Paul Foster (2)

This is a good overview, and shows why these other documents cannot replace the four canonical gospels.

Foster is better at ancient theology than modern. In his discussion of The Gospel of Mary he uses 'womanist' and 'feminist' as synonyms describing an attempt to give women more voice in the early church. 'Feminist' is surely anachronistic in this context, and he obviously does not understand the term 'womanist'. This is doubly disturbing when he goes on to warn against anachronistic uses of the apocryphal gospels.… (més)

This wasn't quite what I expected. The author is an expert on the New Testament and on gospels of Jesus that didn't make it into the New Testament. I thought he would explain what each gospel was and why it wasn't selected for incorporation. Instead, he does pretty much what he says he would do, which is tell the reader what makes a gospel, how they were discovered and what we can learn from them. Foster does a serious textual analysis, where he finds that most of these "gospels" were written after the four gospels of the New Testament. Rather than using them as a window onto new aspects of Jesus, he uses them as a window on the early church, seeing in each a possible doctrinal purpose. These purposes could be laying the blame for Jesus's death on the Jews, as was common in the 3rd century CE, or possibly to raise women's status in the church.

Foster shows how difficult it is to evaluate gospels, although he doesn't deal with the canonical gospels in the same way. This was disappointing for me, but was not the purpose of the book, so I can't hold it against him. I would like to see him write as critical a book about the canonical gospels and explain why they were chosen.

Obviously, this book has a narrow focus and that is what makes it accessible. But it would be nice to see a broader work along the same lines.… (més)