Gerd LüdemannCritiques

This book sets out as a corrective for the idea that the New Testament is all about peace and love, and the violence and intolerance in the Bible is restricted to the Old Testament. The author is able to show that there is plenty of intolerance and violence to go around.

The author Gerd Lüdemann is who was the Professor of New Testament at the University of Göttingen, Germany and Director of the Institute of Early Christian Studies. He has also served as Visiting Scholar at Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, and as co-chair of the Society of Biblical Literature Seminar on Jewish Christianity. His many books include The Resurrection of Jesus, The Great Deception, The Unholy in Holy Scripture, and Heretics: The Other Side of Early Christianity. He is also research fellow of the Westar Institute and the Jesus Seminar. With all that said he is a bad historian and theologian who is part of a number of liberal scholars with advanced degrees in biblical & religious studies who have denied the faith and use the guise of biblical criticism to grind there axe against the church and the bible.

In his book The Unholy In Holy Scripture - The Dark side of the Bible, which was originally written in german then translated for broader english audience. Lüdemann has become one of the most prominent and sharpest critics of the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus with a provocative hypothesis that early Christian belief in Jesus’ resurrection was the product of hallucinatory experiences originally induced by guilt-complexes in Peter and Paul. This rebuttal to this argument is provided in an article by Dr. William Lan Craig titled “Visions of Jesus: A Critical Assessment of Gerd Lüdemann’s Hallucination Hypothesis.” Craig in the past debated with Ludeman on this topic in the past Jesus’ Resurrection: Fact or Figment? which was published.

The pages of the this book are full of bad anti-apologetics and is biased and he states presuppostions for his arguements without any evidence or historical background. Inturn his statements are straw men not able to withstand the the winds of imposing question by the reader. Obvious he sounds like he has an axe to grind against the church and the bible. The worst bit is the part about New Testament exgesis of selective text. To make a long story short, here is an example of Ludemann’s type of “reasoning”: he just lines up a sample of anti-jewish polemic out of the New Testament (ignoring completely the context), puts it along with some nasty bits by Eusebius and Luther, and here we go. And this man (who, nervetheless, did some good job in the past) pretends to be a serious historian. He sets up these straw men titled by his two man attacks on scripture Unholy Violence against others covering the wars of Israel against surrounding tribes especialty the canaanites. The other being Anti-Judaism in the New Testament which he aspires to explain how Paul and the scriptures teach a theology of hate towad the Jews for the murder of Jesus and those who would follow him. Some of the anti-thetical statements he make in his book are stated.

In other words, the gulf betwen historical fact and its alleged meaning, between history and proclamation, between the actual history of Jesus and the variegated picture of his history in the NT, makes it impossible o continue to argue seriously that the writings of the New Testament are inspired, or even to indentify the Word of God with Holy Scripture. Page 2

“It is high time to understand the Bible in a human way, to arouse it like a sleeping beauty and thoroughly to do away with the monopolistic claim which the Christian churches and large areas of so-called academic theology have successfully established in their highly selective biblical exegesis.” Page 26

So the fact remains that there are thousands of Christ, i.e. human pictures of a super-earthly Son of God, but only one Jesus…..But the divinised Christ has little to do with Jesus. Page 132

In the end Ludemann was expelled from his chair on the theology faculty at the University of Göttingen by reason of the content of his academic writing and lecturing on the history and theology of earliest Christianity. He was expelled from his post as professor of New Testament and assigned a professorship of the history and literature of Early Christianity thereby losing all his academic rights and being forced into a ghetto existence within the theological faculty. The expulsion of professor from his academic post came as a public consequence of his poor scholarship. Sadly Ludeman denies the faith he grew up studying and taught in a the halls of theological lecture halls in Germany.

The author correctly stresses the papal (Benedict XVI) flaws in his book 'Jesus of Nazareth', in which the pope makes use of an unacceptable methodology in dealing with the historical Jesus.

However, I did not appreciate the overall tone of the book which should have been simply objective, detached, professional, and not denigratory in any way.

I think that a passionate, objective research aimed at revealing the historical Jesus is needed in a society in search of more complete answers than those 'delivered' by the Catholic Church. It is of the higher importance that such an inquiry would not be devalued by unacceptable behaviours.

In his introduction, the author portrays the Gnostics of the second century as misunderstood, open-minded, liberal spiritual seekers whose "unsurpassed religious creativity" was brutally repressed and whose mythic literature was regrettably extirpated by a rigidly dogmatic catholic hierarchy.
"Suppressed for reasons of dogma and church politics, the Gnostic prayers nevertheless are evidence of an earnest and deep religious sense without which the history of Christianity would certainly have lost some of its richness. Even if the Gnostics were fought against or defamed with every possible means and their prayers fell victim to church censorship, the fascination of Gnosticism remains to the present day."

However, since mainstream Christians (not just the ones that Lüdemann labels "orthodox/catholic", but Montanists, Arians, and a whole host of other streams of faith) actually believed in their religion (as he clearly does not), it is not surprising that they considered truth (as they perceived it) to be more important than mythological "creativity", and were at the very least deeply suspicious of Gnostics, who suborned and reinterpreted Christianity as part of their own esoteric mythic system. The subtitle "Gnostic Spirituality in Early Christianity" is misleading: it might suggest (as does the passage above) that Gnostic spirituality was a thread within the tapestry of Christian faith-history; but the author himself shows that it is, on the contrary, to be seen either as an attempt to import elements into Christianity from sources quite alien to its ethos and origins, such as Manichaeism, Neoplatonism, and pseudo-Egyptian magic traditions; or, alternatively, as an attempt to annex the narrative of Christianity to a broader pagan mythos (much as figures from Roman Catholicism are absorbed into voodoo cults). It seems entirely reasonable that the Christian church should have regarded Gnostics as essentially subversive.

Lüdemann's presentation might seem more justifiable if the Gnostic prayers in his anthology offered something of clear spiritual or literary value to the contemporary reader. I was hoping that this would be the case - that one might find texts of the stature of the sayings from the Gospel of Thomas or the teachings of the Didache. One of them (from the 'Acts of John') at least has a literary history in modern times, and was set by Gustav Holst as the Hymn of Jesus (miscalled by Lüdemann Hymn of Christ). However, the texts are for the most part extraordinarily tedious, irritating in their repetitiveness and their pointless contradictions ("he is uncircumcised, even though he has been circumcised"), with inserted spells and magical gibberish ("Zoxathazo, aoo ee ooo eee ooo oee...[etc.]") which probably served merely to make a grand impression even when first written down.

I praise you, light-truly-unmoved, you [light] for those who have been moved in your [light].
I praise you, silence of all light-silences.
I praise you, saviour of [all] light-saviours.
(from "The Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex")

Hear me - I sing your praise, O first mystery, (you) who have shone in your mystery, (you) who have caused Jeu to establish the eleventh aeon; and you have instituted archons, decans and ministers in the eleventh aeon, whose imperishable name is plouzaaa. Save all my members which have been scattered since the foundation of the world in all the archons and the decans and the ministers of the eleventh aeon; gather them all together and take them into the light.
(from 'The Books of Jeu': the surviving verses repeat almost identical wording from the fifth aeon - whose imperishable name is psamazaz - to the thirteenth - Iazazaaa - and beyond!)

A handful only are worthy of a second look, such as the 'Psalm of Valentinus' (seven lines preserved by the Christian writer Hippolytus, possibly not even Gnostic in origin) and the 'Christ Hymn' already mentioned.

Calling these texts "suppressed", and writing up their authors as the victims of ancient church repression and censorship, is obviously designed to increase their "fascination" for the modern anti-establishment book-buyer: one always has some delicious guilty feeling when reading something that has been banned by the authorities, even if only by the authorities of 1,800 years ago. But the modern reader will have a hard time satisfying anything beyond mere historical curiosity about a religious tradition whose outpourings were justifiably buried in the dust of ages, and on balance could just as well have remained there.

MB 16-vii-2009

PS: I was amused to discover that my assessment of Gnostic literature unintentionally echoes that of a distinguished scholar in the field. In the Preface to The Apocryphal New Testament, M. R. James comments that
"while the Pistis Sophia is just readable, the Books of Jeu are not. The revelations they contain are conveyed in mystic diagrams, and numbers, and meaningless collections of letters, and it requires a vast deal of historical imagination and sympathy to put oneself in the place of anybody who could tolerate, let alone reverence, the dreary stuff."

MB 27-vii-2009½

I probably need to read this book again, but on a first reading it struck me as deeply unsatisfactory. The author attempts to demonstrate the inauthenticity of a wide range of recorded sayings of Jesus in the Gospels, mainly on the grounds that they presuppose a historical context of the Gentile missionary church rather than the ministry of Jesus in Palestine, which the author characterizes as essentially apocalyptic. However, although he presents his criteria in an opening section, he fails to call on them adequately in discussing each text. As a result, the argument for each individual reading appears superficial and incomplete: far too often the author says that inauthenticity is "demonstrated" when it appears merely to have been asserted. I am not ill-disposed towards his conclusions, but in this book I do not find him arguing for them in a manner which would convince the critical reader. The word "deception" in the title sets an unnecessarily combative tone, since the author regards Pauline Christianity as a self-deception by people who believed it (i.e. a delusion), rather than a deliberate lie perpetrated by those who knew it to be false.

The personal introductory section, in which the author emotionally takes leave of the (mainstream Lutheran) Christian faith in which he was brought up, provides a discordant prelude to the rational discussion which follows. It would have been better as an afterword or epilogue.

MB 30-xii-2008, rev. 7-i-2009, 4-iii-2009½

As an eminent biblical scholar at Göttingen University, Prof. Gerd Lüdemann has been working for many years to determine which of the words and actions attributed to the figure of Jesus are more likely to be authentic. The four biblical books known as the Gospels were written between 70 and 120 years after Jesus' birth, and clearly contain much information that was added long after the fact. Lüdemann and other scholars of the international Jesus Project use internal and external evidence to try to determine which sayings, action, and events they describe are more likely to be true, and which represent additions by writers with particular political agendas.

“The Great Deception” presents Prof. Lüdemann’s public break with established doctrine. His “Missive to Jesus,” which forms the first chapter, is his dramatic farewell to his childhood religious views. The second chapter outlines the criteria by which authenticity of Jesus’ alleged words and actions are to be determined. For example, words and events that clearly refer to the Jewish revolt in 70 AD must be late additions. Likewise, sayings that presume a Gentile audience come from a later sphere, as Jesus lived entirely in a Jewish milieu. The ensuing chapters apply these criteria. The third and fourth chapters respectively focus on the inauthentic sayings and actions of Jesus, and the fifth and sixth chapters on those deemed to be authentic. What emerges is a dimly – recognizable Jesus, but one that appears far more likely than the mystical anti-Jewish figure that some take him to be.

Prof. Lüdemann has paid a high professional price for his intellectual courage and independence. He was removed from his faculty position by the administration at Göttingen, and permitted only to teach courses not required for any degree program. Significantly, many theologians of the Jesus project clearly share Lüdemann’s overall views, but have retained their professional positions through greater circumspection. Gerd Lüdemann’s case has gained international attention as a clear violation of academic freedom. Information about his life and work is readily available online, including at his personal home page: http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~gluedem/eng/index.htm

Given that "The Great Deception" focuses on a subset of the relevant Bible verses, a more detailed and recent exposition of Lüdemann’s interpretations is available in his book "Jesus After 2000 Years: What He Really Said and Did".

This book is the written presentation of a live debate between two leading scholars on the resurrection, William L. Craig and Gerd Ludemann. I enjoy these kinds of presentations because they are a good way of getting to the heart of the issue and seeing the best evidence and counter-arguments both sides can marshal. Craig and Ludemann were given opening statements, two rebuttals apiece, and closing arguments.

In my opinion, Craig was the clear winner of the debate both in terms of substance and technique. He is practiced in formal discourse and lays out his argument clearly and succinctly. Ludemann, as fine a scholar as he is, was not up to the challenge. He truly seemed unaware that proponents of the resurrection could actually formulate sophisticated arguments in favor of their position and so was unprepared to respond to them. I am not alone in this assessment, as I have seen several skeptics express their disappointment in Ludemann’s performance, going so far as to dismiss the entire debate as merely the result of Craig’s superior and practiced technique.

Added bonuses to this debate are the responses provided by Stephen Davis, Michael Goulder, Robert Gundry, and Roy Hoover. In my opinion, Robert Gundry’s is the most worthwhile as he examines the strengths and weaknesses of Craig’s arguments, resulting in an even more powerful case for the resurrection being made by this book.

Lüdemann's critical examination of "holy scripture and its authority" is a meticulous historical investigation of early Christianity that seeks "to direct attention once again to Jesus." General readers may find the extensive documentation intimidating; but the argument is accessible, and the documentation is tucked away in notes that can be left to scholars. Beginning with Lessing's insight that the New Testament was a work of the Catholic church and his claim that- because "the appeal to the writings of the New Testament as intrinsically binding on the faith is a dogma of the Catholic church"-we may draw our own conclusions about Jesus, L¸demann sets about to welcome the heretics of primitive Christianity back into the Christian community as valuable human witnesses to the human Jesus. A heretic is one who makes a choice, and L¸demann notes that this was done on all sides in the processes of canonization by which the New Testament was formed, just as it must be done by contemporary Christians who would draw conclusions for the present from historical reconstructions. No doubt, some readers will be put off by Lüdemann's assertion that the Bible is the word of human beings, not the Word of God. But even those who are put off may find Lüdemann's willingness to say "I" refreshing and his historical reconstruction provocative.

Was the resurrection of Jesus a fact of history or a figment of imagination? Was it an event that entailed a raised and transformed body and an empty tomb? Or was it a subjective, visionary experience--a collective delusion? In the view of many, the truth of Christianity hangs on the answer to this question.Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? is a lively and provocative debate between Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig and New Testament scholar and atheist Gerd Lüdemann. This published version of a debate originally set at Boston College is edited by Paul Copan and Ronald K. Tacelli, who invite the responses of four additional scholars. Robert Gundry, a New Testament scholar, and Stephen Davis, a philosopher, argue in support of a historical and actual resurrection. Michael Goulder and Roy Hoover, both New Testament scholars, offer their support for Gerd Lüdemann's view that the "resurrection" was based on the guilt-induced visionary experience of the disciples. The book concludes with a final response from Lüdemann and Craig.