On "The Travels of Marco Polo" by Marco Polo **

Polo traveled from Italy across Asia and back during the years that the Mongol Empire reigned over most of the territory. The version I read was the Yule edition, which coming from the nineteenth century was likely a bit too old to keep the reading interesting.

The Yule edition was heavily annotated, such that the notes were often two or three times the length of Polo's original text. Polo's text itself might have been fairly interesting, although it would have been extremely repetitive. Many a chapter recounts how a given region was infidels, etc. Polo uses nearly the exact same wording each time. Of course, the annotations are necessary because many of Polo's place names are now out of date, such that it's hard to know what location he is writing about. However, the nineteenth-century place names are also many times out of date, such that the annotations weren't much help. And this truly seemed a scholarly edition insofar as the notes recounted numerous opinions with regard to what Polo actually meant every location that he wrote about.

A case in point would be Madagascar. Polo talks of giraffes and other creatures that are not at all on the island. Most scholars l think he has the wrong place and meant another location. After all, the big southern island would have been off his route anyway. Of course, Polo wasn't averse to writing about nearby places that he'd heard about. This really is a kind of geography book in many ways and was likely fascinating to readers of the time.

This isn't to say that there aren't parts that are fascinating even now. His account of Japan, I found a bit interesting, even if most scholars dispute his historical accounts of the battles that he describes. Another particularly intriguing account was of a nation that consisted of two islands. On one island only women lived, and on the other only men lived. The men would visit the women's island for three months of the year. Children lived with the women until the age of fourteen, at which time the boys moved to the men's island. Not many people, even in Yule's time, though the account accurate or true. Finally, there is the religious variety that he encountered, something we often don't think of now when we think of Asia. That is, in Polo's time, while there were plenty of Buddhists and others of so-called Eastern religious affiliations, in his time, there were also a fair number of Muslims and Nestorian Christians scattered across the continent all the way across China.

On "Hidden Gospels" by Philip Jenkins ****

Jenkins's book is a corrective to and a rebuke of such cutting-edge scholars as the Jesus Seminar, who claim usually that the various Gnostic gospel discoveries shed more light on the historical Jesus than we had previous known and than that is available in the canonized New Testament writings. Jenkins is skeptical of such claims and more or less defends conservative religious views on the subject of how we should know who Jesus is and which books we should accept as "historical." While he makes a number of excellent points, he largely defends academic positions that place the writings of the Gospels fairly late (post-Temple destruction), which in my view compromises the authority the canonized Gospels have. After all, if it took fifty years to get around to actually writing about Jesus, then by then it seems like a good deal of mythologizing would have taken place. Thus, why could not these other gospels, not accepted, have been just as legitimate points of view that were mostly banished by the growing power brokers within the early church? Furthermore, he largely sees current doctrine as an accurate reflection of real church teachings of the first century, only faintly acknowledging the influence of Gnostic teachings on it.

Jenkins shows quite convincingly why such scholarship has proliferated and received so much attention. On the former score, the increase in academic programs in religion in recent years has meant that more graduate students have had to find fodder for original research. Gnostic gospels, Qumran scrolls, and other newly discovered documents are prime candidates for such study, since there has been less written about them. Add to that the agenda that many scholars have--for example, writing from a feminist perspective (or a Marxist one or a deconstructionist one, etc., depending of the critical school one wants to apply)--and there is ample desire then to enlarge the canon to include works that support one's point or to interpret them in such a way that they do. Finally, media, looking for good stories on religion, as it does, gravitates toward the controversial. Hence, even though 90 percent of the scholars might have conservative views on Christian faith, it's the 10 percent claiming that Jesus wasn't believed to be divine among the first two generations of followers or Jesus was a Cynic philosopher or Jesus was never crucified and in fact had a regular family, and so on, who get the attention.

Jenkins points out that many of the claims being made today by such scholars are actually quite old--that is, they have been made since the 1800s and in some cases even made only generations after the foundation of the Christian movement. Many of the newly discovered documents are merely new manuscripts of works of which we already have preserved copies. There is not much "new" to much such "new scholarship." In many cases, the agenda that such scholars have is actually subverted by the works they point to with such aplomb. Gnostic views, as Jenkins points out, were not generally so feminist, so egalitarian, so antiauthoritarian, as such scholars portray. Many were more misogynistic than anything seen in the accepted Bible. And they were very much focused around establishing some as better than the vast majority of people. Indeed, the simplicity with which Gnostic views are presented was usually anything but, with levels of gods (aeons) separating us from the divine, such that there was a great deal of knowledge to be gleaned before one could even claim to be truly informed.