Hindrance or Help: Does the Modern Category of ‘Jewish-Christian Gospel’ Distort our Understanding of the Texts to which it Refers?

Abstract

Decisions about how texts are classified and presented affect the way in which they are interpreted. This is particularly evident in the study of the often fragmentary remains of many early Christian gospels, as can be seen in the decisions about which texts are included in the standard collections and the way in which they are arranged. In this article I argue that the term ‘Jewish-Christian gospel’ is positively misleading if taken to refer to a class of writings which share particular formal characteristics (or indeed distinctive theological tendencies) that might set them apart from other gospels, and I suggest that the time has come to reconsider this dubious category. Since these writings need to be understood as texts before they may be used as sources for historical phenomena, it seems better to classify them either according to their literary form or according to the way in which they have been transmitted, not on the basis of a theological evaluation that has little support in the texts themselves.