But instead of prophesying about the end of time, the books of revelation found at Nag Hammadi often speak instead of spiritual breakthrough, as we’ve seen in the Revelation of Zostrianos and Allogenes. Another revelation widely read in antiquity, the Secret Revelation of John, tells how Jesus’s disciple John, grieving after Jesus’s death, suddenly felt the earth shake beneath his feet, saw brilliant light, and heard Jesus speaking to him from the light, saying, “John, John, why do you doubt, and why are you afraid? . . . I am the one who is with you always: I am the Father; I am the Mother; and I am the Son!” Then, John says, he was able to ask the risen Jesus the questions that weighed on his heart, and to receive consolation from the divine presence he now envisioned as the original trinity: heavenly Father, Son, and heavenly Mother, the Holy Spirit.
With so many people offering different “revelations,” someone asked, how do we know which to trust? That question pushed me further: Why trust any? Why had I, or any of us, looked to “authorities” to validate our sense of what’s true—whether what “the Bible says,” as Billy Graham loved to claim, or what he or any other religious leaders say? Exploring these so-called heretical texts, I kept wondering what made church leaders regard them as so dangerous that they banded together to censor, bury, and burn them.
Like anyone engaged in spiritual search, those leaders knew that not everything that sounds like insight rings true. Religious fervor often veers so close to madness that some psychiatrists suspect that every religious emotion masks some kind of delusion. How can we tell truth from lies? What insights are genuine, and which are shallow, fearful, self-serving? The ancients, too, recognized these as the most difficult questions of all, since what they called “discernment of spirits”—discriminating between delusion and spiritual inspiration—requires wisdom. To simplify such questions, church leaders, seeing themselves as shepherds (pastores) worked to set clear boundaries—creeds and canon—to tell their “flocks” what to believe, what to read, and what not to read, while ordering them to look only to priests and bishops for guidance.
For when church leaders saw Christians in their congregations enthusiastic about sources like those found at Nag Hammadi—sources that don’t prescribe what to believe, including some that aren’t Jewish or Christian—some were intensely upset. Around 160 CE, Bishop Irenaeus, one of the most energetic leaders, insisted that his church was not only universal—“catholic”—but also possessed the only absolute, unchanging truth that could guarantee salvation. Some twenty-five years later, the African convert Tertullian, impatient with spiritual seekers, agreed with Irenaeus that such people were “heretics.” Writing his famous prescription (Rx) to cure them from the potentially fatal disease of “heresy,” he complained that “they’re always quoting Jesus’s saying, ‘Seek, and you shall find,’” but “they never find anything, since they’re looking where there’s nothing to find.” When such Christians challenged him, Tertullian ordered them to stop asking questions and accept what they’re taught, famously warning that “questions are what make people heretics!”
For some of us, though, finding no easy answers doesn’t mean that we can shut questions down. When, as an adolescent, I asked the questions that impelled me to leave that evangelical church (“Wasn’t Jesus Jewish? Why do you imagine that a Jew who’s not ‘born again’ is going to hell?”), I had to engage the challenge and keep asking. Later, as I explored the history of Christianity, another question continued to trouble me: Why do so many Christians, whether Catholic, Protestant, or Orthodox, insist that Jesus “had to die” before God could forgive human sin?
That question came up sharply the third morning after Mark died, when I walked through the carved wooden doors of the Church of the Heavenly Rest in New York, into the stone entrance hall to meet with clergy arranging a funeral for our son. Devastated, I was enormously grateful for the two friends who walked in with me. Elizabeth Diggs, our Lizzie, raised Episcopalian in Oklahoma, still loved some elements of that tradition, having discarded others, including Christianity’s longtime hostility toward same-sex relationships; while Shulamith Gross, raised in an orthodox home in Israel, now a scientist, had left her family’s traditions behind, except for Passover Seder.
As the heavy doors closed behind us, we heard someone reading the passion story; apparently he was practicing for the Good Friday service later that week. Walking up the long aisle leading toward the offices at the back of the church, I heard a familiar saying from the Gospel of John: “God so loved the world that he gave his only son” to die for our sins—and I stopped. Our only son had just died. At that moment, I felt that any god who did that—for whatever reason—would have to be crazy.
I wasn’t taking the story literally, of course. To some extent, we can understand why Jesus’s followers interpreted his death that way. Since worship in the Jerusalem temple required animal sacrifice, anyone desperately seeking for meaning might suggest that Jesus died as a human sacrifice, atoning for sin. When I was teaching at Princeton, years after high school, a friend from that time, the daughter of evangelical missionaries, called me after seeing the film The Passion of the Christ to tell me that she’d wept through Mel Gibson’s graphic, endless scenes of torture, since they showed “how much God loves us.”
Startled, I wondered, What kind of God lives in her imagination? An all-powerful god who, Christians say, “is love,” and “loves the world,” but who cannot, or will not, forgive human sin unless an innocent person—his own beloved son—is horribly tortured and slaughtered? Christians who preach that message also have to persuade potential converts that they are hopeless sinners, deservedly dangling over the fires of eternal torment, as revivalist preacher Jonathan Edwards, later president of Princeton University, pictured them in his famous sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” Long before that, Saint Augustine shored up this dire fantasy by inventing “original sin,” insisting that every human being, even a newborn baby, is born infected with mortal sin, which he pictured as a sexually transmitted moral disease. Both Roman Catholic and Protestant theologians, from Anselm through Martin Luther and Calvin, adopted Augustine’s views, perhaps because they enabled each of them to claim that only his church could “save you.” Evangelicals at Peninsula Bible Church in Palo Alto, where I’d gone as an adolescent, liked to repeat a perspective they often claim derives from the Hebrew Bible, “Without the shedding of blood there is no remission,” almost singing the words, often earnest, sometimes smug, declaring that since “God so loved the world that he gave his only son to die for the sins of the world,” you must “accept Jesus as your savior” or be damned.
Since this is the message that many proclaim, why not look elsewhere and abandon Christianity? I’d done that, and might never have returned for a deeper look had it not been for the secret gospels. Only much later did I realize that the formula basic to later Christian creeds (“Christ died for our sins”) goes back to the apostle Paul—not, of course, to Jesus. What, then, did Paul preach as “good news”? Writing to converts in the Greek city of Corinth about twenty years after Jesus’s death, he summed it up like this:
Christ died for our sins . . . he was buried, and raised after three days, then appeared to Peter, then to the twelve, then to more than five hundred believers at once. . . . Last of all, he appeared to me.
Ever since leaving that evangelical church in Palo Alto, where Christians read Paul’s letters as “God’s word,” I’ve disliked reading them. Although sometimes he writes powerfully, even poetically, often his tone is intensely domineering. His letters read as passionately written manifestos of an intense, impulsive, and brilliant missionary, bent on telling people what to believe and how to behave. Although he’d never met Jesus during his lifetime, Paul contemptuously dismissed those who had, angrily cursing even those who had known “the Lord” best—his closest disciple, Peter, and Jesus’s own brother, James—when they disagreed with him about Jesus’s message. But since Paul wrote his letters decades before others
wrote gospels, and his recipients in Greece and Turkey copied them widely and sent them to potential converts all over the known world, they became primary documents of the early movement, his slogan “Christ crucified” often taken as the basic statement of the gospel.
Recently, though, in the Gospel of Truth found at Nag Hammadi, I discovered a different Paul—and a different message. Its anonymous author, most likely Valentinus, the Egyptian poet and visionary, who admires Paul, sees the apostle as teacher of secret wisdom whose vision of grace includes everyone. Having carefully read the letters of Paul now in the New Testament, this author writes what he calls “the true gospel” to answer a question that Paul leaves dangling in his famous first letter to the Corinthians.
Paul had opened that letter saying that when he first arrived in Corinth, he was upset and dismayed to find believers arguing about what the basic message—the “good news”—actually was. Disagreeing, they’d split into factions, each following a different teacher, some saying, “I belong to Peter[’s group],” others saying, “I belong to Paul’s,” some to groups that others led. Determined to stop controversy and create one unified group based on what he called “my gospel,” Paul scolded believers in Corinth, telling them that since “you were babies in Christ, I could only feed you milk—baby food.”
Once he realized this, he says, “I didn’t come to you, brothers, proclaiming the mystery of God, in exalted speech or wisdom,” the “meat” that he would have given to people who were spiritually mature. Instead, he says, “I decided among you” to preach only the simplest, most basic version of the gospel, nothing but “Jesus Christ crucified”—hardly more than a slogan, foolish as he knew it would sound to educated people. For Paul says that he realized even “the foolishness of my message,” that is, “the message about the cross,” could suffice “to save those who believe.”
But writing to the Corinthians, Paul hastens to add that he’s not preaching this simpleminded message because it’s all that he knows. On the contrary, he says, he does teach secret wisdom to those who are spiritually mature:
We do teach wisdom among people who are mature—not the wisdom of this world, nor of the rulers of this age. Rather, we speak the wisdom of God hidden in mystery, which God foreordained before the ages for our glory—which none of the rulers of this age knew—for, had they known it, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.
I was intrigued to see that here, in his own words, Paul hints at a different version of the gospel—not that God “sent his own son to die” as a human sacrifice, but that ignorant and violent people, or the spiritual powers that energized them, had killed Jesus. Yet then he goes on to say that despite their malice, this awful event concealed a mystery. Surely he intended his mysterious words to raise intense curiosity: What, or who, is that primordial “wisdom of God, hidden in mystery”—secret wisdom, unknown even to the most powerful people in the world? And why does Paul refuse to tell them?
Instead of answering, Paul leaves these questions dangling and remains provocative, tempting and teasing his audience by adding that no human being could possibly imagine “what God has prepared for those who love him.” Only those whom God’s spirit teaches directly, as Paul claims the spirit taught him, could know what he calls “the deep things of God.” But, he says, he’s withholding that secret wisdom from them, since he can only tell it to “the mature”—and, he says, “You’re not that, so I’m giving you only the simplest message: ‘Christ crucified.’”
What, then, is the true gospel? Fascinated, I realized that the anonymous author of the Gospel of Truth writes to answer that question, and to reveal that secret wisdom—or, at least, his version of it. He begins with the words “The true gospel is joy, to those who receive from the Father the grace of knowing him!” Plunging into that mystery, he says that the true gospel, unlike the simple message, doesn’t begin in human history. Instead, it begins before this world was created.
What happened, then, not just “in the beginning,” but before the beginning, in primordial time—and how would we know? To answer this question, the Gospel of Truth offers a poetic myth. For around the time this author was writing, some devout Jews, and some non-Jews as well, loved to speculate on questions about what God was doing before he created the world. Often they looked for hidden meaning in poetic passages of the Hebrew Bible, like that opening line from Genesis, which tells how “a wind (or spirit, ruah) from God moved over chaotic deep waters.” What was there, then? Others claimed to find hints of what happened in a famous poem in the biblical Book of Proverbs, in which divine wisdom (hohkmah), identified with God’s spirit (ruah), tells how she worked with God to create the world. Since both “spirit” and “wisdom” are feminine terms in Hebrew, she speaks as the Lord’s feminine companion, or perhaps as his beloved daughter, who participated with him in creating the world, when first she swept over the deep ocean waters:
When he marked out the foundations of the earth, I was there beside him, like a little child, delighting him daily, always rejoicing before him, and rejoicing in his world full of people, delighting in the human race.
Whoever wrote the poem called Thunder, Complete Mind apparently drew on that opening line of Genesis, as well as on the poem in Proverbs, as did another anonymous writer whose poem was found at Nag Hammadi, who also gave a feminine voice to the primordial, life-giving energy that brings forth all things:
I am the thought that lives in the light.
I live in everyone, and I delve into them all . . .
I move in every creature. . . .
I am the invisible one in all beings . . .
I am a voice speaking softly . . .
I am the real voice . . . the voice from the invisible thought . . .
It is a mystery . . . I cry out in everyone . . .
I hid myself in everyone, and revealed myself within them, and every mind seeking me longs for me . . .
I am she who gradually brought forth everything . . .
I am the image of the invisible spirit . . .
The mother, the light . . . the virgin . . . the womb, and the voice . . .
I put breath within all beings.
Some, then, drew on passages they found in the Bible, and on the famous creation myth that Plato tells in his dialogue Timaeus, to spin stories about what happened in primordial time. But certain rabbis, wary of such speculations, tried to shut them down, fiercely forbidding anyone to speak about “what happened before, or beyond, or above” the world’s creation. The Christian bishop Irenaeus vehemently agreed with such rabbis, insisting, as they did, that human beings were never meant to know such mysteries, much less to probe into them.
But prohibitions have never stopped people from speculating. When Paul and his followers wanted to claim that Jesus existed even before the world was created, they drew on Jewish poems and myths about divine wisdom—ignoring the gender difference—to say that Jesus Christ was himself that “hidden mystery” who worked with God to create the world. So when the author of the Gospel of Truth sets out to reveal Paul’s secret teaching, he begins by asking, What happened before the beginning of time?
In answer, he offers a primordial drama of creation, telling how, when “all beings” began to search for the One from whom they came forth, they couldn’t find him. Feeling abandoned, not knowing where they came from, they suffered anguish and terror, like children wandering in the dark, searching in vain for their lost parents. As this gospel tells it, what separates all beings, including ourselves, from God is not sin. Instead, what frustrates our longing to know our source is its transcendence, and our own limited capacity for understanding. Yet when these beings—or when we—realize that we can’t find our way home, don’t know where we came from, or how we got here, we feel utterly lost. Overwhelmed by grief and fear, we may rush into paths that lead nowhere, more lost than ever, imagining that there’s nothing beyond the confusion we see in the world around us.
At this point, the Gospel of Truth turn
s toward a drama of cosmic redemption. When the Father sees his children terrified and suffering, ensnared by negative energies, he sends his Son, “the hidden mystery, Jesus the Christ,” to show them a path and bring them back “into the Father, into the Mother, Jesus of the infinite sweetness.” And although, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians, ignorant and violent “rulers of this world” tortured and crucified Jesus, the Father overturned their conspiracy, transforming even their hideous crime into a means of grace.
To show this, the Gospel of Truth reframes the vision of the cross from an instrument of torture into a new tree of knowledge. Here Jesus’s battered body, “nailed to a tree,” is seen as fruit on a tree of “knowing the Father,” which unlike that tree in Paradise, doesn’t bring death, but life, to those who eat from it. Thus the author suggests that those who participate in the Eucharist, eating the bread and drinking the wine that, symbolically speaking, are Jesus’s flesh and blood, “discover him in themselves” while he “discovers themselves in him.”
After years of contending with familiar Jewish and Christian sources, I found here a vision that goes beyond what Paul calls “the message of the cross.” Instead of seeing suffering as punishment, this gospel suggests that, seen through the eyes of wisdom, suffering can show how we’re connected with each other, and with God; what Paul’s letter to the Colossians calls “the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory.” No wonder, then, that Christians called their sacred meal a mystery (mysterion), a Greek term later translated as “sacrament” (from Latin sacramentum).
Why Religion? Page 18