The oldest piece of my own writing on this blog is from a letter I wrote my sister where I talk about Elaine Pagels’s “The Gnostic Gospels”. Here I rewrite it to see how much my writing has changed (maybe I should do this once a year):
Then: Elaine Pagels: The Gnostic Gospels
Now:
I am reading “The Gnostic Gospels” by Elaine Pagels, a professor at Princeton. We think there are only four gospels – but that is because once the Church got the backing of the Empire in the late 300s, it burned the other gospels, the ones it did not approve of, like those of the Gnostics. As it turns out, it did not burn them all: some were hidden in a jar in a cave in Egypt. There they sat for 1600 years until they were discovered in 1945.
The Gnostic gospels have a much different view of Christianity:
- God is male and female.
- God is in each person.
- In the Garden of Eden the snake was telling the truth while “God” was not God at all but some lesser being lying about being God.
- Life is not a battle against sin but against the lies of this world.
- Jesus did not rise from the dead.
- Jesus favoured Mary Magdalene over Peter.
It was more like Buddhism than what we are used to. In fact, it was in the time of Jesus that regular trade with India was opening up.
The Church won not because it had the Truth but because its beliefs led to martyrdom and a chain of command (popes, bishops, priest) that kept it from being destroyed by hundreds of years of persecution and heresy.
The Gnostics had none of that: their Jesus did not suffer on the cross – in fact he laughed! – so they had no martyrs. Each believer discovers the Truth inside himself and so to be saved there is no need for priests or bishops – which left the Gnostics without strong leadership or a single set of clear teachings to keep them together.
In the 100s the Church and the Gnostics had about the same number of followers. But the Church, being better led and more fanatical, got the upper hand and by the 300s was able to wipe out the remaining Gnostics and burn their gospels.
So there has been a sort of Darwinian natural selection of religious truth. In the end the only Christianity that could make it through the first 400 years was one that believed:
- Jesus was human and suffered on the cross – thus martyrs.
- Jesus rose physically from the dead – thus a church of middlemen (priests) offering the the Body and Blood of Christ as the only way to heaven.
- There is only one true God – thus only one true Church.
Get rid of any one of these beliefs and the Church would have fallen apart or would have been wiped out – just like the Gnostics.
See also:
- Elaine Pagels: The Gnostic Gospels – the original post
- Gnosticism
- Nag Hammadi Library – the books in that jar
If this is the same book I remember, it read like a dissertation. I got bogged down in the citations.
Actually I like your original style of this review.
What I do remember about this book, is that I thought one of the main reasons the Gnostics didn’t survive because women were too prominent. Patriarchy ruled in the culture and I also thought that some of the apostle were very sexist, Peter, Paul and Timothy. The “Garden of Eden” story became the supporting foundation for patriarchy.
It’s an entertaining way to see how it was then.
I’m no specialist, but if it was truely a matter of shall we say “spiritual evolution” or “competition”, the church would have ended with only one gospel.
I’m not saying they were not tempted, tho.
There were no bad guys and good guys
Sorry, I’ve got to dissent on this one. The notion that the gnostic writings are just as authentic or “sacred” is faddish, marginal scholarship. Chronologically, none of the gnostic writings that supposedly should have been in the biblical canon are contemporaneous with the gospels. When these dubious works were written, the gospels, not to mention the New Testament epistles (which precede the four gospels chronologically) were already quite old. Gnostic works
came along later, pretend to have historical integrity by authorship, and clearly teach a very different notion of Christian theology than is associated with the gospel traditions.
Quite to the contrary, historically speaking, gnostic works were never taken seriously by the church because they had no credibility. The decision to rule out gnostic books was based upon a recognition of their lack of foundation, and they knew the difference between authentic and fake “apostolic” writings. Indeed, the only people who took the gnostic writings seriously were gnostics, and the only people who take them serious today are (1) sincere people who lack the breadth of exposure to canonical history; and (2) people like Pagels who remain marginal in their bent toward challenging historical facts, even if they have to force their ideas on the record. The fact that neither Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, nor Protestant scholars (theologians or historians) take gnostic writings seriously today is not some conspiracy. These writings just don’t have credibility, even from a historical-literary standpoint, to be placed on the same level as the four gospels. Even liberal scholars who engage in “higher criticism” and would question aspects of the four gospels, still would not be persuaded by the “political” argument posed by Pagels and a few others. It’s just not so.
Believe it or not, the history of the Christian canon is very credible, and even though there are many points of debate and various positions on the New Testament text in whole or part, it should not be treated as if it were something from a Dan Brown novel. I would challenge anyone to explore this further and they will find that that despite being perhaps the best attested ancient document collection (in manuscript terms), there is a level of ignorant skepticism against the NT that prevails without solid basis. What W.E.B. DuBois said of skewed U.S. history could also be said about church history as skewed by people like Pagels:
“Somebody in each era must make clear the facts with utter disregard to his own wish and desire and belief. What we have got to know, so far as possible, are the things that actually happened in the world.”
The gnostic movement was a fuzzy, popular, and marginal movement. It contributed nothing to the history of the ancient church except the need to clarify for the future what was well known to them and their predecessors–which books belonged in the canon of the New Testament. Despite being a nuisance, then, gnostics inadvertently did the church a favor by obligating them to establish criteria for canonicity–reasonable criteria that such shabby works could not meet.
Louis DeCaro Jr,
Give some citations. How do you know that there couldn’t have been a sect that was as influential? I saw a documentary by chance on the Cathars today. There were enough of them, that the Roman Catholics thought their beliefs were a threat to Christianity.
You seem to know just enough, but I’d like a little more substance. To say the books are shabby works isn’t enough. However, your argument is irrelevant to this book review. As I remember, she had many citations which she based her interpretations. I assumed that you looked those up to verify the historical references or did you just read that her references were wrong. I didn’t see this book as an appeal to conspiracy seekers and mass entertainment as the Da Vinci Code, but as an academic work.
Have you read the gospels including the gnostic ones in Greek or Aramaic? Because I feel the flair of the writing comes from the translation. That is why many people much prefer the King James version of the Bible than the much newer translation from Greek.
I do say you are wrong in that you imply that there wasn’t a selection process in determining which gospels would be included in the New Testament. There were other accounts of Christ life other than the Gnostics. that were waded through, before that decision was made. I don’t think any total resolution came until the 6th century. I ran across this account of how the books of the New Testament were chosen.
I remember when I went to Catholic school in the fifties, the Apocrypha was not considered part of the Catholic Bible.
Abagond,
I read the 1979 hard cover edition.
Hathor:
I read it in paperback.
Since I said “I am reading…” when I first wrote this I was still somewhere in the middle of the book. So it does not present the whole book – just what I had read so far that I thought my sister would find interesting – partly because our father had told us years before that the Catholic Church had burned the gospels it did not like, that there was not just Matthew, Mark, Luke and John but Thomas and Mary and others too.
Louis DeCaro Jr:
The Gnostics were hardly marginal. In fact, when Plotinus wrote about Christianity it is the Gnostics he was writing about. In his day back in the 200s Pauline Christianity, the kind you take seriously, was still mostly a religion of the poor – the very kind that most people of education do NOT take seriously.
Suppose history had taken a different turn and the Gnostics won and the Catholics were wiped out as a heresy. Whose gospels would get burned? Whose gospels would have tons of scholarship and religious belief behind them? Whose gospels would be the oldest and best attested? Whose gospels would just be in bits and pieces and seem half-mad because they are incomplete and because there is no living religion to make sense of them Whose gospels would liberal scholars take more seriously?
You sound like a serious Christian so I am sure you have had the experience of someone dismissing Christianity based on misreading the Bible in bits and pieces. Well, that is just the position Gnosticism finds itself in in our time.
Christianity is not to be taken as literal fact.
The sun god cults of Afrasia hold the key to its origins.
You should reas Suns of God by S. Acarya?
I believe the oldest parts of the NT are some of the Pauline epistles which were written in the 60s AD. If I’m not mistaken, the oldest known Gnostic texts date from the 3rd century. That would seem to to give the NT a stronger authority.
Wikipedia says that the Gospel of Thomas was the first gnostic gospel and that it was written in the early or the middle of the second century AD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnostic_Gospels
On the other hand, the earliest NT book, First Thessalonians, seems to have been written in 51 AD.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_testament#Dates_of_composition
Some scholars say the Gospel of Thomas may have been written as early as 60:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Thomas
Pagels herself argues that it was written before the gospel of John.