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Yuri
Kuchinsky's
The Magdalene Gospel: A Journey Behind the New Testament
Roots Publishing, 2002
Reviewed by Robert M. Price
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This fascinating volume has
grown out of the author's researches and subsequent Internet debates concerning
the Middle English Pepysian Gospel Harmony (MS Pepys 2498) which has slumbered
away the centuries in the library of Magdalene College,
Cambridge. Kuchinsky is
convinced that this curious and mostly neglected text represents the
hypothetical gospel harmony of Justin with much Johannine material added.
Justin's harmony, our author reckons, would have been based on earlier versions
of Mark and Luke plus canonical Matthew, while the Johannine source would have
been a similarly intermediate version of our Fourth Gospel. Kuchinsky notes the
tendency of the Pepys text to side with Old Latin and Syriac readings, which he
considers often superior (as do I, just to keep things straight). He does not
underestimate the length of time separating the Pepys manuscript from what he
considers its vastly earlier date of composition, but he is able to connect many
dots to form a hypothetical line of transmission and dissemination. It must have
come from somewhere, after all.
The Magdalene
Gospel treats a number of interesting subjects in new ways. His championing
of the neglected work of the great Alfred Loisy is refreshing. Not least
important is Kuchinsky's case that we have erred in dating the gospels so early
and in failing to detect much later materials in the Pauline epistles, errors
that have blinded us to a fascinating possibility, namely, that the de-Judaizing
of Christianity so vehemently debated in the New Testament is really a
second-century phenomenon following upon the defeat of Bar-Kochba and Hadrian's
outlawing of Jewish practice. This point by itself deserves much thought.
I mean to treat
here the central argument of the book, namely a reiteration of Boismard's
judgment that the Pepys Gospel Harmony represents a second-century text or form
of the text. The best way to do this will be to survey instances where the Pepys
text differs from the familiar readings of our gospels. After reading through
them, I confess that, contra Kuchinsky's arguments, I found no instance in which
the differences did not make ample sense to me as pious glosses and redactions,
together with summarizing omissions from the conventional gospels used as source
materials.
Kuchinsky points
to the remarkable fact of the entire absence from the text of the phrase "Son of
Man." Instead, Jesus simply speaks of himself in the first person. This
Kuchinsky takes to denote a very early date, suggesting that the phrase has been
added to all four gospels only in the last stages of editing, perhaps in order
to obscure the text, a seemingly odd scribal strategy. Partisans of an early
date for Thomas make a similar case, contending that Thomas is
pre-Christological, but I don't agree with them either: Thomas seems to me to
want to do away with Christological titles as barriers to the experience of the
living Jesus himself ("Tell us who you are, so we may believe in you."). In the
same way, I read Thomas not as pre-apocalyptic but as eliminating futuristic
eschatology as a Gnosticizing response to the delay of the Parousia. The Pepys
harmony also everywhere replaces "kingdom" of God with "bliss" of God, which
must be a similar result of de-eschatologizing and a sign of lateness.
The Magi from the
East become the Three Kings familiar from Christmas carols in Pepys 3:15; unlike
the nativity star, this is not a particularly auspicious sign. Herod dispatches
"all his men" to exterminate the Bethlehem innocents, another bit of
legendary embellishment. In 7:1 we read that "When
St. John had himself baptised he
went into the desert till he was thirty years old." (Kuchinsky regards "St." in all such references as
secondary scribal piety, not original to the text. Could be.) Is this some
ancient tradition about John's self-immersion? It might be, but it might just be
medieval speculation: surely John would have felt the need to be baptized, and
who else would have been available to do the job? And his age is just an
inference from the Lukan notes that Jesus and John were born in the same year
and that Jesus was about 30 when John dipped him.
In Pepys 7:7,
John preaches "they should not put their trust in being the descendants of those
who were once so pleasing to God. Because God also may make good people out of
those who no one had any hope in before." This is not more primitive than Luke
3:8b but rather a gloss upon it. In 7:23, Jesus sets John's mind at ease about
his own baptism: it is for the sake of "giving all others an example in every
way, and especially of humility," a gloss on the vague Matthew 3:15. The text
does seem to be in touch with the old tradition (Gospel of the Ebionites cited
in Epiphanius Against Heresies 30:13:7-8; Justin, Dialogue with Trypho
88:3) of fire dancing on the surface of the
Jordan at the baptism: "there came the brightness of heaven with the Holy
Spirit, and alighted in him" (7:25). But
then again, none of this is exactly pre-canonical, is it?
Kuchinsky takes
it as a mark of an earlier form of the text when Jesus is depicted as less
brusque or abusive, as in Pepys 10:4, where Jesus does not rebuke his busybody
mother, omitting John's "Woman, what have I to do with you?" But surely it is
more natural to take all such examples as instances of "damage control" (as
Crossan calls it), cleaning up Jesus. In the same story, Jesus turns water into
wine to the tune of a mere three gallons, not thirty, per jar. Earlier? No, just
another attempt to reign in Jesus according to the sensibilities of later piety.
Likewise in Pepys 40:16, Jesus does not contradict his well-wisher as in Luke
11:28 ("Nay, rather...") but just elaborates: "Certainly, but blessed are those
who hear the word of God and keep it." This is a later, cosmetic improvement of
the more difficult, hence more primitive, Lukan reading. Yet again, Pepys shows
itself to be anything but primitive in its version of the visit of Jesus'
family. Matthew and Luke had already omitted Mark's note that Jesus' kinfolk
thought him paranoid. Matthew retained Jesus' third-person rebuke, while Luke
softened even that. Here is the Pepysian version: "And Jesus replied to those
who told him [that his family awaited] that all those who hear his words and do
accordingly--he loved them as much as his mother or his relatives." And instead
of "brothers," it is his "cousins" who visit! Here we have nothing but the
Catholic veneration of the Holy Family.
Pepys 11:15
specifies not just that one must be "born of water" (John 3:5), but actually "baptised
in water" to enter the "heavenly glory." Another gloss, no doubt correct, but no
less a gloss for all that.
The Samaritan
woman asks Jesus, in this version, "whether it is better to worship here, upon
the Mount Gerizim, as our ancestors did,
or in Jerusalem?" (Pepys 13:18). Kuchinsky deems this an earlier reading, since
it actually names John's "this mountain" (John 4:20). But why not take it as
another gloss for the medieval reader's benefit? And when the Pepysian Jesus
answers "that the hour was come when the people need not regard either this or
the other, but honor God and the Holy Spirit in all places" (13:19), we have
not, I think, a more primitive and authentically Johannine piece of realized
eschatology, but rather an assimilation to the reader's own historical
situation, already implicit in John 4:21, but made pedantically explicit here.
Kuchinsky thinks it important that the woman does not assume Jesus sides with
Judaism instead of Samaritanism, perhaps implying an earlier, Samaritan or
Samaritan-tilting, version. But I would think the (summarizing) Pepys version
has simply left out the "you Jews" business because of its much later Christian
standpoint which easily forgets Jesus' Jewishness. Plus, note the anti-Modalistic
distinguishing between God and the Holy Ghost, correcting John's uneasy-making
"God is Spirit" (John 4:24; cf. 1 Corinthians 15:45; 2 Corinthians 3:17--ouch!)
We learn in 20:13
that "Matthew Levi" was some sort of cooper or metal-worker, but this is likely
a pious attempt to exonerate him from being a tax-collector even before Jesus
recruited him. In any case, "Matthew Levi" represents a Mark-Matthew
harmonization and thus is scarcely early.
Pepys 46, the
rejection in Nazareth, has a very interesting reading. The list of Jesus'
relatives reads exactly as I have proposed the pre-Markan list must have (see my
"Eisenman's Gospel of James the Just," in Chilton and Neusner, eds., The
Brother of Jesus: James the Just and His Mission, 2001, pp. 196-197): "Is
this not the son of Joseph, the carpenter? Is not Mary his mother? Are not James
and John and Simon and Judas his brothers?" By the time we read it in Mark 6:3,
"Joseph" has dropped out of the first sentence in favor of "Is this not the
carpenter, the son of Mary," in the interest of the emerging miracle-birth
doctrine. "Joseph" has fallen down into the second sentence as "Joses,"
replacing "John," who, as one of the Pillars, as per Eisenman, must have been a
brother of Jesus along with James the Just and Simeon bar-Cleophas/Simon Cephas.
This connection is preserved in the designation of John bar-Zebedee and John the
Baptist as Jesus' "cousins." So if Kuchinsky is right, the Pepys reading would
come in quite handy for me. But who knows? Since tradition early on made John
bar-Zebedee the cousin of Jesus, and Pepys apparently regards Jesus' brothers as
his cousins, this passage may have introduced him among the male kin of Jesus.
Kuchinsky
suggests that the beatitude found in 24:9, "Blessed are they who desire
righteousness in their food and drink," represents Jewish Christianity, an
endorsement of kosher laws. It sounds to me more like a rewording of the
Matthean "those who hunger and thirst after righteousness/justice," though the
motive may indeed be to foster Christian kashruth. It is at any rate subsequent
to the Luke/Q version which had merely "who hunger." The Pepys harmony then
provides but the skimpiest, indirect discourse summary of the Sermon on the
Mount (Matthean version). Kuchinsky freely admits that the text habitually
summarizes, paraphrasing and condensing. But he seems not to notice how this
feature of the text makes it more likely in every case where something familiar
from the traditional gospel texts is missing, that it has been omitted, perhaps
clumsily. For instance, when the Pepys text (30:6) lacks the qualifier to the
encomium on the Baptist ("... nonetheless, the merest peasant in the kingdom of
heaven ranks higher than he."), this does not mean we are reading the pristine
form of the saying (though I am willing to bet the qualifier is indeed an
apologetical interpolation!). That is, the qualifier, clumsy in its own right,
has been trimmed away as the text was smoothed out in summary.
How interesting
that in the Pepysian version, Jesus raises up not the son but the daughter of
the widow of Nain! But does this mean we are reading a more primitive version? I
doubt it: this version merely carries the Lukan story farther from its source,
Elijah's resurrection of the Zarephath widow's son (1 Kings 17:17-24),
assimilating it to the resurrection of Jairus' daughter.
Pepys 30:5 shares
with the Liege Diatessaron and Ephraem Syrus the reading that John the Baptist's
audience had not gone out merely to see "a reed that stirs and bends with every
wind." But this is surely a clever gloss on the seemingly pointless "reed shaken
by the wind," which probably meant "you didn't just go for the scenery, did
you?" That it cannot be original is evident from the fact that it imports praise
for John (he sticks by his principles) into the very member of the comparison
that is being rejected!
John is called
"the angel that God promised who should come and make way before Christ" (also
30:5), but this need not be taken, as Kuchinsky does, as a vestige of an early,
less Christocentric Jewish Christianity (though I, too, envision such a stage in
which Jesus and John were venerated equally). All it means is that somewhere
along the line someone mixed up the two meanings of
aggeloV:
John the messenger becomes John the angel. Midrash or mistake?
The "children in
the marketplace" simile, simpler than the canonical version, seems to me to be
simplified, not more primitive as Kuchinsky would have it. Even recent
commentators differ over precisely who is complaining to whom and about whom or
what, so it is no wonder that the Pepys harmonist took the easy way out: "they
were like children who neither laughed nor wept with their friends" (30:9).
Pepys identifies
the Lukan sinner who anoints Jesus in the Pharisee's house with Mary Magdalene
(31:3), a notorious post-canonical harmonization. More intriguing is the change
in the parable of the two debtors. Jesus now asks which of the pair of forgiven
deadbeats the creditor loves more! Interesting, to be sure, but probably
the change is a piece of redaction justifying Jesus' apparent disdain for the
priggish Simon in favor of the repentant woman. For all the difficulty
commentators have had trying to make the parable fit Luke's secondary context,
the element of the greater debtor loving the lenient creditor more is one of the
few things that did fit! But not in Pepys. The forgiven woman goes on to
join Jesus' female entourage (31:22)--just as she does in the late apocryphon
The Book of the Resurrection of Christ by Bartholomew. (Mary of Bethany is
amalgamated with Mary Magdalene, too, in 35:1, another late, legendary
identification. Later on in the story the Beloved Disciple is likewise equated
with John bar-Zebedee, presupposing a later piece of guesswork.)
The Rich Fool
story (42:6-14) has taken on the color of Christian eschatology ("Fool, this
very night the demons will deliver your soul to hell."), losing the original
Jewish wisdom tenor, where the irony is more subtle: the fool has built up a
future he will just miss enjoying. In light of this, Kuchinsky's contention that
the story as we read it here is more primitive because it has the fool destroy a
single barn rather than several, seems gratuitous.
Startlingly,
Pepys gospel 43 merges the report of the Galileans whom Pilate massacred with
Josephus' account of Pilate's butchery of the peaceful minions of the Samaritan
Taheb, which got him sacked. Only Pepys has Jesus himself lead the crowd to
Gerizim! Plainly someone has confused "Jesus" with "Christ," i.e., messiah
generically, and grossly confused the story.
Kuchinsky reads
Pepys 48:7-9 as depicting the fusion of John's orphaned disciples with Jesus'.
But this is all it says: "And then St. John's disciples came and buried his
body, and afterward came to Jesus and told him how St. John was martyred. And
the apostles, themselves, came, and told Jesus all that they had done and
taught. And then Jesus told them all that they should follow him privately into
the wilderness, and that they rest themselves for a little while--because they
had labored greatly." All we have here is a compressed version of Matthew
14:12-15. There is nothing here to suggest John's disciples joined Jesus'
company.
The healing of
the paralytic at the Pool of Bethsaida (47) contains the marginal gloss about
the angel troubling the waters, strictly a piece of late Johannine textual
tradition. Similarly, the Pepys harmony contains a glossed version of the Woman
Taken in Adultery (59:26-40), and in its Johannine context, which means the
harmonist used a very late version of John.
Kuchinsky thinks
it a mark of older vintage that in the Pepysian version of the exorcism of the
Syro-Phoenician's daughter (52) Jesus is made to answer the disciples, not the
woman, that he was sent only to Israel. In this version, they had been
urging him to heal the daughter, just to shut the mother up. But, really, how is
the point any different from the Matthean/Markan version where he speaks to the
mother in order to placate the disciples who ask him to send her away?
The Dishonest
Steward (68:1-4) says the manager was being sacked for embezzlement, but his
conduct thereafter was strictly above reproach: "And the steward acquired for
himself many friends, and settled his lord's debts fair and square." More
primitive than Luke's version? No, rather a sanitized version composed so as to
avoid having Jesus seem to commend wicked behavior, another long-standing
headache for commentators. Likewise, when the Pepys gospel (96:48) has John (the
Beloved Disciple) known only to the high priest's servants, not to the priest
himself as in John's gospel, we have no earlier, less problematical version but
rather a later smoothing of a puzzling oddity.
Who carried
Jesus' cross? Not Simon of Cyrene, but Simon the Leper, from Matthew 26:6! This
change might have been made to undercut Simonian legends equating Simon of Gitta/of
the Kittim/of Cyrene with the Crucified. Or it might have seemed that a leper
made a more natural scapegoat. In any case, what we have here is more apocryphal
character-hybridizing.
In the Pepys
gospel, the Risen Jesus appears to Peter, supplying what is so conspicuously
missing from the canonical gospels, especially Luke: "And when St. Peter heard
it that they had seen Jesus, he rose and went down to the sepulchre. And right
away, Jesus showed himself to St. Peter" (107:1-2). But that's just it: this
harmony supplies what the original lacked; hence this version is a gloss.
It is much harder to account for why Luke, who does believe Jesus appeared to
Peter (24:34), does not portray it than to suppose Luke originally had it, as
preserved in Pepys, and that some scribe cut it out! It is designed to plug a
hole in the text.
In sum, the Pepys
harmony just does not appear to be a combination of pre-canonical versions of
the gospels. Just about every divergence can be understood more easily as pious
glossing from a much later standpoint. Kuchinsky's reading is not required by,
nor really even easily compatible with, the text he himself has provided. I do
not belong to that magisterium of mainstream scholars on whom the author expends
his venom so often throughout the book. Nor is my own working paradigm of gospel
origins threatened by his reconstruction. Indeed, it would come in quite handy
for me at various points. Other readers may come to different conclusions. Nor
is the conclusion of this review to say that one ought not to spend the time
with this book. Quite the opposite: there is much to be learned here on various
topics, and the work repays study.
CopyrightŠ2007 by
Robert M Price
Spirit of
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