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| A Naïve Reading of the Gospels May Be Just What Christianity Needs | A Naïve Reading of the Gospels May Be Just What Christianity Needs |
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| In the not-so-distant past when 90 or 95 percent of Americans identified as Christian, it was hard for almost anyone in that vast majority to read the Christian Gospels naïvely — to come to them without preconceptions, in the way of their original intended audience, a person hearing the “good news” about Jesus of Nazareth for the first time. | In the not-so-distant past when 90 or 95 percent of Americans identified as Christian, it was hard for almost anyone in that vast majority to read the Christian Gospels naïvely — to come to them without preconceptions, in the way of their original intended audience, a person hearing the “good news” about Jesus of Nazareth for the first time. |
| Instead, almost everyone encountered them first through either the structures of organized Christianity — as a text for Sunday school and Bible study, the experience of the scripture inseparable from the experience of church — or with the expectations set up by Christianity’s overwhelming cultural influence. | Instead, almost everyone encountered them first through either the structures of organized Christianity — as a text for Sunday school and Bible study, the experience of the scripture inseparable from the experience of church — or with the expectations set up by Christianity’s overwhelming cultural influence. |
| In that world, even the work of skeptical critique and academic deconstruction was mostly carried out by people who had experienced the pious reading first and organized their own interpretations against religious doctrines or cultural norms that they had rejected or abandoned. | In that world, even the work of skeptical critique and academic deconstruction was mostly carried out by people who had experienced the pious reading first and organized their own interpretations against religious doctrines or cultural norms that they had rejected or abandoned. |
| These dynamics persist for the millions of people still raised within some form of Christian faith. But with the rapid decline of institutional Christianity, the younger generations in America now include large numbers of people who have only vague and secondhand ideas about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So a more naïve encounter with the New Testament may become more normal, on a much larger scale than in the past. At both the popular and the academic level, more people will experience the Gospels first as a form of testimony and storytelling that precedes any fully realized set of doctrines or vision of the church. | These dynamics persist for the millions of people still raised within some form of Christian faith. But with the rapid decline of institutional Christianity, the younger generations in America now include large numbers of people who have only vague and secondhand ideas about Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. So a more naïve encounter with the New Testament may become more normal, on a much larger scale than in the past. At both the popular and the academic level, more people will experience the Gospels first as a form of testimony and storytelling that precedes any fully realized set of doctrines or vision of the church. |
| As someone raised within Christianity, I can’t tell you directly what that experience is like. But Lent and especially Holy Week in my own Catholic Christianity provide a strong encounter with the Gospel narrative, the raw text overshadowing the liturgical and doctrinal elements more than usual. So it’s an appropriate time to speculate about how the return of a more naïve reading might influence the wider culture, its possible effects on the long debate between Christian believers and would-be academic debunkers of the faith. | |
| From its 18th- and 19th-century origins, the project of skeptically deconstructing the New Testament, in search of a “Historical Jesus” distinct from the Christ of faith, has often combined two distinct arguments. First, it has attacked the pious assumption that the Gospels must be factually inerrant, perfectly historical, accurate in every detail and pellucid in the doctrines they imply. Second, it has moved from identifying specific problems in the texts, tensions and apparent contradictions and arguable mistakes, to arguing that all the problems are evidence that the Gospels must have been mostly composed long after the fact, as theological texts rather than historical records, with relatively thin connections to the events that they describe. |