be produced. If Robinson was offering “whiskey or Egyptian pounds”, he would get stories, even if none had hitherto been circulating. It is in the nature of Economic Man.