Burton L. Mack is a writer and John Wesley Professor (now emeritus) in early Christianity at the Claremont School of Theology in Claremont, California. He is also active at the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity. Mack is primarily a scholar of Christian origins, approaching it from the angle of social group formation. Mack's approach is skeptical, and he sees traditional Christian documents like the Gospels as myth as opposed to history ("myth" in New Testament studies is not meant to imply "falsehood" or "lie", but rather it is meant to take into account the social, cultural, and political situations of their author. The gospels, then, he sees more as charter documents of the early Christian movement than as reliable accounts of the life of Jesus). Though he does not regard himself as a Historical Jesus scholar, he suggests that Jesus was a wandering sage, similar in style to the Greco-Roman cynics, and that the earliest "Jesus Movements" followed a similar model. He is a noted scholar of the hypothetical Q Document, and is confident that it can be sifted into three layers: one containing primarily wisdom sayings, another giving details on how the community ought to behave, and another containing apocalyptic pronouncements. This model of Q is highly controversial.
Select Works
- Wisdom and the Hebrew Epic: Ben Sira's Hymn in Praise of the Fathers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press) (1986)
- A Myth of Innocence: Mark and Christian Origins Fortress Press (1988)
- The Lost Gospel: The Book Q and Christian Origins Macmillan Co. (1993, paperback 1994). A reconstruction for the layman of the Q Gospel; historiography and its relation to belief, building off the work of John S. Kloppenborg, among others. ISBN 0-06-065375-2
- Who Wrote the New Testament?: The Making of the Christian Myth HarperSan Francisco 1996. ISBN 0-06-065518-6 The gospels as fictional mythologies created by various communities.
- Christian Origins and the Language of the Kingdom of God (with Michael L. Humphries)
- The International Lost Gospel
- Rhetoric and the New Testament
- Patterns of Persuasion in the Gospels
- The Christian Myth: Origins, Logic, and Legacy (The Continuum International Publishing Group 2001)
When asked by his students why he remained a Southern Baptist, Professor Mack would reply, " To make the other Southern Baptists mad." recollection from a student at CST in 1989.
