Chapter 11

Scholarship and Deconstruction

The spectrum of critical versus uncritical New Testament scholarship can be usefully characterized along a single axis measuring how thoroughly a scholar follows the evidence without regard to traditional commitments. Scholars and readers alike approach the biblical text with varying degrees of prior allegiance: to confessional orthodoxy on one side, to anti-confessional skepticism on the other. Four characteristic dispositions emerge from this landscape, distinguished not by their methods (which all may call themselves “critical”) but by the commitments that shape what conclusions each is prepared to accept. The following typology, adapted from a companion discussion, captures these dispositions in shorthand.

Table 9. Four dispositions toward the biblical text.

The Core New Testament is a product of the “Critical Christian Scholar” disposition. It does not treat tradition as self-authenticating evidence and does not allow confessional commitments to determine in advance the conclusions reached from the evidence. Equally, it does not approach the biblical text with hostility toward faith or a prior disposition to disprove it. It affirms claims in proportion to the evidence that supports them and refrains from defending claims the evidence does not sustain.

What the Critical Christian Scholar affirms at minimum is the Kerygma itself. The Kerygma is not a theological commitment imposed from outside the evidence but a conclusion the evidence compels, the earliest recoverable stratum of apostolic proclamation established in the preceding sections. To affirm the Kerygma is to affirm what the evidence most firmly supports about the earliest Christian faith, and to withhold further theological assertions that the evidence does not compel is to refuse to add commitments beyond what the evidence sustains. This is the methodological core of critical Christian scholarship: the Kerygma represents the minimum theological content that constituted a person as a Christian in the apostolic period, and, correspondingly, the minimum theological commitment that follows from the evidence itself. Other affirmations may be defensible on additional grounds, but core apostolic Christianity aligned with critical Christian scholarship does not require them. In this precise sense, the Core New Testament is not only the product of a scholarly method but the embodiment of the minimum Christian confession that the evidence itself sustains.

The Pedigree of Critical Christian Scholarship

The disposition of Critical Christian Scholarship has a longer history than its contemporary articulation might suggest. Henry Latimer Jackson, writing in 1918 in The Problem of the Fourth Gospel, articulated the same posture in nearly identical terms and toward the same end. Jackson opened his work with a diagnosis as arrestingly familiar today as it was a century ago: “At the present moment, two things about the Christian religion must surely be clear…. One is that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.”¹ Jackson’s response was neither to retreat into traditionalist defensiveness nor to abandon Christian commitment, but to undertake critical investigation of the Fourth Gospel as a Christian duty, in the conviction that honest historical inquiry strengthens rather than undermines the faith it examines.

Jackson framed this duty in language worth quoting at length:

“If a duty laid in particular age be that of fearless and withal reverent investigation into sources, it is fully realized by scholars who, both at home and abroad, are showing themselves alive to the demand; and one and all concerned for truth, deep seriousness and transparent honesty of purpose go with them to their work. Rightly conceived, their unremitting toil is in reality a response to ‘the desire of Christendom’ for the fullest and most exact knowledge possible of the historic life and ministry of Jesus… the one only thing which it is his business to discover and present is Truth, and he accordingly works on as convinced that ‘in the end there will come a great reward in pure and trustworthy knowledge.’”

Jackson’s posture maps onto the four-disposition typology with no friction. He approaches the Fourth Gospel neither as the traditionalist seeking to harmonize its difficulties nor as the secular critic seeking to disprove the faith it serves, but as a Christian scholar whose commitment to the historic life and ministry of Jesus is precisely what motivates his examination of its literary character. The closing of Jackson’s introduction laid down the temper appropriate to the work he was undertaking: “Criticism, inevitable as it was, has come to stay; this recognized, the wiser course is not only to allow its reasonableness but to welcome it, to make the most of what it has to teach.” The methodological core of Critical Christian Scholarship is, in Jackson’s framing, an act of reverent investigation. The present study takes up that same posture a century later and toward the same end.

Healthy Deconstruction

A consequence of this methodological posture is worth naming directly. For readers who encounter this study while holding inherited Christian commitments that the evidence here challenges, the experience may trigger what is now commonly called deconstruction: the critical examination of beliefs one had previously received and taken for granted. The term has circulated broadly in Christian discourse since the mid-2010s, accelerated by social media platforms that enabled public faith journeys. Prominent pastors, musicians, authors, and children of evangelical leaders have shared deconstruction narratives, and a related #exvangelical movement has organized former evangelicals around the critical appraisal of the traditions they inherited. In contemporary usage, the word covers a wide range of processes: for some, it names a gradual and principled reappraisal of inherited beliefs against evidence and experience; for others, it names a rapid unraveling of Christian commitment that ends in departure from faith altogether.

The two framings have hardened into rival cultural camps, with evangelical traditionalists often treating the term as shorthand for apostasy and various other Christians treating it as necessary spiritual maturation. The latter group is itself internally divided. Restorationists endorse deconstruction as a path toward reconstructing apostolic Christianity by stripping away later denominational and creedal accretions; their posture is not liberal but paradoxically conservative in a deeper sense, since they reject mainstream tradition precisely in order to recover an older and more authoritative one. Liberal progressives, by contrast, endorse deconstruction as a path toward reconstructing Christianity along contemporary humanistic lines that leave much of classical morality and historic doctrine behind; their reconstruction is oriented toward the present rather than toward any earlier tradition. Both groups treat deconstruction as maturation, but their reconstructive destinations differ fundamentally: the restorationist seeks to return Christianity to its earliest apostolic form, while the progressive seeks to adapt it to contemporary sensibilities. Both framings of deconstruction, the traditionalist and the reformist, capture something real: deconstruction has indeed produced both serious intellectual work and genuine loss of faith, and whether a given process leads to one outcome or the other depends less on the word itself than on what one does with the examination it names.

This study aligns methodologically with the restorationist direction. Its critical work is directed toward recovering the most primitive apostolic stratum, and the Core New Testament it produces is a return to the earliest recoverable apostolic witness rather than a departure from Christian commitment. It neither celebrates deconstruction uncritically nor dismisses it as a slippery slope. Deconstruction is good when it removes what the evidence does not support and preserves what it does. It becomes destructive when it discards the historically grounded core along with the traditions that accumulated around it, leaving nothing in place of what it dismantled. The aim of this project is healthy deconstruction: a critical examination that strips away what the evidence cannot sustain, whether that be literary dependence treated as independent eyewitness testimony, dogmatic commitments projected back onto the apostolic period, or accretions of tradition mistaken for the Gospel itself, while preserving and strengthening what the evidence does sustain. The Kerygma remains after the critical work is complete; so does Luke-Acts as the primary Gospel witness; so does Paul as the primary apostolic voice. These are not what the critical examination dismantles but what it discovers to have been the secure foundation all along. To deconstruct onto this foundation is to reconstruct faith on historically defensible ground rather than on inherited presupposition. Readers whose deconstruction leads them to critical Christian scholarship and to the Kerygma as the minimum apostolic confession have not lost their faith but have grounded it where the evidence most firmly sustains it.

A specific dimension of this experience deserves naming. Readers will find that many positions challenged by the evidence presented here are routinely described in the secondary literature as “the scholarly consensus.” The term carries weight: it implies broad professional agreement, settled questions, and a burden of proof on dissenters. What the term often does not imply, despite its rhetorical force, is empirical measurement. No comprehensive survey of New Testament scholars has been conducted on Markan priority, on Q’s existence, or on most other contested questions in the field. The “consensus” invoked in textbooks and lectures is therefore socially constructed rather than empirically measured: it describes the position one encountered in graduate school, the position assumed in standard textbooks, and the position required to publish in mainstream journals. None of these is the same as a counted majority among practitioners, and none is the same as a position the evidence compels.

The label functions rhetorically as well as descriptively. To say “the consensus is X” shifts the burden of proof onto dissenters and signals that engagement with the underlying evidence is unnecessary; the appeal to consensus does the work that the evidence would otherwise have to do. This rhetorical function is exploited regularly in popular religious and irreligious discourse alike, where “the scholarly consensus” is invoked to dismiss opposing positions without examining their substantive grounds. Readers should distinguish between a scholarly position they have weighed for themselves and a scholarly position they have accepted because it has been described to them as the consensus view. This study has aimed to provide substantive grounds wherever it dissented from the prevailing view, on the principle that scholarly positions earn their authority from the evidence that supports them, not merely from the breadth of their acceptance.