Vindicating John’s Gospel

In March, a team of archaeologists excavating beneath Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulcher announced a new finding: ancient pollen and other botanical evidence indicating a garden had been there two thousand years ago. The finding corroborates John’s account of Jesus’s passion and death: “Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb where no one had ever been laid. So because of the Jewish day of Preparation, as the tomb was close at hand, they laid Jesus there”(John 19:41–42). The discovery gives credence to the traditional Christian belief, dating to at least the fourth century, that the Church of the Holy Sepulcher indeed marked the actual place where Jesus had died and was buried. But it also attests to something more: the reliability of John’s Gospel itself.

The Fourth Gospel has been typically regarded by the biblical-scholarship establishment as a late-written and fanciful narrative whose contents are nearly entirely theological mythologizing. The Jesus Seminar of the 1980s and 1990s, which sought to recover what it deemed the true words and deeds of Jesus, determined that not a single word attributed to him in John’s Gospel is authentic. But John’s geography has proved over time to be uncannily accurate. For example, the pool of Bethesda in Jerusalem with its five porticoes, where, according to John, Jesus healed a paralyzed man (John 5:1–15), was thought to have been John’s own invention—until late-nineteenth-century excavations unearthed a pool that matched John’s description.

The news about the ancient garden comes at the right time of year. For decades, credentialed scholars at major universities have used the Easter and Christmas seasons as occasions to question the validity of all four Gospels, not just John. The latest exemplar is Princeton professor emerita Elaine Pagels’s new book Miracles and Wonder: The Historical Mystery of Jesus, recently reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and the Atlantic. Pagels, best known for her 1979 bestseller The Gnostic Gospels, believes that no true historian can take the supernatural elements of the Gospel stories literally. Jesus’s virginal conception by the power of the Holy Spirit, recorded in Matthew and Luke, was likely an attempt to paper over the “inconvenient fact” that his mother, Mary, had probably gotten pregnant out of wedlock or been raped by a Roman soldier. (That lustful Roman soldier has lurked in anti-Christian rhetoric about Mary since the third century.)

As for Jesus’s resurrection from the dead on Easter morning, narrated in all four Gospels, Pagels suggests that such accounts could have stemmed from the experiences of people in mourning, who sometimes report sensing the presence of their dead loved ones “in some other mode of perception”—not unlike Elvis sightings.

As a journalist, I have been following academics’ deconstruction of the Gospels for more than three decades. It started as the “search for the historical Jesus.” Prominent New Testament professors claimed to have extracted the “real” Jesus—usually an ethical teacher but sometimes a failed prophet or revolutionary—from the Gospel embellishments.

Lately, though, the historical Jesus has become irrelevant to the New Testament establishment beyond the fact that he existed, and the Gospels are viewed as pure ideological propaganda. Their authors, according to this consensus, were skilled polemicists who appropriated the names “Matthew,” “Mark,” “Luke,” and “John” to give their texts the authority of being connected to Jesus’s disciples. Their aim wasn’t so much to reveal Jesus as to do political battle on behalf of the “orthodox” version of early Christianity as it competed against alternative “Christianities” such as Gnosticism, which had its own gospels and polemicists. And the academic-consensus view of orthodox Christianity isn’t pleasant: rigid, authoritarian, patriarchal, and fanatical. In this view, the Gospels themselves, as foundational documents, are riddled with anti-Semitism and misogyny, sidelining Mary Magdalene, for example, who was a revered figure for the Gnostics. Orthodox Christianity prevailed against its rivals only because the Roman emperor Constantine and his sword made it the empire’s official religion. Believing Christian students exposed to all of this in their New Testament 101 classes might be forgiven for concluding that their professors are deliberately trying to undermine their faith.

And in fact this consensus view is its own orthodoxy, held in nearly every academic setting where New Testament studies are taught, with the exception of some small Christian colleges and seminaries. Lest you not believe this, Bart Ehrman, religious studies professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and bestselling author (How Jesus Became God), candidly admitted as much in a 2017 blog post. Ehrman went so far as to make a laundry list of the top research universities and liberal arts colleges whose New Testament faculty believe that the Gospels were written so late in time—forty to sixty-five years after Jesus’s death—as to be historically unreliable, and that John’s Gospel in particular was certainly not written by the fisherman son of Zebedee as Christian tradition holds. Those are the “critical” scholars, Ehrman wrote, the ones who “do their best to know the truth rather than to confirm what it is they have always been taught to think.” Academic dissidents from this orthodoxy can be safely marginalized as “confessional,” or as cherry-picking the evidence to reach foregone conclusions.

The discovery of the garden underneath the Church of the Holy Sepulcher doesn’t necessarily prove that Ehrman and the rest of the New Testament establishment are wrong. Scholars can survey the history of Christianity and its texts and still conclude that its core doctrines about Jesus’s divinity rest on fabrications. But the garden in Jerusalem should be a small lesson for them in humility—not to mention, a lesson to respect the millions who believe that Jesus’s resurrection from the dead was a real event that irrupted into history and altered it forever.