There is a certain delight in watching what happens when a secular scholar gets hold of some of the lunatic theories now being peddled by Biblical scholarship's left wing. Philip Jenkins is no friend of orthodoxy, but as a Professor of History and Religious Studies, he has taken a long gander at the offerings of people like Crossan, Mack, Pagels, and the Jesus Seminar, and now wants to know where they have placed their heads.

Jenkins indicts the left-wingers for the same crimes we have: mirror-reading; presenting as though new materials and arguments that have been around for a long time (the idea that Jesus was an Essene mystic was around before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered! -- this and other ideas are contrary to the lament of Robert Funk, who thinks that scholars before his time with his ideas had to hide under beds); early-dating non-canonical gospels for the sake of ideology (i.e., the dream of a demand-less Christianity -- Jenkins' chapter on feminist Biblical scholarship is especially interesting) and against the evidence; layering of the hypothetical Q document and using Q as a basis for dating Thomas early, as well as using it to determine the whole of Christian theology; differing treatment according to canonical and non-canonical sources -- it's not often as detailed as I would like, but it is certainly gratifying to hear it from a neutral mouth!

Behind all of this chicanery Jenkins perceives a desire by liberals to recreate an idealized Christianity that suits them better than the traditional alternative, with the aid of a media that is all too often suckered in by the promise of a controversial story. It is rather interesting as well to note that several of these liberals (Funk, Mack, and Crossan in particular) came from highly conservative backgrounds (and thus are "conspicuously" violating the Seminar warning against finding a Jesus congenial to one's own desires) and are part of a small circle that is patting each other on the back (as I have observed). Hidden Gospels is a much-needed indictment of this coterie of revisionists -- expect it to give them plenty of heartburn.