What are the Nag Hammadi Scriptures?

[Guest guest]

Elaine H. Pagels

 

What are the Nag Hammadi Scriptures?

 

(p.5) Currently, in discussions among scholars throughout the world, the

discovery of the Nag Hammadi library is transforming what we know about

Christianity--and its mysterious founder. For more than fifteen hundred years,

most Christians had assumed that the only sources of tradition about Jesus and

his disciples are those contained in the New Testament, especially in the

familiar gospels of 'Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John'. Suddenly, however, the

unexpected discovery of over fifty ancient texts, most of them Christian, has

demonstrated what the church fathers long had indicated: that these familiar

gospels are only a small selection from among many more traditions--and

gospels--that, from the early generations of the Christian movement, circulated

among groups throughout the known world. Now, for the first time in more than

fifteen hundred years, scholars could open and read other gospels - the 'Gospel

of Thomas', the 'Gospel of Truth', the 'Gospel of Philip', and the 'Gospel of

Mary' ('Mary' had been discovered in 1896) - sources that enormously widen our

understanding of the scope of the early Christian movement.

 

Those who first investigated these writings quickly recognized that some of

them, at least, date back to the earliest centuries of the Christian movement,

but they assumed that these must be 'false' gospels. Certain " fathers of the

church " had mentioned by name such writings as the 'Gospel of Thomas' and the

'Gospel of Truth', but apart from the names, such writings had remained

virtually unknown, since some of the same church leaders had attacked them as

" heresy. " (p.6) Irenaeus of Lyon, for example, who wrote around 160 CE, had

discussed--and denounced--passages from the 'Secret Book of John', discovered

complete at Nag Hammadi; [9] and his famous contemporary Hippolytus, a Christian

writer in Rome, quoted some of the opening lines from perhaps the most famous

book of the discovery, the 'Gospel of Thomas'. [10] This shows that both of

these texts--and, no doubt, many others--had been written and widely circulated

among Christian groups by the middle of the second century. Irenaeus also

mentioned a 'Gospel of Truth', which he said was written " recently, " perhaps

around 130-60 CE, by the Egyptian Christian poet Valentinus or one of his

followers--perhaps the same 'Gospel of Truth' now discovered at Nag Hammadi.

[11] Irenaeus specifically mentioned the 'Gospel of Judas', which, he said,

teaches that Judas alone " knew the truth as no one else did " and enacted the

" mystery of the betrayal, " obeying a command from Jesus to initiate his

sacrifice. [12] The 'Gospel of Judas', actually discovered only in the 1970s,

has now been translated from Coptic and published for the first time in nearly

two thousand years. [13]

 

Yet since scholars who relied upon Irenaeus's account also noticed that the

bishop had classified all such gospels--and many other writings he dismissed

along with them--as both " illegitimate " and " apocryphal, " they assumed that the

recently discovered texts they were reading must be what Irenaeus called

them-- " heresy. " Irenaeus had insisted that such writings were " wholly unlike

what has been handed down to us from the apostles, " and he called those who

revered such writings " heretics. " He concluded, indeed, that " the heretics say

they have more gospels than there really are; but really, they really have no

gospel which is not full of blasphemy. " [14]

 

Thus those who first read and published these texts assumed that the Christian

texts among them were not really Christian, but " heretical " --the work of

heretics who accepted what Irenaeus called " falsely so-called gnosis. " What

apparently had happened to these texts only confirmed that impression. Although

they were originally written in Greek, like the New Testament gospels, these

texts discovered in Egypt had been translated into Coptic, perhaps by Christian

monks who treasured them as holy books in the library of one of the oldest

monasteries in Egypt. But the monks' reverence for such writings apparently

upset Athanasius, the archbishop of Alexandria, who sent out an Easter letter

all over Egypt in the spring of 367, ordering believers to reject what he called

" illegitimate and secret books. " [15] (p.7) Athanasius, who admired his

predecessor Irenaeus for his strong stand against " heretics, " also included a

list of twenty-seven books of which he approved, calling them the " springs of

salvation. " Strikingly, the twenty-seven books he names in this letter are

precisely those that came to constitute the collection we call the " New

Testament " --for which his letter provides our earliest known list. But

apparently some monks defied the archbishop's order to reject all the rest;

instead, they saved and protected over fifty texts from their library by sealing

them in a heavy jar and burying them away from the monastery walls, under the

cliff where they were found sixteen hundred years later.

 

Yet as we have seen, many of these writings already had been circulating widely

throughout the ancient world before the archbishop took action. Two hundred

years earlier, as we noted, Bishop Irenaeus, after charging that the many

Christians among his congregation in rural Gaul (present-day France) who

treasured such writings were actually " heretics, " went on to insist that of the

dozens of gospels revered by various Christians only four are genuine. And these

four, Irenaeus declares, are the gospels now included in the New Testament,

called by the names of Jesus's followers--'Matthew', 'Mark', 'Luke', and 'John'.

All the rest are illegitimate, because, he says, " there cannot be more than four

gospels, nor fewer. " [16] Why not? Irenaeus explains that just as there are four

corners of the universe and four principal winds, so there can be only four

gospels--which he seems to take as a kind of scientific explanation. To those

who would ask, " Why 'these' four? " Irenaeus declares that only theses are

written by eyewitnesses of the disciples like Luke and Mark. Few scholars today

would agree with Irenaeus. In the first place, we cannot verify who actually

wrote any of these accounts, and many scholars agree that, although certain

traditions were associated with certain disciples, the disciples themselves may

not be their authors; second, nearly all the other " gospels " that Irenaeus

detests are also attributed to disciples--often disciples from the same group as

these.

 

When an international group of scholars first read and published the 'Gospel of

Thomas' in 1959, [17] the primary question in their minds, not surprisingly, was

this: what can the 'Gospel of Thomas' tell us about " Gnosticism " --that is, about

" heresy " ? Since Irenaeus and others had denounced such gospels, they assumed

that 'Thomas' must not only be a false, " Gnostic " gospel, but also that, being a

" false gospel, " it must have been written later than the " real " gospels. And

since most people agree that Mark's gospel was written earliest, some forty

years after Jesus's death, around the year 70, 'Matthew' and 'Luke' about ten

years later, and 'John' about 90-100, they assumed that 'Thomas' must be later

than any of these, and so they guessed that it dated to about 140 CE.

 

Further, since they assumed that this gospel was " heretical, " they knew what to

expect in terms of content: after all, church fathers like Irenaeus basically

had defined--or, some would say, invented--heresy. (p.8) Irenaeus explains that

heretics are " Gnostics, " by which he means dualists who believe that the world

was created by an evil power, and so they have a dismally negative view of the

world and the God who created it. Furthermore, following Irenaeus's lead, many

of these scholars also assumed that heretics are " nihilistic " [believing in

nothing: denying all reality] and that the works they revered would be full of

philosophical speculation and bizarre mythology. [18] When the first editors of

Thomas's gospel found in it virtually no evidence for dualism, nihilism,

philosophical speculation, or weird mythology, most assumed that this just goes

to show how devious heretics are: they do not say what they really mean. Many

scholars decided that even if they could not find these elements in 'Thomas'

explicitly, they must be there implicitly; consequently, some decided just to

read them into their understanding of the 'Gospel of Thomas'. Most of the first

publications did this; some still do even now.

 

When the discovery became available to scholars throughout the world, many of us

shared the excitement of investigating these nearly unknown texts. Hearing about

the discovery astonished everyone who heard it. This certainly was not what we

had expected to find in graduate school--nor, in fact, what we had hoped to

find. Most of us who set out to find out about Jesus and the early history of

Christianity imagined that we could find in first-and second-century sources a

kind of " golden age " of early Christianity, a simpler, purer Christian teaching

that existed when Jesus wandered with his disciples around the hills of

Galilee--what Professor Krister Stendahl, then dean of Harvard Divinity School,

ironically called " play Bible land. " And since we assumed that there must have

been only one original, pure form of Christianity back at its beginning, we

never imagined that we would be asking the question that this discovery now

raises for us: what different Christian groups--and thus what 'kinds' of early

Christianity--were there at the beginning of the movement? [19]

 

Yet by the time many of us arrived in graduate school, certain scholars already

had begun to embark upon a second stage of research. Examining the 'Gospel of

Thomas', scholars first noticed that it is not a narrative, like the New

Testament gospels; instead, it consists simply of a list of sayings attributed

to Jesus. Scholars like Helmut Koester, James M. Robinson, and John Dominic

Crossan observed that many sayings in 'Thomas' are strikingly similar to sayings

long familiar from the New Testament gospels attributed to Matthew and Luke--for

example, such well-known parables about the kingdom of God as the parable of the

mustard seed and the parable of the sower and such sayings as " Blessed are the

poor, for yours is heaven's kingdom. " [20] The research of this generation of

scholars opened up new questions: could the 'Gospel of Thomas', for example,

possibly be not a late, " Gnostic " gospel, as many of us first assumed, but, on

the contrary, an early collection of Jesus's teaching--perhaps even one that

Matthew and Luke used to compose their own gospels? Could it be the so-called Q

source, a hypothetical first-century list of Jesus's sayings? Is it possible

that the 'Gospel of Thomas' might tell us a great deal not about heresy, but

about Jesus and his teachings? Could this be an early source--maybe even our

earliest source--of Jesus's teachings, collected in an unedited, unvarnished

form?

 

Questions like these inspired a movement among a group of scholars looking for

the " real, historical " Jesus and what Jesus actually taught. Professor Helmut

Koester came to conclude that the 'Gospel of Thomas' perhaps could be dated as

early as the mid-first century--about twenty years after Jesus's death?

[21]--which would make it the earliest gospel we know, and certainly one of the

most important. John Dominic Crossan and others have written books that follow

this view, and many people are still engaged in this research.

 

At present, however, many do not share the view that the 'Gospel of Thomas' is a

kind of rough quarry of early Jesus sayings strung together with minimal

editorial point of view. Even though our evidence cannot tell us for sure what

came from " the historical Jesus, " it can tell us a great deal, more than we ever

knew before, about the early Christian movement--how it emerged and the

astonishing variety of forms it took.

 

Recognizing this, many scholars today throughout the world have accepted the

challenge articulated by our colleagues Michael A. Williams in his book

'Rethinking " Gnosticism " : An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category' and

Karen L. King in 'What is Gnosticism?' Instead of regarding the many texts found

at Nag Hammadi as a corporate collection, scholars today more often analyze each

one separately or in relationship with contemporaneous Jewish, Christian, and

pagan sources. Instead of assuming that all these texts deviate from what is

" normal, mainstream " early Christianity, we are finding that they have opened to

us a far wider range of what we now understand to be early Christian sources.

Instead of discriminating simply between what we used to call " orthodox " and

" Gnostic " (or " proto-orthodox " and " proto-Gnostic, " which amounts to the same

thing), many scholars working on the Coptic texts are now investigating the new

evidence along with the old to ask different questions. Many of us are

discussing questions like whether it is misleading to classify these texts as

" Gnostic. " Given how varied they are, we realize that it is more accurate to

look at them simply as a wide range of early Christian traditions that are

unfamiliar to us, because the bishops intended to downplay viewpoints that

diverged from their own. Professor Karen King has suggested that we should ask

what evidence these many texts offer for various kinds of " early

Christianities " ; simultaneously, scholars of Judaism are investigating a wide

range of " early Judaisms. " [22] (p. 10) Finally, such investigation raises the

question of what our familiar terminology means--and what it obscures. What do

we mean when we speak of what is " orthodox " and what is " heretical " ? What

characteristics differentiate and define what we mean when we speak of " Judaism "

or " Christianity " ?

 

In many ways, investigation of the Nag Hammadi texts is just beginning. This

volume invites readers to participate in exploring the early Christian

movement--with far more evidence of its amazing range than we had known before.

 

The Nag Hammadi Scriptures (The International Edition)

Edited by Marvin Meyer; Advisory Board: Wolf-Peter Funk, Paul-Hubert Poirier,

James M. Robinson; Introduction by Elaine H. Pagels

Introduction p.5-10

HarperCollins Publishers - New York

ISBN:978-0-06-052378-7

ISBN-10: 0-06-052378-6

 

Notes:

 

[9] 'Against Heresies' 1.29.

 

[10] 'Refutation of All Heresies' 5.7.20. The renowned Egyptian teacher Origen,

writing about a generation later, also mentions the 'Gospel of Thomas', along

with the 'Gospel of Matthias' and " many others " ('Homilies on Luke 1').

 

[11] 'Against Heresies' 3.11.9.

 

[12] 'Against Heresies' 1.31.1.

 

[13] Kasser, Meyer, and Wurst, eds., 'The Gospel of Judas'.

 

[14] 'Against Heresies' 3.11.9.

 

[15] 'Festal Letter' 39.

 

[16] 'Against Heresies' 3.11.8.

 

[17] Antoine Guillaumont, Henri-Charles Puech, Gilles Quispel, Walter Till, and

Yassah 'Abd al-Masih, 'The Gospel According to Thomas'.

 

[18] See the influential book by Hans Jonas, 'The Gnostic Religion', an abridged

translation of his 1934 monograph published in Germany under the title 'Gnosis

und spatantiker Geist'.

 

[19] See, e.g., Karen L. King, " Which Early Christianity? "

 

[20] John Dominic Crossan, 'Four Other Gospels: Shadows on the Contours of the

Canon'.

 

[21] Cf. Helmut Koester, " The Gospel of Thomas, " in James. M. Robinson, ed.,

'The Nag Hammadi Library in English', 125: " In its most original form, it may

well date from the first century (the middle of the first century is usually

considered the best date for the composition of 'Q'). "

 

[22] See King, " Which Early Christianity? "