The Gospels Early Christians Wish Existed with Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel

Johnny Ova: Welcome everybody to the Dig In Podcast. I am your host, Pastor Johnny Ova, and today my guest is Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel. Dr. Vanden Eykel, thank you so much for joining us today. We're going to have a great conversation.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Looking forward to it. Thanks for the invitation.

Johnny Ova: My pleasure. All right, let's get in. The canonical Gospels give us almost nothing about Jesus' birth and childhood. Why were early Christians so unsatisfied with that silence, and what were they trying to solve by writing new stories?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: The story of Jesus' birth is found in the New Testament only in Matthew and Luke. Especially in Matthew, the story is really slim on details. In Luke you get different details, a different angle. In Matthew, Joseph is the one talking with everyone, the angels, and Joseph is the one who knows what's going on. In Luke, it's Mary who knows what's going on. So I think the reason these stories were maybe unsettling and prompted people to rewrite them is precisely because they're not very detailed. Early Christians are drawing all sorts of conclusions about the person of Jesus, and as they think more about who they believe Jesus to be, they naturally start to retell these stories and fill out details. They try to harmonize some details. A great example: in both Matthew and Luke, Jesus is born in Bethlehem. That's important for both authors, but they have really different ways of making sure Jesus is born in Bethlehem. In Matthew, that's just where his parents live. In Luke, they live in Nazareth, and they go to Bethlehem for the census. So early Christians, thinking about these stories, are trying to reconcile those things and figure out how the stories fit together. In that process they also have to add details and change details to make them make sense.

Johnny Ova: I'm a Christian, I'm a pastor, I run a church here on Long Island, New York, and I see so many ironic things. One of them is the great point you just made. I don't think Christians really notice how much of what they believe is not in Scripture the way they think it is. I remember as a young Christian hearing "the Bible says," then trying to find it, and thinking, well, that's a bit of a stretch from this one thing that's there.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: I always tell my students the thing that will make me bristle more quickly than pretty much anything is the statement "the Bible says," because the Bible is a collection of texts from different authors, and it says different things depending on which author you're looking at.

Johnny Ova: The Protevangelium. Did I pronounce that right?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Protevangelium is how I pronounce it, but we accept all pronunciations here.

Johnny Ova: Listen, if they're going to give us tough words like this. And on top of that, when I research the exact pronunciation, I get seven different ways people say it.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Exactly. I just refer to it as PJ in my scholarship, because who has time to type out Protevangelium of James every time?

Johnny Ova: I'm going to go with PJ for the rest of this conversation. But I do know this is one of the most influential Christian texts that most Christians have never heard of. What is it, and what does it claim about Mary?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: The Protevangelium receives this title in the 16th century when it's rediscovered. It's a text that falls out of favor in the West, so we have very few Latin copies, but it's rediscovered and reintroduced into European consciousness in the 1500s. It's a fascinating text, and you're absolutely right, it's one of the most influential collections of stories that most Christians today aren't aware of. Although there's plenty of art that taps into the Protevangelium, so Christians going to church in Europe are seeing images of characters from this text. Mary is the protagonist, the central character. One of the details we get from this text is who her parents were, Joachim and Anna. These people don't appear in the New Testament, and they get full lives in the Protevangelium. It was written in Greek. It's a second century text, so it's extremely early. I tend to date it to the first part of the second century, probably around 150 or slightly before. And this collection of stories is very focused on answering a question. Early Christians have arrived at the conclusion that they're worshiping Jesus as a God. So the Protevangelium tries to answer the question, if Jesus was God in human form, and he was born, what does that look like? What was his mother like? It's a very reasonable question. What sort of person gives birth to a God?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: So the Protevangelium starts even before Mary's birth, with her parents. This part of the text is patterned on the story of Samuel in the Old Testament, the miraculous conception of Samuel by Hannah. It's Anna in the Protevangelium. There's a pious couple that doesn't have a child, and suddenly an angel appears and says, you will have a child, and that child is Mary. The really cool thing about this text is that it follows Mary's story from before her conception, through her birth and her infancy. Ultimately she's brought to the temple when she's three years old, and she lives in the temple until she's 12. She dwells in the Holy of Holies, and angels bring her food. Really fascinating stuff. It tries to fill out the portrait, assuming this woman would have been spectacular in so many ways. So let's collect some stories and see what she was really like and what we believe about her.

Johnny Ova: Man, that's fascinating. Do we know who wrote it?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: It claims to be James, the brother of Jesus, or the stepbrother of Jesus in this text. But that's probably an attempt by the author to push the text a little earlier, to give the impression it was written even before the Gospels were. We more or less conclude it was probably an anonymous author or authors in the second century.

Johnny Ova: And that also changes the idea of Mary as an ordinary girl who had no idea who she was, and then an angel visits her and says, you're going to give birth to the Messiah, God in flesh. It seems like she was special from her childhood.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Yes, and even before. That feeds into what would develop into things like the Immaculate Conception in Roman Catholic belief, where Mary is a sinless creature from the moment of her conception. The Protevangelium doesn't actually say this, but it's very clear that Mary's mother conceives Mary in the absence of a father. Her father is off fasting in the wilderness when Anna becomes pregnant with Mary. So the point of the text is that this is not just a random person God has chosen to carry himself. This is somebody who has been part of a plan driven by God, really before they even existed.

Johnny Ova: How much of what Christians believe about Mary today actually comes from this second century text rather than the Bible itself?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: I would say a pretty good amount, at least in Catholic and Orthodox circles. A lot of Mariology and belief about Mary takes root in this text, specifically the set-apart nature of Mary. She's not just a random person. She's somebody God not only chose but really designed for this purpose.

Johnny Ova: One thing I noticed when reviewing this text is that it goes to great lengths to defend Mary's virginity. Why was that such a pressing concern for second century Christians, and really for Christianity in general?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Of course, Matthew and Luke are not subtle about this. Both believe Mary's conception of Jesus was virginal. That taps into the idea in the ancient world that important people also have important childhoods and important births. You see this in other stories. Alexander the Great's conception is one example. Alexander's father sees his wife at some point lying in bed with a snake, and he leaves. He's like, no thanks. And then she appears pregnant with Alexander the Great. So it's a pretty common trope in the ancient world, not necessarily virginal conceptions, but miraculous ones. That's there in Matthew and Luke. But by the second century there's rhetoric coming from non-Christian or perhaps anti-Christian circles saying, no, Mary did not conceive Jesus virginally, and if Joseph wasn't the father, somebody else had to be. The most common version of this tradition is that Mary was the victim of assault by a Roman soldier. This soldier even gets a name in the tradition, Pantera. So one interpretation of the Protevangelium is that it's meant to counter those claims that Mary was assaulted and that's where Jesus comes from.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: The Protevangelium pushes back and says, no, she was under the care of her parents, she was under the care of the temple, and then it tells the story of her divine conception. It fills in a lot of details absent from Matthew and Luke to assure readers she absolutely was a virgin when she conceived. It bolsters and fills out a claim that's already present in Matthew and Luke.

Johnny Ova: I'm curious, because obviously we know the prophecies of the Messiah born of a virgin, so I'm assuming they're trying to protect that. But you may not even know this. My question is why? Why couldn't God just have a husband and wife, a married couple, give birth to the Messiah? Are they just trying to add to the supernatural element of what's going on?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: That's a great question. I think it ultimately comes down to this: you have a belief being articulated and held about the person of Mary, and in the second century, and the Protevangelium is proof of this, Mary has been elevated to the status of a kind of miraculous creature herself. If you already have that belief, then in later debates, I'm thinking especially of Thomas Aquinas, although I can't cite you a place in the Summa where he says this, there's the question: could God have created Jesus through normal sexual relations? Yes, absolutely, 100 percent. God can do whatever God wants. But at least in later debates, and I think probably even earlier, there's a sense that yes, God could have done it another way, but God did it this way. So they're trying to construct a system where that truth claim stays solid.

Johnny Ova: All right, let's go to another topic. You have a book on the Magi. Most people assume they were kings and that their names were Gaspar, Melchior and Balthasar. None of that, and none of their names specifically, are in the Bible. Where did all of that come from?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: This is another great example. It's always good to talk about the Magi when it's not even Magi season. As the old saying goes, it's always Magi season somewhere.

Johnny Ova: I was going to say, I should have saved this episode for Christmas.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: At least that's the saying in my house. The Magi are a fascinating example. The story in Matthew is basically 12 verses long, and like the story of Jesus' birth more broadly, it's super vague and lacks detail. These characters appear in the New Testament only in Matthew. When you go back and read the story away from any preconceived notions about who they are, what they are and why they're there, it's very short, and it leaves all these questions. They come from the East. Well, where is that? And how many are there? Matthew never actually says there are three Magi, even though that gets picked up pretty early, and with good reason. There are three gifts, so probably three givers. The impulse to retell the story is not only because it's an interesting and mysterious story, but because people want to fill in these gaps. If these are important characters, where did they come from and why are they really there? Matthew never really says why they're there. They just say, we're looking for the one born king of the Judeans, we saw his star, and we came to pay tribute to him. But what's the rationale?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: That gives rise to a whole interpretive tradition. They're coming to Jesus because they're pagans in need of deliverance from evil, or all sorts of other reasons. All these stories develop in the wake of Matthew's story to fill in those gaps, and because there are so many, they take different trajectories: who are they, why are they there, what conversations do they have? The pinnacle of this, in my mind, is a text called the Revelation of the Magi, written in Syriac, probably around the eighth century. In this text there are multiple Magi, 12 I think, if I'm remembering correctly. There's all sorts of discourse, and the story is told from their perspective. So it's really fascinating how these early authors retell the story and try to fill in its gaps.

Johnny Ova: Is that really where they got three from? Three gifts, so each one must hold one? I don't know, man. When I bring groceries into my house, I'm one of those guys who tries to get them all in one shot so I don't have to make a second trip. I feel like one guy could carry three. Is that really where they got three from?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: The word Magi implies there's more than one, because it's plural. But the story in Matthew just says Magi from the East brought frankincense, gold and myrrh. A lot of the tradition comes from the assumption that each one would have had one gift. Truthfully, I think that's a pretty fair assumption. I think Matthew probably does imagine three characters, but he never actually says it. So perhaps there were a bunch. The example I use a lot is a baby shower: there are 20 people, but only three kinds of gifts, diapers, wipes and clothes, and the 20 people all bring the same three gifts.

Johnny Ova: That's interesting. I got it.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: And of course art is one of the big influences that solidifies the number of the Magi. Three is a nice number for early Christians, and the earliest artistic representations we have almost always have three, so it gets codified. Then later, probably around the sixth century, they acquire these names, which also become part of the tradition.

Johnny Ova: Where did the names come from? Do we know how they got assigned to them?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: That's a bit of a mystery. The first written text I'm aware of that lists their names is the Excerpta Latina Barbari. It's a really strange text that just enumerates them with these names. There's also a mosaic in Ravenna, Italy, probably from around the same time or slightly after, that also has their names. So I think the names just arise out of tradition. The fifth and sixth centuries are the earliest we see evidence of them.

Johnny Ova: Even in Christianity, the three are now turning into groups, with more teaching that there were multiple, and even the length of time. As a kid growing up, you picture the three wise men coming over and giving gifts to Jesus, and you think it took a couple of hours to walk over, instead of months and months. I know you've argued the Magi in Matthew are political figures, not mystical gift bearers. How does that reframe what Matthew is actually doing here?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: That's my central argument in the book. When you look at the reception history of this passage, very early and almost universally it goes to the idea that the Magi are Gentiles coming to worship Jesus. In the interpretation of Matthew, that becomes a foreshadowing of Jewish rejection of Jesus, which certainly does happen in Matthew. Whether that's a historical reality is probably a longer conversation. I push back on that interpretation because I just don't see it in Matthew. I don't think these characters are there for worship. I think Matthew is using them to highlight the illegitimacy of Herod's kingship and the legitimacy of Jesus' kingship. Matthew goes to great lengths in the genealogy he opens his Gospel with to say Jesus is descended from David. He's not subtle about any of this: David, David, David. And the Magi are useful for him because in the ancient world, one of the primary functions of Magi is serving as advisors to kings. They're drawn to the courts of kings and to political power. So I think Matthew brings the Magi in and has them go to Jerusalem to ask Herod first, because they're looking for the king of the Judeans, and that's the obvious place to go.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: In Matthew it's very clear they've gone to the wrong place. When they go to Jerusalem and say, we're looking for the one born king of the Judeans, Herod has to admit, well, that's not me. So they're sent to Bethlehem instead, and that's where they open their chests and present their gifts of tribute. In my mind, this whole story is centered on affirming for readers that Jesus is the true heir to David's throne, not Herod. And by association it casts shade on the Roman Empire, because Herod receives his title, King of the Judeans, from the Senate in Rome, and Herod isn't even a Judean himself. So it tries to reset and say, no, we don't have allegiance to this puppet king of Rome. Jesus is the true king. And that kingship obviously looks different, because this king gets crucified by Rome, not rubber-stamped.

Johnny Ova: Can we define the Magi a little here? Because you go from wise men to kings to magicians. Who are these people? You said they're political, but do they have a supernatural or magical aura to their character?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: For sure. Really the only translation of Magi where I say, let's find something else, is kings. I'm not sure that's what Matthew has in mind, although there are characters in ancient literature who are trained as Magi as a precursor to becoming king. But there are different roles. The figure of the Magus in the ancient world is very subjective. It depends on who you're asking. If you ask Matthew what a Magus is, in my mind it's an advisory figure coming to pay tribute to this king. Elsewhere in the New Testament, two Magi appear in the book of Acts. One is named Simon, and one is named Elymas, also called Bar-Jesus in that story. In both of these stories, Magi are negative characters. So Matthew likes Magi, or at least tolerates them, and Luke, being the likely author of Acts, hates them. When we look at the functions Magi serve in the ancient world, there are political functions, but in a lot of texts they're also trained religious professionals. They're priestly figures. They interpret dreams and other phenomena, earthquakes, fires, these sorts of things, and they perform sacrifices. Zoroastrians call many of their religious professionals Magi. So there's a very religious and, I would say, mysterious dimension to them. These are powerful figures who can discern the will of the gods and see things normal people like us can't, because we're not trained to.

Johnny Ova: Once the Magi story left Matthew's hands, it took on a life of its own. How did later writers expand this narrative, and what were they adding that Matthew never intended, in your opinion?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Lots of things happen later. One of the most notable is a fixation on the star in Matthew and what exactly we're dealing with. In Matthew, the star has two personalities. In the first part of the story, it's just a regular star from which the Magi have discerned some significance. They say, we saw his star at its rising. That taps into the ancient belief that rising stars are linked to rising rulers. In Isaiah, falling stars are linked to falling rulers. The most famous example is the king of Babylon in Isaiah, I believe: you are fallen, Day Star, son of the morning. When the star falls, the king has fallen out of favor, and when a star rises, a king is coming into being. In the first part of Matthew's story, it really does seem like a regular star, and that's why the Magi are the ones interpreting it. Nobody else can tell this star is any different. But in the second part of Matthew's story, the star reappears when they leave Jerusalem, and now it's leading them. It's a different phenomenon, almost like a homing beacon. It goes on before them, they're happy to see it, and it stops over the house where Jesus is. Stars don't do that.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: So early Christians are trying to figure out what exactly this star is. In the Protevangelium, the star becomes exceedingly bright, to the point where all the other stars dim and you can't see them. I think that's a way of saying, yes, it was an unusual star, but it also taps into the political rhetoric: Jesus' kingship has not only begun, it's more significant than all the other kingships we know of. So expansions on the star are one big thing. Another is expansions on the backstory of the Magi. In the Revelation of the Magi, these characters are way in the East, in the land of Shir, near the boundaries of the earth. They're waiting for a sign from heaven showing that God is going to restore creation to the way it was supposed to function. And when the star appears, it's actually not a star. It's Jesus himself. It's a kind of shape-shifting thing. It appears, it speaks to them, it leads them, it makes meals for them, it levels mountains. So these texts fill in details and add to the mysterious and legendary nature of the story.

Johnny Ova: All right, let's talk about some of the additional texts, apocrypha, things like that. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas has the child Jesus cursing kids, causing death, raising them back. What is the purpose of stories like this?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Man. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas is every New Testament scholar's favorite thing to teach in class. We give this text to students, they come to class, and we say, raise your hand if you were surprised not only that Jesus causes death, but that he literally strikes people dead as a child. It's an absolutely wild text. I'm not an expert in it. I dabble in it, but I love it. In fact, if I had to write an intellectual biography of what first planted the seed for me to focus on apocryphal literature, I encountered this text in a New Testament class in college, read it, and thought, oh my gosh, this is crazy. It's really fascinating, but it's the same thing we see with these other texts: the desire to understand something about Jesus' life. The New Testament tells us hardly anything about Jesus' childhood. In Matthew, Jesus grows up in Egypt because Joseph is afraid of Herod targeting Jesus, so he moves everyone to Egypt, and that takes Jesus off the map a little. In Luke, we get one story of Jesus as a 12-year-old in the temple, chatting with the teachers.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: This is the story of subpar parenting on Mary and Joseph's part. They go to Jerusalem for Passover, they leave, and three days later they discover Jesus is not with them. You can see it happening. Joseph and Mary are like, I thought you had him. It's a communication issue. As a friend of mine says, for any marriage to work you have to communicate clearly and often. Three days without knowing where your kid is.

Johnny Ova: Father of the Year, that's it.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: But that's really the only story we have in the New Testament about Jesus as a kid. So at some point somebody said, we're going to tell what Jesus was like as a kid. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas starts with Jesus as a five-year-old playing by a river, separating the waters into pools, cleansing them by his word, and making little clay sparrows. It's a theologically loaded text. Jesus gathering waters is what God does in Genesis. God gathers the waters and creates animals out of clay. Jesus is doing the creative work God does in Genesis, which is the author's way of saying this child is not just a child. This is a divine child. Then the logical place this text goes, and if you've ever spent time around a five-year-old you know exactly what I'm about to say: what would it look like if you had a child who was God with unlimited power? What would that child look like as a five-year-old? And frankly, Jesus fits the mold. If somebody bumps into him, he strikes them dead, he withers them. He gets upset. So the whole text is an interesting commentary on the power of God, and it also acknowledges that Jesus has a very profound human component. This is not just a divine being. This is also a human who had to learn how to be human.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: There are all sorts of interesting thoughts about why the story exists. One of the most compelling arguments is that I don't think this author believed they were telling a story about how Jesus used to be a violent, cursing wonder worker. I think the author believes Jesus as a child was a cursing wonder worker, and also a cursing wonder worker as an adult. The best example that comes to mind is Jesus and the fig tree in the Gospel of Mark. He sees the fig tree, goes up to it, tries to find figs, and there are no figs, so he curses it. But the author says it wasn't the season for figs. He goes up expecting fruit when it isn't even time for fruit, and the fig tree withers. That's not reasonable. So this author takes that kind of story and asks, what would this person have looked like as a child? In the ancient world, great people were assumed to have fairly static character traits.

Johnny Ova: It really sounds like a kid figuring it out. Whoa, I've got all this. Let me kill you, raise you. Kill you, raise you. Look what I can do with the water. Look what I can do with this.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Right. And throughout the text Joseph is wringing his hands, because the parents from the town keep coming and saying, you have to get him under control. "He's killing our children" is a line from the text. At one point Joseph hires a tutor for him, and Jesus curses the tutor because the tutor doesn't respect his intellect. But the collection of stories in Infancy Thomas is also fascinating because it's balanced. When does Jesus kill people? When they're not praising him, when they're not telling him how good he is, and literally when they get in his way and bump into him. Then there are stories of when Jesus is in a good place, and he's helpful. When Joseph is in his workshop and cuts a piece of wood too short, Jesus lengthens the board for him. Mary asks him to get water, and he brings back a cloak full of water. So he's very helpful as long as you're respecting him. And I think that's also a theological commentary.

Johnny Ova: Gotcha. So I would understand why this text would be removed from the canon, quote unquote. But it's very clear, even in the New Testament, that there were many texts that were extremely important to early Christians. They're quoted in the New Testament over and over. I know this is a very general question, but why do you think some of them did not make it into the New Testament? Was there just a dramatic rejection, or is the story more complicated than that?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: With the process of canonization, we have some details and a lot of educated guesses about how it actually happened. When we talk about canonization, determining what's in the New Testament and what's not, I tend to think of it as a very organic process. I start with, first of all, is the text about Jesus? The Protevangelium is extremely popular, but it's not really focused on Jesus, so it doesn't have a natural home in the New Testament. The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, however, is very much about Jesus. So why isn't it in there? At some point people aren't reading it as often as other texts because of the disturbing details. Plenty of early Christians, with good reason, don't like the idea of Jesus murdering people, murdering other children, even though he resurrects them in the story. But one of the primary things to think about is circulation and popularity. Texts like the Infancy Gospel of Thomas were circulating, and we have copies. But one text that's very popular to talk about today is the Gospel of Thomas, which is not the same as the Infancy Gospel. The Gospel of Thomas is a collection of really quite bizarre sayings of Jesus, and we don't have many ancient copies of it.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: That shows us it probably wasn't circulating as widely as other texts. It wasn't circulating because there wasn't as much demand for it, and there wasn't demand because people weren't reading it. So we have to think about how texts propagated in the ancient world. There were publishing operations, but they looked different. If you want a copy of a book, you have to track down a person who has a copy and then hire somebody to copy it for you. You're probably not going to seek out a copy of the Gospel of Thomas, because it's a slog. It's really confusing and not that easy to read. But you are going to track down texts like the Gospel of Mark, the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, because these are the ones you're hearing, and they're really good. So you naturally go and get copies of those.

Johnny Ova: Were these apocryphal texts solving theological problems that the canonical Gospels accidentally created? You have to think about who's writing the text. They're coming from a lens, a framework. There's a bias in everything. We read the Gospels from the perspective of believers in Christ, but I'm sure there's a flip side. If the Romans were writing about the same events, they would probably take a much different approach than the Gospel writers. So were these apocryphal texts trying to solve a problem, like, we have some gaps here, let's fill them in?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Absolutely. I think a lot of them try to solve theological problems, and by doing so they also create a lot of theological problems. Coming back to the Protevangelium, that's a text trying to solve the problem of Mary's purity, Mary's virginity, and making sure that story supplements what we find in the Gospels. A person who has the Protevangelium and is also reading Luke will say, aha, I know this backstory. So it aims to bolster the claims those texts are making. But sometimes the details they include cause trouble. For example, in the episode I mentioned, when the angel comes to Mary's mother in the Protevangelium and says, behold, you have conceived, her husband is already gone. He's in the desert. So it's very clear the text sets up a miraculous conception for Mary, even a divine conception. The point is to say Mary was a pure creature, but it creates a theological problem: if Jesus' divine, virginal conception is also something Mary herself shares, what do we do with that? That's a theological problem created by the text, but only in light of texts like Matthew and Luke.

Johnny Ova: You co-edited a volume on Judeophobia and the New Testament. How did some of these non-canonical expansions contribute to anti-Jewish sentiment in early Christianity?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: We're really happy to see that book out in the world, and I hope it's already doing good work. One of the themes I looked at in my book on the Magi was how interpretations of Matthew, specifically patristic writings and these apocryphal texts, give rise to anti-Judaism, or what we call Judeophobia as a broader umbrella. One way they do this is by taking the focus off the Magi as Magi and putting it on the Magi as pious Gentiles. Again, that's a dynamic I just don't see in Matthew, but a lot of people interpreted the text that way very early on: the Magi are the good Gentiles, and they're going up to Jerusalem against the, quote unquote, bad Jews. So this text and others contribute to that portrait. They narrativize the Jewish rejection of Jesus that becomes so prominent in texts like Matthew. At the end of Matthew, when Jesus is before Pilate, the crowd is saying, crucify him, crucify him. Pilate says, I want nothing to do with this. Then the crowd says what are perhaps the most dangerous words in the New Testament: his blood be on us and on our children.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: That has had disastrous consequences, and it still does: the idea that the Jews killed Jesus, or are responsible for killing Jesus, and in Matthew, that they take full responsibility for that guilt. I want to pause, for legal reasons, and say that is a position I fully reject. I think it's harmful rhetoric that Matthew is using here. But that rhetoric gets read back into the Magi story, and it strengthens the claim that not only did the Jews reject Jesus at his crucifixion, they rejected him from the moment of his birth, which again has very disastrous consequences.

Johnny Ova: We're going to link both books we mentioned today, the one on the Magi and the Judeophobia book, in the description of the episode on YouTube, Apple and Spotify. Just a few more questions. It's been an amazing conversation, and I appreciate all the wisdom, and my lessons in pronunciation have been tremendous. How much of the Christmas story as most Christians know it is actually a composite that doesn't exist in any one text? I just don't think we fully grasp how much of what we celebrate, what we believe is the whole story, is really gaps that have been filled in.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: The nativity that sits on your mantel at Christmastime, or that appears in front of the church, is itself a kind of non-canonical text of sorts. I was going to say, I'm glad you're sitting down for this. That's not to say Christians are stupid in some way. It's the way we make sense of things. It's the natural consequence of reading. Matthew gives us certain details, the Magi and the star. Luke gives us the journey to Bethlehem to register in Luke's census. And from Luke we supposedly also get the stable. Now, I want to be very clear: the stable is not in Luke. The stable is a detail provided by the reader's imagination. If anyone watching this is thinking, no, I remember a stable in Luke, there is no stable in Luke. There's also no innkeeper in Luke. But the Christmas story includes these details because we fill in the gaps naturally. Where does the stable come from? In Luke, once Mary gives birth to Jesus, she puts him in a manger. A manger is not a stable. It's a feeding trough. Where would you find feeding troughs? In barnyards, yes, in stables, in alleyways, in caves out in the fields, those sorts of places.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: So I would say the nativity, the Christmas story, is very much a combination of Matthew, Luke and also the Protevangelium. The Protevangelium has Mary making her journey to Bethlehem on a donkey. There is no donkey in the Gospel of Luke. Mary and Joseph are just traveling. There are no barnyard animals. Those things are all provided by the reader's imagination. But they combine to give us this iconic scene that, even if you didn't grow up going to church, you recognize. These are the wise men, or the kings, or whatever. There are the shepherds over here. There's the star. There's the stable. People know what's going on because it's part of cultural consciousness. But in terms of where it appears in the New Testament, that scene does not appear anywhere in the New Testament.

Johnny Ova: Got it. Last one for me today. If these texts were that influential and widely read, what does that say about how we define Scripture, and who got to decide what counted and what didn't?

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: That comes back to the question of the process of canonization. Again, I think it's a very organic process, and in the second and third centuries, the 100s and 200s, that process is still ongoing. Even in the fourth century, one of the earliest examples we have of a major early Christian thinker doing this is Athanasius. He writes a festal letter in 367, I think. I'm sorry, I'm bad with dates and numbers. In it he says, these are the texts you should be reading. But interestingly, he also mentions other texts, like the Epistle of Barnabas and I think even the Shepherd of Hermas. He says, yes, you can read these, just don't read them publicly. And when we look at old copies of the New Testament, we also find these texts in those collections. So the process of deciding what's in the New Testament and what's not is still going on in the fourth century, and quite frankly it continues through the medieval period. What I hear a lot is the question about the Council of Nicaea. Is that where these texts were decided? A lot of people say, didn't they just choose the texts that made Jesus out to be a certain way? No, they didn't. They were there to answer different questions.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: It really isn't until the 1500s, at the Council of Trent, that we get an acknowledgment, a closing of the canon: these are the only texts in the Old Testament and the New Testament. That comes in response to the Protestant Reformation, where you had Martin Luther saying, yes, the New Testament is great, except for Revelation and James. I don't care for those very much, so I'm going to put them in an appendix. That shows that even in the early 1500s, with somebody like Martin Luther, who was not an unbiased person, there was a sense that what's in this collection needs to reflect belief, worship and practice. So it's a process that goes on for centuries. And today, of course, the conversation has shifted to inspiration, authority, all of those things. Can you learn things from the Protevangelium of James? Absolutely. There are a lot of rich theological ideas in it. Can you learn things from the Infancy Gospel of Thomas? Absolutely. But those texts existing outside the canon is a statement that the texts inside the New Testament are uniquely inspired, and I don't like the word inspired very much because I don't think people know what it means, or uniquely authoritative. These other texts might be interesting, maybe even good for the soul, but they aren't uniquely inspired or authoritative the way those texts are.

Johnny Ova: Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel, thank you so much for joining us. This was a lot of fun. I really appreciate it, and I learned a ton.

Dr. Eric Vanden Eykel: Thanks for having me. I've really enjoyed it.