Craig A. Evans

His formal education traced a southward arc through California and the Pacific Northwest. A B.A. and Ph.D. in Biblical studies at Claremont Graduate University in southern California. The combination of history, philosophy, and theology wasn’t accidental. It’s the foundation on which his method rests: take the Gospels seriously as historical documents, subject them to the same critical tools you’d apply to Tacitus or Josephus, and see what holds.

His first teaching post was a single year at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, beginning in 1980. Then, in 1981, he joined Trinity Western University in Langley, British Columbia, and stayed for twenty-one years. He was chair of the Religious Studies Department from 1981 to 1994 and director of the graduate program in biblical studies from 1994 to 2000. In between he held visiting and sessional roles: a visiting fellowship at Princeton Theological Seminary in 1987 and 1988, sessional lecturing at Regent College in 1985, 1987, and 1999, and a senior research fellowship at the University of Surrey Roehampton in London from 1998 to 2001.

That long residence in British Columbia wasn’t just institutional stability. It’s where Evans built the infrastructure of a field. He chaired the Society of Biblical Literature’s Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity Section from 1989 to 1996 and the Studiorum Novi Testamenti Societas’s Gospels and Rabbinic Literature Seminar from 1996 to 2003. He served as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin for Biblical Research from 1995 to 2005. He founded three book series: Studies in Scripture in Early Judaism and Christianity for Sheffield Academic Press and T&T Clark, Studying the Historical Jesus for Eerdmans, and Formation and Interpretation of Old Testament Literature for Brill. By the time he left Langley, he’d authored or edited more than fifty books. These weren’t ceremonial positions held at a distance. They shaped what the discipline looked like for a generation of researchers who came up inside them.

In 2002 he moved to Acadia Divinity College in Wolfville, Nova Scotia, as Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament. He directed the graduate program there until 2015. Wolfville is a small university town in the Annapolis Valley, and Evans and his wife Ginny made a life there while he ranged internationally for lectures and seminars. Graduate seminars at Cambridge in 1999 and Oxford in 2000; a public lecture at the Field Museum in Chicago in 2000 and the Canadian Museum of Civilization in Gatineau in 2004; the Rivendell Lecture at Yale and the Greer-Heard Forum on Resurrection at New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary, both in 2005; a seminar at Yale Divinity School that same year. The invitations kept coming because the questions he was working on weren’t settling down.

In 2016 he moved again, this time to Houston Baptist University (now Houston Christian University), as the John Bisagno Distinguished Professor of Christian Origins. He’s currently Distinguished Research Professor at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, directing the Master of Arts programs in Biblical History and Archaeology and in Biblical Languages and Culture.

The book that brought his argument to a popular readership was Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels, published by IVP in 2008. He doesn’t argue there that the Gospels are inerrant or that historical criticism should be set aside. He argues that a significant strand of scholarship has applied hypercritical standards to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John while treating later, non-canonical texts with something closer to credulity. He names names: the Jesus Seminar, Bart Ehrman, Elaine Pagels, Robert Eisenman, Morton Smith, James Tabor, and Michael Baigent. His case against the non-canonical texts is specific: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Peter, the Egerton Gospel, the Gospel of Judas, and the Gospel of Mary are late compositions, not early repositories of authentic Jesus tradition. The Secret Gospel of Mark he classifies as most probably a modern forgery. A chapter on The Da Vinci Code dismisses it as sensationalism. James H. Charlesworth and other prominent New Testament scholars contributed endorsements.

Can We Trust the Bible on …

Bart D. Ehrman, Craig A. Evans +1 more

2020 | 128 pages

Scribes and Their Remains

Craig A. Evans, Jeremiah J. Johnston +1 more

2019 | 384 pages

From Jesus to the church

the first Christian generation

Craig A. Evans

2014 | 188 pages

Commentary on Matthew

Craig A. Evans

2011 | 566 pages

But Fabricating Jesus is the readable surface of a body of technical work that has been building for four decades. Ancient Texts for New Testament Studies (Hendrickson, 2005) is a reference work mapping the Jewish and Greco-Roman literary context that lies behind the New Testament texts. Jesus and the Ossuaries (Baylor University Press, 2003) uses bone-box archaeology to probe first-century burial customs and what they imply for the passion narratives. Scribes and Their Remains and Jesus and the Remains of His Day press further in the same direction: physical and textual residue as a control on what Gospel claims are historically plausible. The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus, which he edited, is a standard reference tool in graduate seminars. And he’s described a work in progress that would be the definitive history and assessment of the quests for the historical Jesus, from Reimarus forward, a project that amounts to a capstone for everything he’s done.

The Dead Sea Scrolls run as a persistent thread through his research. At a February 2007 workshop at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Kansas City, attended by more than 330 people, Evans made a case for what the scrolls actually do and don’t establish. They didn’t vindicate or undermine Christian faith at a stroke. What they did was clarify the conceptual and linguistic world Paul worked in, ease the apparent tension between Paul and James, and open lines of inquiry that hadn’t been visible before. “It isn’t like, ‘Well, now I can believe,’” he told the audience. “The scrolls help us answer important questions that lead to fresh further-clarifying discoveries.” That’s as clean a statement of his method as he’s offered anywhere: not apologetics in the promotional sense, but the slow accumulation of contextual evidence, one find at a time.

At the same event he was candid about why texts like the Gospel of Judas draw the audiences they do. “There are lots of people out there with a spiritual hunger,” he said, “interest in things about Jesus, things about God, but they don’t really know where to turn.” He didn’t dismiss that. It’s worth paying attention to: the historical Jesus debate is, at bottom, a debate about who gets to answer a hunger that isn’t going away, and Evans’s position is that the hunger deserves evidence of better quality than popular culture usually provides. That’s a recognisably human concern, not just a scholarly one. The traditions that have carried these questions across two thousand years, through wildly different cultures and languages and political arrangements, have survived precisely because the questions kept mattering to ordinary people, not just to professors.

He’s appeared in documentaries for the History Channel, the BBC, and Dateline NBC. His bibliography now runs to more than 70 books and 600 journal articles and reviews. He was still directing graduate programs and producing new research as of his appointment at The Bible Seminary in Katy, Texas, where his two M.A. programs sit at the intersection of textual scholarship and physical archaeology, which is exactly where he’s always worked.