It’s been an interesting few weeks from the standpoint of coverage of Christianity in the secular media, including:

• The scientific study which claimed that praying for a sick person was of no effect.
• The release of the so-called “Gospel of Judas,” which claims that Judas was acting on Jesus’ command when he turned him over to the Romans.
• The hype surrounding the upcoming release of the film adaptation of “The DaVinci Code.”
• A report claiming that Jesus might have actually been walking on ice, not water, when he approached the disciples’ boat on the Sea of Galilee.”

I find the “walking on ice” story especially ridiculous. The whole point of the Biblical account is that Jesus came to the disciples in the midst of a storm — and, as others have already pointed out, even if the temperatures were below freezing, you don’t get a sheet of ice when the water is turbulent. It would make more sense to reject the story altogether (which I’m not recommending!) than to try to explain it away in this convoluted fashion.

The study of prayer is also a little silly. I’ve linked to an excellent rebuttal of this one in a previous post. Prayer is not a stunt, not quantifiable, and it doesn’t work like a Coke machine, as my freshman-year dorm wing chaplain told me during college. Prayer is a dialogue with the holy and living God.

I haven’t read enough about “The Gospel of Judas” to have much comment about it, except to say that I believe the canonization process undertaken by the church was divinely-inspired. Any manuscript which conflicts with the four canonized Gospels is not a manuscript in which I choose to believe.

I realize that there are differences between the Catholic Bible and the Protestant Bible, but let’s set those aside for the moment; I don’t think they’re as theologically significant as the differences between the existing Gospels and this new account.

I know that sounds stubborn and anti-intellectual, but I don’t mean it that way. The fact of the matter is that, after two millennia, we can verify the age of a manuscript but not necessarily its truthfulness. I am open to what scholarship can tell us about the historical context and interpretation of the existing Bible, but I will not be swayed by every supposed new manuscript that turns up.