Within decades of his death, then, the story of Jesus became for his followers what the Exodus story had become for many generations of Jews: not simply a narrative of past events but a story through which they could interpret their own struggles, their victories, their sufferings, and their hopes. As Jesus and his disciples had traditionally gathered every year to act out the Exodus story at Passover, so his followers, after his death, gathered at Easter to act out the crucial moments of Jesus’ story. As Mark tells the story of Jesus, then, he simultaneously offers the script, so to speak, for the drama that his followers are to live out. For just as Mark opens his gospel by telling of Jesus’ baptism, so, as we have seen, every newcomer’s experience would begin as each is baptized, plunged into water to be “born again” into God’s family. And as Mark’s account concludes with what happened on “the night Jesus was betrayed,” so those who were baptized would gather every week to act out, in their sacred meal, what he said and did that night.
This correspondence helps account, no doubt, for the fact that Mark’s gospel—the simplest version of the story later amplified by Matthew and Luke—became the basis for the New Testament gospel canon. Just as Exodus serves as the story line for the Passover ritual, so the story Mark tells came to serve as the story line for the Christian rituals of baptism and the sacred meal.67 Receiving baptism and gathering every week—or even every day—to share the “Lord’s supper,” those who participate weave the story of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection into their own lives.68
This, then, is what I dimly recognized as I stood in the doorway of the Church of the Heavenly Rest. The drama being played out there “spoke to my condition,” as it has to that of millions of people throughout the ages, because it simultaneously acknowledges the reality of fear, grief, and death while—paradoxically—nurturing hope. Four years later, when our son, then six years old, suddenly died, the Church of the Heavenly Rest offered some shelter, along with words and music, when family and friends gathered to bridge an abyss that had seemed impassable.
Such gatherings can also communicate joy—celebrating birth, marriage, or simply, as Paul said, “communion”;69 such worship refracts a spectrum of meaning as varied as the experience of those who participate. Those repenting acts of violence they have done, for example, might find hope for release and forgiveness, while those who have suffered harm might take comfort in the conviction that their sufferings are known to—even shared by—God. Perhaps most often believers experience the shared meal as “communion” with one another and with God; thus when Paul speaks of the “body of Christ,” he often means the collective “body” of believers—the union of all who, he says, were “baptized into one body, Jews or Greeks, slaves and free, and all were made to drink from one spirit.”70
Yet, since the fourth century, most churches have required those who would join such communion to profess a complex set of beliefs about God and Jesus—beliefs formulated by fourth-century bishops into the ancient Christian creeds. Some, of course, have no difficulty doing so. Many others, myself included, have had to reflect on what the creeds mean, as well as on what we believe (what does it mean to say that Jesus is the “only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father,” or that “we believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church”?). Anyone with an ear for poetry can hear this creed as a sonorous tone poem in praise of God and Jesus. Certainly, as a historian, I can recognize how these creeds came to be part of tradition, and can appreciate how Constantine, the first Christian emperor, became convinced that making—and enforcing—such creeds helped to unify and standardize rival groups and leaders during the turmoil of the fourth century. Yet how do such demands for belief look today, in light of what we now know about the origins of the Christian movement?
As we have seen, for nearly three hundred years before these creeds were written, diverse Christian groups had welcomed newcomers in various ways. Groups represented by the Didache required those who would join them to embrace the “way of life” taught by Moses and by Jesus, “God’s child.” Justin Martyr the philosopher, now regarded as one of the “fathers of the church,” cared about belief, of course—above all, that the pagan gods were false, and that one should acknowledge only the one true God, along with “Jesus Christ, his son”—but what mattered most was to share—and practice—the values of “God’s people.” So, Justin says, “we baptize those” who not only accept Jesus’ teaching but “undertake to be able to live accordingly.”71 What sustained many Christians, even more than belief, were stories—above all, shared stories of Jesus’ birth and baptism, and his teachings, his death, and his resurrection. Furthermore, the astonishing discovery of the gnostic gospels—a cache of ancient secret gospels and other revelations attributed to Jesus and his disciples—has revealed a much wider range of Christian groups than we had ever known before.72 Although later denounced by certain leaders as “heretics,” many of these Christians saw themselves as not so much believers as seekers, people who “seek for God.”
The Church of the Heavenly Rest helped me to realize much that I love about religious tradition, and Christianity in particular—including how powerfully these may affect us, and perhaps even transform us. At the same time, I was also exploring in my academic work the history of Christianity in the light of the Nag Hammadi discoveries, and this research helped clarify what I cannot love: the tendency to identify Christianity with a single, authorized set of beliefs—however these actually vary from church to church—coupled with the conviction that Christian belief alone offers access to God.
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.
CHAPTER TWO
GOSPELS IN CONFLICT: JOHN AND THOMAS
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 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 langua
ge, 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, 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.
In 1979 I published The Gnostic Gospels, a preliminary exploration of the impact of the Nag Hammadi discoveries. Now, about twenty years later, many scholars say that these texts may not be “gnostic”—since many of us are asking what that perplexing term means. Insofar as gnostic refers to one who “knows,” that is, who seeks experiential insight, it may characterize many of these sources accurately enough; but more often the “church fathers” used the term derisively to refer to those they dismissed as people claiming to “know it all.” One thoughtful scholar, Michael Williams, suggests that we should no longer use the term, and another, Karen King, demonstrates its many connotations.7 Nevertheless, I intended that book to raise certain questions: Why had the church decided that these texts were “heretical” and that only the canonical gospels were “orthodox”? Who made those decisions, and under what conditions? As my colleagues and I looked for answers, I began to understand the political concerns that shaped the early Christian movement.
Thanks to research undertaken since that time and shared by many scholars throughout the world, what that book attempted to offer as a kind of rough, charcoal sketch of the history of Christianity now can be seen as if under an electron microscope—yielding considerably more clarity, detail, and accuracy. What I focus on in this book is how certain Christian leaders from the second century through the fourth came to reject many other sources of revelation and construct instead the New Testament gospel canon of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John along with the “canon of truth,” which became the nucleus of the later creeds that have defined Christianity to this day.
As I worked with many other scholars to edit and annotate these Nag Hammadi texts, we found that this research gradually clarified—and complicated—our understanding of the origins of Christianity. For instead of discovering the purer, simpler “early Christianity” that many of us had been looking for, we found ourselves in the midst of a more diverse and complicated world than any of us could have imagined. For example, many scholars are now convinced that the New Testament Gospel of John, probably written at the end of the first century, emerged from an intense debate over who Jesus was—or is.8 To my surprise, having spent many months comparing the Gospel of John with the Gospel of Thomas, which may have been written at about the same time, I have now come to see that John’s gospel was written in the heat of controversy, to defend certain views of Jesus and to oppose others.
This research has helped clarify not only what John’s gospel is for but what it is against. John says explicitly that he writes “so that you may believe, and believing, may have life in [Jesus’] name.”9 What John opposed, as we shall see, includes what the Gospel of Thomas teaches—that God’s light shines not only in Jesus but, potentially at least, in everyone. Thomas’s gospel encourages the hearer not so much to believe in Jesus, as John requires, as to seek to know God through one’s own, divinely given capacity, since all are created in the image of God. For Christians in later generations, the Gospel of John helped provide a foundation for a unified church, which Thomas, with its emphasis on each person’s search for God, did not.
I have also learned after years of study that, although John’s gospel is written with great simplicity and power, its meaning is by no means obvious. Even its first generation of readers (c. 90 to 130 C.E.) disagreed about whether John was a true gospel or a false one—and whether it should be part of the New Testament.10 John’s defenders among early Christians revered it as the “logos gospel”—the gospel of the divine word or reason (logos, in Greek)—and derided those who opposed it as “irrational” (alogos, lacking reason). Its detractors, by contrast, were quick to point out that John’s narrative differs significantly from those of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. As I compared John with these other gospels, I saw that at certain points this is true, and that some of these differences are much more than variations on a theme.
At crucial moments in its account, for example, John’s gospel directly contradicts the combined testimony of the other New Testament gospels. We have seen already that John differs in its version of Jesus’ final days; moreover, while Mark, Matthew, and Luke agree that disrupting merchants doing business in the Temple was Jesus’ last public act, John makes it his first act. The three other gospels all say that what finally drove the chief priest and his allies to arrest Jesus was this attack on the money changers, when Jesus in Jerusalem entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling and those who were buying in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the moneychangers and the seats of those who sold doves, and he would not allow anyone to carry anything through the temple.11
Mark says of this shocking incident that “when the chief priests and scribes heard of it, they kept looking for a way to kill him,”12 and Matthew and Luke agree with Mark that the temple authorities had Jesus arrested shortly afterward.
But John places this climactic act at the beginning of his story, to suggest that Jesus’ whole mission was to purify and transform the worship of God. John also increases the violence of the scene by adding that Jesus “knotted a whip out of small cords” and “drove them all out of the Temple.”13 Unlike the other gospel writers, John mentions no immediate repercussions for this act, probably because, had Jesus been arrested at this point, he would have had no story to tell. To account for Jesus’ arrest, John inserts at the e
nd of his narrative a startling story that occurs in none of the other gospels: how Jesus raised his friend Lazarus from the dead, which so alarmed the Jewish authorities that they determined to kill Jesus, and, he adds, the chief priests even “planned to put Lazarus to death as well.”14
John intends his story of the raising of Lazarus, like his version of the “cleansing of the Temple,” to point to deeper meanings. As John tells it, the chief priests had Jesus arrested not because they regarded him as a troublemaker who caused a disturbance in the Temple but because they secretly recognized and feared his power—power that could even raise the dead. John pictures Caiaphas, the high priest, arguing before the Jewish council that “if we let him go on like this, everyone will believe in him, and the Romans will come and destroy our holy place and our nation.”15 According to John, such opposition was by no means a matter of the past; even in his own time, about sixty years after Jesus’ death, those who opposed Jesus and his followers still feared that “everyone will believe in him.” Thus, while John diverges from the other gospels in what he says and how he says it, the brilliant Egyptian teacher named Origen, who lived in the early third century and became one of John’s earliest defenders, argues that “although he does not always tell the truth literally, he always tells the truth spiritually.”16 Origen writes that John’s author had constructed a deceptively simple narrative, which, like fine architecture, bears enormous weight.
John’s gospel differs from Matthew, Mark, and Luke in a second—and far more significant—way, for John suggests that Jesus is not merely God’s human servant but God himself revealed in human form. John says that “the Jews” sought to kill Jesus, accusing him of “making yourself God.”17 But John believed that Jesus actually is God in human form; thus he tells how the disciple Thomas finally recognized Jesus when he encountered him risen from the dead and exclaimed, “My Lord and my God!”18 In one of the earliest commentaries on John (c. 240 C.E.), Origen makes a point of saying that, while the other gospels describe Jesus as human, “none of them clearly spoke of his divinity, as John does.”19
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