The latest issue of The New Yorker includes an essay by Adam Gopnik, ¡°We¡¯re Still Not Done With Jesus,¡± on the scholarly debates about the origins of Christianity.
In the piece, Gopnik positions himself as a nuanced balancer between two serious schools (though he tilts toward the first): a school that holds that the early Christians mythologized and invented, but on the basis of some set of true events; and a school that treats the historical core of Christian faith as illusory and inaccessible and the books of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John as pure literary-mystical inventions.
Entirely absent is any meaningful treatment of the arguments for taking the Gospels seriously as what they claim to be: eyewitness accounts, or syntheses of eyewitness accounts, with a straightforward claim to basic historical credibility. This absence is not exactly surprising to a longtime reader of Gopnik¡¯s work. But I will admit that I had been hoping ¡ª wishcasting? ¡ª that we were finally moving past a cultural landscape in which the only interpretations of Christian origins offered to inquiring readers of secular publications were those bent, as Gopnik puts it, on ¡°rehabilitating aspects of Christianity on terms that a secular scholar can respect,¡± while taking for granted that ¡°nothing happened quite as related.¡±
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