On not knowing the difference between a "Synoptic" and a "Canonical" Gospel.

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“Dawkins and Hitchens miss two important points. First, their critics are not 
only talking about their scholarly limitations but about their errors, errors that a more informed or careful critic wouldn’t make…”.



Curtis White, The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions in a Culture of Easy Answers

(with new afterward; Brooklyn, London: Melville House, 2014), 35.

Popular books are often based more on the author's audacity and force of personality than on carefulness or expertise. They are pep rallies in print, exercises in preaching to the choir to elicit enthusiastic shouts of "Amen," and let anyone outside the choir be damned. Popular authors are cheerleaders really, who use forceful assertions in place of pom poms.

As such the most popular authors are likely to be dilettantes prone to making obvious mistakes of the sort that proper expertise would have saved them from making.

Still I often find myself surprised that some of the dumb things they say still make it all the way into print. Even in cases where I did not expect the author to have known better, I still can't help but wonder how certain blatant mistakes survived the process through which the book had to go before appearing in print, the editors, the proofreaders, the people who had received advanced reader copies, and so on.

Christopher Hitchens makes a good example. Now to be sure some of the erroneous stuff Hitchens said might survive the process described about. I can easily imagine that happening in the case of Hitchens' comments about the Q source:

"The book on which all four [Gospels] may possibly have been based, known speculatively to scholars as 'Q,' has been lost forever… (Christopher Hitchens, god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything [New York: Twelve, 2009], 120).

Now, as everybody who knows basic facts about the Q source will be aware, nobody says all four Gospels were based on Q. Rather Q is defined as a source Matthew and Luke share in addition to their common source Mark.

I can understand editors, proofreaders, the sort of people who would be given Advanced Reader Copies of books by Hitchens, etc., not knowing that, and therefore passing over Hitchens' mistake.

More difficult to explain is how everyone missed the following erroneous statement:

…the frantic early church councils that decided which Gospels were “synoptic” and which were “apocryphal” (Hitchens, god is not Great, 120).

In this case I have to admit I was surprised that neither Hitchens, not his editors, nor his proofreaders, nor the recipients of Advanced Readers Copies, nor any or all of them taken singly or together had in their common stock of basic cultural literacy enough information to know that the word Hitchens wanted there was not "synoptic" but "canonical"!

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