Gospels In Conflict: John and Thomas - Part 1

[Guest guest]

Dear All,

 

We concluded 'From the Feast of Agape to the Nicene Creed' with the following:

 

(p.29) " Now that scholars have begun to place the sources discovered at Nag

Hammadi, like newly discovered pieces of a complex puzzle, next to what we have

long known from tradition, we find that these remarkable texts, only now

becoming widely known, are transforming what we know as Christianity. [73] As we

shall see in the following chapters, we are now beginning to understand these

" gospels " much better than we did when I first wrote about them twenty years

ago. Let us start by taking a fresh look at the most familiar of all Christian

sources--the gospels of the New Testament--in the perspective offered by one of

the 'other' Christian gospels composed in the first century and discovered at

Nag Hammadi, the Gospel of Thomas. As we shall soon see, those who later

enshrined the Gospel of John within the New Testament and denounced Thomas's

gospel as " heresy " decisively shaped--and inevitably limited--what would become

Western Christianity. "

 

Beyond Belief (The Secret Gospel of Thomas)Chapter 1, pg. 29

 

[73] The work of many scholars today is changing our earlier, more simplistic

picture of the origins of Christianity. Among notable books being published

currently see, for example, Daniel Boyarin, 'Border Lines: The Idea of Orthodoxy

and the Partitioning of Judeo-Christianity' (Pennsylvania, 2004); Bart Ehrman,

'Lost Christianities' (New York and London, 2003); Karen King, 'What is

Gnosticism?' (Cambridge, 2003); Marvin Meyer, 'Secret Gospels' (Harrisburg, Pa.,

2003). I am enormously grateful to these colleagues for allowing me to read each

of these books in manuscript. "

 

Here now is Part 1 of 'Gospels in Conflict: John and Thomas.

 

Enjoy,

 

violet

 

 

 

 

Gospels in Conflict: John and Thomas - Part 1

 

(p.30) I have always read the Gospel of John with fascination, and often with

devotion. When I was fourteen, and had joined an evangelical Christian church, I

found in the enthusiastic and committed gatherings and in John's gospel, which

my fellow Christians treasured, what I then craved--the assurance of belonging

to the right group, the true " flock " that alone belonged to God. Like many

people, I regarded John as the most spiritual of the four gospels, for in John,

Jesus is not only a man but a mysterious, superhuman presence, and he tells his

disciples to " love one another. " [1] At the time, I did not dwell on disturbing

undercurrents--that John alternates his assurance of God's gracious love for

those who " believe " with warnings that everyone who " does not believe is

condemned already " [2] to eternal death. Nor did I reflect on those scenes in

which John says that Jesus (p.31) spoke of his own people ( " the Jews " ) as if

they were alien to him and the devil's offspring. [3]

 

Before long, however, I learned what inclusion cost: the leaders of the church I

attended directed their charges not to associate with outsiders, except to

convert them. Then, after a close friend was killed in an automobile accident at

the age of sixteen, my fellow evangelicals commiserated but declared that, since

he was Jewish and not " born again, " he was eternally damned. Distressed and

disagreeing with their interpretation--and finding no room for discussion--I

realized that I was no longer at home in their world and left that church. When

I entered college, I decided to learn Greek in order to read the New Testament

in its original language, hoping to discover the source of its power. Reading

these terse, stark stories in Greek, I experienced the gospels in a new way,

often turning the page to see what happened next, as if I had never read them

before. Reading Greek also introduced me firsthand to the poems of Homer, the

plays of Sophocles and Aeschylus, Pindar's hymns, and Sappho's invocations; and

I began to see that many of these " pagan " writings are also religious

literature, but of a different religious sensibility.

 

After college I studied dance at the Martha Graham School in New York. I loved

dance but still wondered what it was about Christianity that I had found so

compelling and at the same time so frustrating. I decided to look for the " real

Christianity " --believing, as Christians traditionally have, that I might find it

by immersing myself in the earliest Christian sources, composed soon after Jesus

and his disciples had wandered in Galilee. When I entered the Harvard doctoral

program, I was astonished to hear from the other students that Professors Helmut

Koester and George MacRae, who taught the early history of Christianity, (p.32)

had file cabinets filled with " gospels " and " apocrypha " written during the first

centuries, many of them secret writings of which I'd never heard. These

writings, containing sayings, rituals, and dialogues attributed to Jesus and his

disciples, were found in 1945 among a cache of texts from the beginning of the

Christian era, unearthed near Nag Hammadi in Upper Egypt. [4] When my fellow

students and I investigated these sources, we found that they revealed diversity

within the Christian movement that later, " official " versions of Christian

history had suppressed so effectively that only now, in the Harvard graduate

school, did we hear about them. So we asked who wrote these alternative gospels,

and when. And how do these relate to--and differ from--the gospels and other

writings familiar from the New Testament?

 

These discoveries challenged us not only intellectually but--in my case at

least--spiritually. I had come to respect the work of " church fathers " such as

Irenaeus, bishop of Lyons (c.180), who had denounced such secret writings as " an

abyss of madness, and blasphemy against Christ. " [5] Therefore I expected these

recently discovered texts to be garbled, pretentious, and trivial. Instead I was

surprised to find in some of them unexpected spiritual power--in sayings such as

this from the Gospel of Thomas, translated by Professor MacRae: " Jesus said: 'If

you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you

do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy

you.' " [6] The strength of this saying is that it does not tell us what to

believe but challenges us to discover what lies hidden within ourselves; and,

with a shock of recognition, I realized that this perspective seemed to me

self-evidently true.

 

Beyond Belief (The Secret Gospel of Thomas)

Chapter 2, p.30-32

Elaine Pagels

Vintage Books, New York, U.S.A

ISBN: 0-375-70316-0

 

Notes:

 

This chapter condenses and summarizes research that is presented in a fuller and

more technical form as Elaine Pagels, " Exegesis of Genesis 1 in the Gospels of

Thomas and John, " 'Journal of Biblical Literature' 118 (1999), 477-496.

 

[1] John 15:12,17.

 

[2] John 3:18.

 

[3] John 8:44. For discussion and references on how John's gospel, as well as

the others, portrays " the Jews, " see Elaine Pagels, 'The Origin of Satan' (New

York, 1995), especially 89-111, and the references cited there.

 

[4] For the authoritative account of the story of the discovery, see James M.

Robinson, " The Discovery of the Nag Hammadi Codices, " 'Biblical Archaeologist'

42 (1979), 206-224.

 

[5] Irenaeus, AH 1, 'Praefatio'.

 

[6] Gospel of Thomas 70, in Nag Hammadi Library (hereafter NHL) 126, where this

difficult passage is translated differently and, in my view, less lucidly.

Throughout the present text, I have taken liberties with NHL translations in the

interest of clarity or of preserving the poetic quality of the original text;

thus, readers who consult the NHL may note variations.