This scholarly but well-written book is aimed at two readerships. The first is the ‘liberal’ scholarly community which sees the acceptance of the four gospels in the early church as the outcome of a keen struggle for supremacy. To quote one of the leading advocates (Bart Ehrman, quoted by the author on page 4) of this view:

In brief, one of the competing groups in Christianity succeeded in overwhelming all the others. This group gained more converts than its opponents and managed to relegate all its competitors to the margins… This group became ‘orthodox’ and once it had secured its victory over all its opponents, it rewrote the history of the engagement – claiming that it had always been the majority opinion of Christianity…

In short the issue is how the four gospels gained canonical status whereas other claimants did not. Dr Hill goes carefully through the evidence for this thesis which has become ‘orthodoxy’ in some circles. He convincingly demonstrates that the thesis is not proven.

At various points Dr Hill has another readership in view. On page one he quotes from Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, page 231:

Who chose which gospels to include?’ Sophie asked. ‘Aha!’ Teabing burst in with enthusiasm. ‘The fundamental irony of Christianity! The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman emperor Constantine the Great.

Surely this is a classic example of a dubious thesis seeping out of the halls of academia into the media. In the final chapter ‘Who chose the Gospels?’ Dr. Hill makes the following comment:

For audiences used to a diet of The Da Vinci Code, public unveilings of recovered Gnostic Gospels, or dubious docu-drama about the discovery of the supposed Jesus family tomb, it may be a bit disappointing to learn that the four-Gospel canon did not rise to prominence through a conspiracy of fourth-century bishops determined to squelch threats to their authority. The four well-known Gospels were not even foisted on the church by a second-century, heresy-hunting, book-burning bishop named Irenaeus.

How then were the four gospels chosen? Dr Hills’ answer is traditional and right:

Second-century Christian leaders would have said that neither individuals nor churches had the authority to ‘choose’ which of the many Gospels they liked, but to receive the ones given by God and handed down by Christ through his apostles.

David Kingdon