ONCE during my curacy I was stopped on the streets by a man coming out of a bar, bursting with the scholarship of Dan Brown, who asked me why anyone should believe in Christianity, given that the Gospels were chosen by Constantine in the fourth century, for political reasons, leaving out many others.
Although I fear that this man would be as unlikely to read this book as he was unwilling to listen to my somewhat irritable reply, Who Chose the Gospels? is written to respond to exactly these depressingly widespread Da Vinci Code charges.
Hill is a professor of New Testament at an Evangelical seminary in Orlando, Florida; and, while it is obvious that he approaches scripture as a believer, and from the more conservative end of contemporary biblical scholarship, he is abreast of current scholarly debates, and seeks to persuade his readers from the historical evidence.
He makes a considerable effort to convey the detail of complex scholarly debate in an accessible popular style (complete with anecdotes about his family, and amusing contemporary analogies for historical problems), so that this might actually be capable of being read at least by the average Christian, if not by the sceptics making the challenge.
Hill begins with a round-up of the evidence of recent papyri finds for the priority and predominance of the canonical Gospels over their rivals. He then works back through patristic authors, from Irenaeus’s alleged “invention” of a four-fold Gospel in the early third century, through Clement, Theophilus, Serapion, the Muratorian fragment, Tatian, Ammonius, and Justin, to the Apostolic Fathers and Papias at the beginning of the second and end of the first century, arguing that all point to an authoritative use of the four canonical Gospels (although the evidence is, he recognises, more circumstantial the earlier he gets).
Finally, Hill considers the difference in content between the apocryphal and the canonical Gospels, and argues that it is most likely that no one person “‘chose” the Gospels (though he flirts with the idea that it might be John the Elder, or even the Apostle), but rather that they were generally and independently acclaimed as authoritative within the first generations of the Church, because of their intrinsic merits.
Hill recognises that there are more serious scholars (Ehrman, Petersen, and Pagels) who see the canonical Gospels as representative of just one of a number of competing “Christianities” in the first few centuries, which eventually triumphed in the fourth century and wiped out all the others.
This sort of argument is particularly difficult to counter, as the “orthodox” writers themselves testify to this diversity, and it is difficult to know how one might “neutrally” adjudicate between their various claims to be the “authentic” Christianity (numerical majority, historical priority, or continuity of form?).
I wish Hill had said more about this ecclesiological/doctrinal question, which his emphasis on sola scriptura perhaps led him to overlook. Nevertheless, this is a useful and readable book for those who wish to respond to the Da Vinci Code challenge.
The Revd Dr John Hughes is Chaplain of Jesus College, Cambridge.